Some recent news

Congratulations to Dr Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, ASNC alumna and recent PhD graduate, now at the University of Oxford, who has recently been announced as one of Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers. This initiative, run in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, will allow Eleanor to bring her research on the worldview of the medieval Icelanders to a wider audience.

Congratulations also to Dr Philip Dunshea, a PhD graduate of ASNC, who studied as an undergraduate with Dr Alex Woolf at the University of St Andrews, and who has recently been appointed to a temporary lectureship in Celtic History here in the Department of ASNC. Phil will be covering the teaching of Dr Fiona Edmonds, while she is on maternity leave (congratulations Fiona!).

And finally, while we wouldn't normally allow commercial advertising here on the ASNC blog, we must make a brief mention of recent ASNC alumnus, George Potts, who stars in a new advert for Virgin trains. We'll try to resist the urge to make a joke about ASNCs going far ...

Iron Age Inverness

Philip Dunshea writes: 

News in from Inverness, in what later became northern Pictland, where archaeologists have unearthed evidence for iron-smelting and iron-working in a late prehistoric context.

Iron was a valuable and coveted product in medieval and pre-medieval Scotland; by way of illustration, there is a classic ‘dog-in-a-manger’ anecdote from the end of the first century A.D., when the Romans were grappling with the issue of what to do with the recalcitrant peoples of the Highlands. In the wake of the famous battle at Mons Graupius, Agricola and his troops built a 22-hectare legionary fortress at Inchtuthil, near present-day Blairgowrie, on the hinge between Strathmore and Strath Tay. But the site was abandoned a few years later, seemingly in a hurry, and ten tons of iron, including over a million nails, were buried in a deep pit inside the fort. Clearly the departing troops lacked the time or the means to transport such an impressive stockpile away with them, but were under strict instructions not to let any of it fall into the wrong hands.

But then the natives were also quite capable of making the stuff for themselves, and had been doing so for many centuries. At Beechwood Farm to the east of Inverness, where new buildings for the University of the Highlands and Islands are under construction, archaeologists have come across the remains of an ironworking hearth, an early form of the ‘bloomery’ used to smelt iron before the invention of the blast-furnace. The structure is surrounded by deposits of slag, the waste-product formed at various stages of smelting and smithing. Its discovery marks another contribution to our understanding of how society and economy operated around the Moray Firth, one of the crucibles of Scotland’s pre-history.

Map of the Moray Firth, © Wikipedia Commons

Power was visibly concentrated in this corner of Scotland in the early-historic period: forts like the massive enclosed promontory at Burghead, and later monasteries such as the celebrated foundation at Portmahomack on Tarbat Ness, speak of a society ruled over by potentates with extensive command of resources and populations. This ‘landscape of power’ can be traced in various manifestations until the onset of the Viking Age: the lands around the Moray Firth have one of the highest concentrations of Pictish sculpture in the whole country, and if we take Adomnán’s Life of Columba at face-value, it was from here that king Bridei ruled over a wide hegemony in the mid-sixth century. Bridei’s ‘capital’ may have been located at the hillfort on Craig Phadrig, just to the west of modern Inverness. When the region finally emerges in the slight documentary evidence for the seventh and eighth centuries, it is under the name of Fortriu – of all the divisions in the murky political landscape of Pictland, it is by far the best attested.

All this must have entailed resource control, principally in terms of agricultural produce and livestock. But over the last decade or so it has become increasingly clear that the lands at the north-eastern end of the Great Glen were also home to a number of centres for proto-industrial activity. There was a major hub for iron production at Culduthel, to the south of the city, where among a cluster of roundhouses many of the structures were found to contain hearths similar to that unearthed at Beechwood, their floors fused with a crust of iron slag.  Nearly two hundred finished iron artefacts – mostly weapons and tools for working wood, leather or metal – were recovered from the site, along with a quarter metric tonne of iron slag.

At another site at Dornoch, thirty or so miles to the north, similar activity continued into the viking period and beyond (a new forge was erected there as late as the fifteenth century). But the sequence is now being extended further back as well. There is a bloomery furnace near Forres dated to between 400 B.C. and 100 A.D. Carbon-dates provided so far at Beechwood Farm suggest that smelting activity took place between 400 and 100 B.C. – that is, in the pre-Roman Iron Age.  In this respect, the cumulative impression is one of considerable economic continuity in the region.

All of this begs the question of where the iron ore came from (the only other raw ingredients needed for ‘bloomery’ smelting are wood to burn, and a good water supply). The Romans had plenty of iron mines in Britain, and most of their ore came from the Weald of Kent and the Forest of Dean. As for Scotland beyond the limits of empire, there are (or were) rich deposits of iron ore – on the island of Raasay, for instance, over on the west coast. Haematite and magnetite is found in small concentrations in the older schist and gneiss rocks of Skye, Shetland and Kishorn. None of these are known to have been mined before the seventeenth century, however, and it is thought that virtually all of the iron smelted in earlier times was produced from a regenerative source called ‘bog iron’. This typically forms where iron-bearing ground water rises to the surface, where (possibly aided by bacteria) an oxidised crust of iron ore forms. After ‘harvesting’ the crust can reform within as little as two decades – a superb example of a renewable resource being exploited in a proto-industrial context.

