The full excavation finally started in 1976 and pulled an extraordinary collection of material from the tomb. By the time it was written up in a 2002 review, the count stood at sixteen thousand individual human bones from at least 324 separate people. No intact skeletons - the bodies had been disarticulated, perhaps deliberately, perhaps by time. Mixed with the human remains were the talons and bones of eight to twenty white-tailed sea eagles, *Haliaeetus albicilla*, the largest bird of prey in northern Europe. Archaeologist John Hedges, who led the project, wrote a popular book called *Tomb of the Eagles* that made the name stick. The *Archaeological Journal* reviewed his book politely but coolly - 'reasonably well done', the reviewer said, before adding 'but how very much better it might have been'. The name, regardless, took.

The original interpretation was elegant: the eagle was a totem animal for the community that built and used the tomb, and the birds were buried with the dead as a sacred deposit. New dating techniques eventually challenged that reading. When the eagle bones themselves were dated, they came back at around 2450 to 2050 BC - up to a thousand years after the tomb was first built. The eagles were not buried with the original dead. They were added long afterwards, by people who had inherited a much older monument and continued to use it for purposes their distant ancestors would not have recognised. The same pattern shows up at other Orkney tombs: long-running cycles of use, periodic reuse and rededication, generations of mourners returning to the same chambers across thousands of years. The eagles arrived late. They arrived anyway.

The tomb itself sits right on the cliff edge above the eastern shore of South Ronaldsay, a position that would have been chosen carefully. It is a chambered cairn of the Orkney type - a low rectangular mound of stones covering an interior of slab-built compartments accessed by a narrow passage. Inside, the visitor crawls along the passage and emerges into a main chamber tall enough to stand in. The walls are thin flagstone slabs of local Devonian sandstone, the same material every Orkney tomb is built from because it splits naturally into slabs and the islands have nothing else. The roof is reconstructed. The original was probably corbelled - successive stones cantilevered inward until they met overhead - and like every Orkney corbelled roof it eventually fell in. Above the chamber the cliff drops sharply to the sea. The dead were laid in a place where the wind never stopped.

The Simison family ran the tomb as a small private museum from the 1970s onwards. Visitors crawled in along the passageway, sometimes pulled on a trolley, and emerged into the chamber where they could examine the reconstructed setting. The site closed to the public in 2020. In June 2025, however, a community group on South Ronaldsay successfully took the site into local ownership with a £101,607 grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, with plans to reopen access. The tomb was featured in 2017 on the BBC Two archaeology series *Britain's Ancient Capital: Secrets of Orkney*. Whatever its future as a visitor site, the place itself - the chamber, the cliff edge, the bones of 324 unknown Orcadians and the eagles laid among them - has been in use since before Egypt's first pyramids. It will outlast the latest closure too.