Towers in the north
While reconstruction drawings can give some sense of how impressive the timber roundhouses might once have been, it is perhaps only with the broch towers of the north and west that we can gain a real sense of the visual impact of such buildings 18 Vie broch lower of Mousa in Shetland is one of the best preserved prehistoric buildings in Britain, standing close to its original height at around 13m tall. and of the central role of the roundhouse in Iron Age life. Yet brochs and duns have tended...
Bronze Age houses in the Sutherland glens
The most common prehistoric houses visible in the landscape today are hut circles. This rather antiquated term encompasses a wide variety of architectural forms that need share little more than a tendency to decay into a ring-shaped earthen bank. Many were originally imposing and elaborate buildings to which the rather disparaging term 'hut' does little justice. These roundhouses are among the most common prehistoric remains in the Scottish landscape, with more than 2000 known in Sutherland...
Expressions of ethnicity
We might expect the emergence of tribal units to be accompanied by some material expression of tribal or ethnic identity. However, in the early part of our period the surviving artefacts suggest precisely the opposite. During the Later Bronze Age. the status-conscious elites flaunted elaborate bronzes that bore striking similarities to those of their peers elsewhere in Europe. The appeal of these items probably lay as much in their exotic associations as in the time lavished on their...
Tiibal interaction
In view of the territoriality and social fragmentation that seems to characterize the middle centuries of the first millennium BC, the lack of evidence for inter-tribal contact prior to the Roman incursions conies as little surprise. Steatite, found only in Shetland, was transported to Orkney and to a few sites on the west coast, but apparently not in any significant quantities. Similarly, iron ore must have been traded to some extent, as presumably was timber for the construction of monumental...
Places of worship
The classical records suggest that Celtic religion was practised in natural places, such as groves, forest clearings, pools, lakes and islands, rather than in the monumental buildings familiar to the Romans and Greeks, so it is unsurprising that overtly ritual sites are hard to find. The Latin poet Lucan, writing in the first century AD though describing events of a century earlier, describes a dark and hidden woodland sanctuary near Marseilles, where human sacrifices were offered up to crude...
Rites of sacrifice
Classical accounts of Celtic religion dwell on acts of sacrifice. The offering of material wealth to the gods, in return for favours, to ensure good luck or as simple bribes, is common in accounts of the Celts, and tar from alien to classical societies of the same period. Mounds of valuable possessions, booty and trophies of war, were apparently heaped in sacred places, enclosures and pools, inviolable on pain of death. This wealth could comprise a collection of elaborate jewellery or weaponry,...
Burial
Despite the regular occurrence of stray fragments of human bone on settlements, formal Iron Age burials are notoriously rare in Britain prior to the first century AD By the end of the Bronze Age cremation was the dominant burial rite throughout Britain, the ashes often being placed in pots, pits or cairns. Around 700 BC, however, cremations more or less disappear from the archaeological record. Some indications are now appearing, however, to suggest that some simple burials and small cemeteries...
Tribal Scotland
By the time of the Roman invasion Scotland was occupied by numerous tribal groups. The Greek geographer Ptolemy, writing in the second century AD. but drawing on earlier accounts, gives a roll-call of the tribes, mostly identified by recognizably Celtic names 58 . He also provides tantalizingly vague descriptions of their territories the Selgovae seemingly in the upper Tweed Basin the Novantae in the south-west and many more. But Ptolemy's account should not be taken too literally. Problems...
The Bronze Age crash
The Later Bronze Age is usually regarded as a period of environmental and economic decline. From around 1300 BC the climate seems to have become gradually colder and wetter, to such an extent that communities in some marginal lands were forced to give up agriculture altogether. As a result, extensive Bronze Age landscapes survive in some parts of the British Isles, for example on Dartmoor, and in parts of Shetland, where the abandoned lands were never reclaimed. This retreat from the uplands...
Who were the Celts
There are three main strands of evidence to which we can look when searching for the ancient Celts. The first comprises the written accounts of the classical authors, many of whom encountered the Iron Age peoples of temperate Europe at first hand 2 . Secondly, we have the linguistic links between the surviving languages of the modern-day 'Celtic fringe' and languages spoken across vast tracts of central and western Europe during the Iron Age. And thirdly, of course, we have the archaeology....
timber roundhouses in the south and east
Just as the excavations at Lairg have pushed the dates of hut circles firmly back into the bronze Age, recent work in Upper Clydesdale has shown an equally precocious development of timber roundhouses in the south. At the site of Lintshie Gutter, more than thirty platforms cut into the hillside mark the stances for roundhouses formed of earthen walls faced with wattle and daub. Inside were hearths, cooking pits, pottery and querns. Charcoal from the buildings has been dated well before 1500 BC...
The Pictish wars
Although throughout this period the northern frontier remained fixed on Hadrians Wall, the area to the north was under the surveillance of scouts who, in AI 367, betrayed the Romans to their northern enemies and were disbanded. The tribes between the Tyne and Forth, such as the Votadini and Damnonii, however, appear to have remained either neutral or perhaps even actively pro-Roman. Certainly the Roman writers refer to the repeated incursions of troublesome Picts and Scots, yet never mention...
