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 production. Indeed, the Bronze Age aristocracy seem to have drawn their status largely from their outside contacts and control of long-distance trade.
From around 700 BC this pattern changed. The collapse of the bronze industry brought an end to long-distance contacts. Communities became rather more inward-looking and status was displayed through communal projects such as fort-building and. at a still more local level, the building of substantial roundhouses. Social position now seems to have been established through control over land, labour and the agricultural cycle, while the great building schemes helped to set local chiefs at the heart of their communities and stamp their imprint on the land. It was in such communities that kinship and ethnic identity became important concerns.
It has been suggested that the tribal names recorded by Ptolemy imply that some Scottish tribes identified themselves with certain animals; the Epidii (horses) in Kintyre, the Caereni (sheep) and Lugi (ravens) in Sutherland, while the Orcas or Orkney Islands may derive from 'orci' (young pigs or boars). Interestingly, these names are all found on the northern and western fringes of the country, suggesting that some form of totemic practice may have been a defining part of ethnic identity among the Atlantic Scottish tribes. Animal motifs on north-eastern metalwork of the first centuries BC and AD such as the boar's head on the Deskford carnvx (59) and the stylized snakes on spiral armlets
(60) may hint at a similar situation there, and similar explanations have been invoked for certain animal symbols inscribed on much later Pictish stones.
The richly decorated pottery found in profusion in the Hebrides, and to a lesser extent in the Northern Isles, seems to have been another medium for ethnic expression
(61). Potting, like most craft production, was probably carried out by non-specialist j>t'
farmers and fishers deeply rooted in the traditions of the community, when the demands of food production or procurement allowed. The wheelhouse at Sollas in North Uist yielded around 3< HM t sherds from a variety of handmade cooking pots and storage jars, drawing on traditions of form and decoration that do not occur outside the Atlantic zone. While the subtleties encoded within their complex patterns will always elude us. we can at least recognize that these pots expressed to some degree the identity of their makers, perhaps at a variety of scales from household to lineage to tribe.
Most media of ethnic expression, however, were probably rather more transitory in nature than pottery or metahvork. Caesar and later Herodian famously record the British custom of painting or tattooing the body with woad, a blue dye, and tattoos can even be discerned on the faces of individuals portrayed on Gaulish coins. Body decoration may well have identified the tribe and status of the wearer. Items associated with weaving, such as spindle whorls, bone combs and loom weights, are common finds on settlement sites, suggesting that textiles would have provided another medium for art and symbolism. Ephemeral media such as these may have been the means by which symbols and clan badges were kept alive between their periodic archaeological manifestations in stone or on metahvork.
Post a comment