Formation of Bog Iron, photograph © United States Geological Survey Commons

Elsewhere in Scotland, there is a definite link between metal-working and aristocratic (or even royal) status in the early historic period, for example at Dunadd, in Argyll, or at Whithorn and the Mote of Mark in far-off Galloway. Jewellery manufacture, at any rate, and other forms of advanced metal work, were the preserve of the elite (including the clergy) and the craftsmen they controlled. Smelting presumably took place in situ, with the traces usually found nearby. The earlier examples in Moray are in some respects no different: the Culduthel furnaces surround one of the largest roundhouses ever found in Scotland, twenty meters in diameter, and there is evidence at the site for prestige activities like glass production and bronze-working. But there are also signs, at Dornoch, that iron smelting sometimes took place in a rather cosy domestic context, perhaps little separated from the supply and preparation of food. How the Beechwood furnace fits into this wider picture remains to be seen.

In search of Carn Droma: exploring the boundaries between Picts and Gaels

Philip Dunshea writes:

‘Reconnaissance walking’ is seen by modern archaeologists as a preliminary technique before proper field-surveying gets under way: a fairly casual way of assessing whether a site is worth investigating. But for much of the twentieth century it was a big part of the business for many medievalists. The list of the great walkers is a long one but honourable mention must go to O.G.S. Crawford and Margaret Gelling. 

Gelling, a toponymist who eventually became president of the English Place-Name Society, spent countless hours bush-whacking across woodlands and fields, tracking contour lines and fluvial patterns, all in an effort to make herself as familiar with the intricacies of the English landscape as her beloved Anglo-Saxons must have been. Crawford, meanwhile, was wrapped up in what he believed was a personal crusade to survey and catalogue Britain’s heritage before it was swept away forever by modernity. Crawford knew that history and maps were inseparable, and as the Ordnance Survey’s first History Officer, he was well placed to follow this conviction. One of his lasting contributions to archaeology was in pioneering the use of aerial photography.  To both Gelling and Crawford the legacy of the past (pre-historic, Roman and medieval) was there to be read in the landscape.

Over the last few decades, in common with every other academic discipline, early-medieval archaeology and early-medieval history have become so specialised in their own right that it’s now almost impossible to maintain an expert presence in both fields.  Nowadays most historians in the ASNC line of work restrict themselves to libraries, largely because they’re dependent on work by philologists and other people who know more about the source-texts than they do. Archaeologists (or the dwindling cohort of archaeologists who don’t yet work in laboratories) have the great outdoors to themselves.   

This seems neither fair nor justified. In the early medieval period the lie of the land must have had a vastly greater impact on day-to-day life than it does for us today. In many ways the texts studied by ASNaCs are just as rooted in the physical environment as any material remains, and this was brought home by some recent work I’ve been doing on the early-medieval significance of Scotland’s watershed divide.  The research was all supposed to be focussed on a topographical feature called Druim Alban (the ‘Ridge’ or the ‘Spine of Alba’) which was understood to mark the frontier between the Picts (in the east) and the Scots of Dál Riata (in the west). In all contexts it is clear that the term refers to a mountain range – but which one?

Druim Alban (photo credit: Philip Dunshea)

Pictish symbols

Phil Dunshea writes:

The mysterious carved symbol stones which cover Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde isthmus have always possessed a rather otherworldly quality. The people who left them – known to the Romans as the Picts, or ‘painted ones’ – disappeared from history in the tenth century, when they were effectively subsumed into the medieval kingdom of Scotland. By the twelfth century the Picts had acquired near-mythical status:

“Who will not espouse love of celestial things and dread of worldly things, if he considers not only that their kings and princes and people have perished, but also that at the same time their whole racial stock, their language and all remembrance of them have disappeared?”

The stones they erected, ornamented with elaborate swirling motifs and wild beasts, are best described as abstract. The examples with more intelligible pictures usually seem to depict conventional aspects of Dark Age aristocratic life: Christianity, hunting, warfare, land ownership and so on. But a new theory, put forward by Professor Rob Lee of Exeter University, suggests that there may be more to it than that. Lee and his team think these symbols might actually be a script, and that the stones are covered with writing. The media has pounced: “New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered”, as the Discovery Channel’s website proclaims. Or “Ancient Language Mystery Deepens”, as the BBC more soberly put it.

Hilton of Cadboll replica (from Wikimedia Commons)

Why the excitement? It’s mainly because the Pictish language has always been something of an enigma. Other than their stones the Picts left very little trace of themselves (there is no surviving Pictish literature, for instance). Bede, a Northumbrian scholar writing at the beginning of the eighth century, makes it quite clear that the Picts did have their own language, but modern scholars have very little to go on in their attempts to work out what it might have looked like. Place-names and the names of Pictish kings (which occasionally appear in medieval texts) suggest that it was a Brittonic language, part of the same family as Welsh. That might imply that the Picts had not always been all that different from the rest of the Brittonic-speaking inhabitants of Britain, who once stretched from Cornwall to Lothian. It may only have been with the coming of the Romans, and their famous walls, that anything became distinctively ‘Pictish’. Clearly the Welsh and Pictish languages were different by Bede’s time, perhaps because the latter had been isolated long enough for it to develop along different lines. Without a more extended sample of Pictish writing, however, there is not much more that can be said.