Expressions of status
By around 100 BC the pattern was changing again and we see a shift from expressions of kinship and ethnicity to expressions of personal status. Perhaps as a northern reflection of an upsurge in trade among the tribes of Gaul and southern England, ultimately spurred on by the establishment of new Mediterranean markets, longdistance contacts were re-established. Scottish manifestations of this renewed activity are limited, however, and many of the goods that probably formed the basis for external...
Domestic rituals in the north
A curious series of deposits recovered from wheelhouses in the Western Isles shed some light on an aspect of Iron Age ritual that escapes note in the literary sources. At Sollas in North Uist, around 150 pits had been dug into the soft sand floor of the wheelhouse 81 . Of these, around 60 contained animal bone while the rest may well have held other perishable materials, such as plant foods. Most of the ritual deposits at Sollas came from small, often inter-cutting, pits dug during the life of...
Hunting and gathering fishing and fowling
Even in these farming lands wild plants, berries, nuts, seeds, fruit, herbs and fungi would have been collected for food, drink, flavourings and medicines, although these are notoriously difficult to detect archaeologically. The Hebridean wheelhouses give some indication of the variety of birds and fish that would have been exploited by coastal communities throughout Scotland. Cnip and Sollas produced the remains of numerous sea-birds the shag, great auk now extinct , guillemot, puffin, gannet,...
TIjc cult of the head
Numerous references, from Polybius writing of the Battle of Telamon in 225 BC to the later Christian Irish authors, attest to the Celtic predilection for collecting the severed heads of their enemies. Posidonius further related how the Gauls nailed the heads of vanquished enemies to their houses and preserved others in cedar oil for permanent display. While some Roman writers probably played up the head-hunting aspect of Celtic warfare for propaganda purposes, there is a scatter of supporting...
Ritual and religion
While the following works do not deal specifically with Scotland, they do tackle Iron Age religion at a European scale. Piggott's work is the classic text 011 the Druids and provides a healthily sceptical approach to the literary sources. Miranda Greens book provides an up-to-date overview incorporating more recently excavated material. Green, M 2001. Dying for the Gods Human Sacrifice in Iron Age and Roman Europe. Stroud Tempus. Piggott, S 1968. The Druids. London Penguin. Fraser Hunters...
Roman and native
There are several good books 011 the Roman period 111 Scotland, all of which have something to say about the interaction of Rome with the indigenous population. David Breeze's book is the most wide-ranging and provides the best general introduction London Batsford. Hanson. WS 1991. Agricola and the Conquest of the North. London Batsford. Hanson, WS and Maxwell, GS 1983. Rome's North-West Frontier the Antonine Wall. Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press. Maxwell, GS 1990. A Battle List Romans and...
Iron Arfc farmers in the lowlands
Despite this rather apocalyptic vision of economic devastation in the Highlands and Islands, there is little matching evidence in the south and east of the country. Indeed, what was going on in the Scottish lowlands in the centuries from around 1500 to 1000 BC remains something of a mystery, since centuries of merciless ploughing have scoured away all but the most indelible settlement traces. Many areas of good modern farmland would have been out of bounds to prehistoric farmers some heavy...
Acknowledgements
The ideas presented here are founded on the work of generations of scholars and I cannot stress too much the debt that is owed to their efforts. Although I have greatly expanded the bibliography for this second edition, it is still far from comprehensive. There is no scope in a book of this kind to include the detailed references or footnotes that would expose my borrowings more fully. I hope, however, that the new bibliography will at least make it easier to follow up areas of interest. For a...
Archaeological sites
Several Iron Age sites are in the care of the Secretary of State for Scotland and are looked after by Historic Scotland. These have on-site information and are probably the best sites to begin with. Following the coast clockwise from Shetland they are Clickhimin, broch and settlement, Shetland Jarlshof, broch and settlement, Shetland Ness of Burgi, fort blockhouse , Shetland HU 4643 4082 HU 39800955 HU 4573 2366 HU 3878 0839 HY 3818 2685 HY 4413 1161 HY 3716 3061 HY 3971 1259 NC 8704 0137 NC...
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Connain in North Uist. while decorated combs and tweezers have been found in other parts of the country. The ownership of well-bred animals was another way in which chiefs and kings could set themselves apart from their subjects, particularly in a society where ownership of stock would have been a yardstick of wealth. Horses were certainly present throughout much of Scotland, being found in Orkney and the Western Isles as well as further south at sites like Eildon Hill North and Broxmouth....
Celtic languages
There is, by and large, a consensus that Celtic languages emerged in Europe during the Later Bronze Age and they were certainly dominant throughout the British Isles by the time of the Roman occupation. Indeed, the Greek writer Pytheas, writing as early as 325 BC and quoted by Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC, referred to Britain as 8 The Corrymuckloch hoard from the Sma Glen in Perthshire was discovered in 1995. Along with a deliberately snapped sword blade and three socketed axes,...