Pictish coppersmith's 1,000-year-old handprint found in Orkney

Metalworker would have plied his trade from small, half-buried circular stone structure, say archaeologists

The grimy handprint of a sweaty metalworker and the smeared track of his dirty knees have been uncovered by archaeologists more than 1,000 years after the fires went out in his copper workshop on an island in Orkney.

It would have been a hot, uncomfortable workspace: a small circular stone structure, half underground, in a substantial Pictish settlement on the island of Rousay. Archaeologists are racing against the tides, which are gradually eroding the surviving structures, to save as much evidence as possible.