This area comprises that part of Scotland south of the Forth/Glyde line (including some of north-east England) and It is distinguished from the rest of Scotland in one important way, by the presence of decorated bronze metalwork in the British La Tene style (Thomas 1963; Stevenson 1966). Many of these objects - sword scabbards, bridle bits and early penannular fibulae together with three unique craftsmen’s objects (the Deskford carnyx head (Piggott 1959: 24-32) the Torrs chamfrein (Atkinson and Piggott 1955) and the Balmaclellan mirror (Fox 1949) (Figure 34.2)) - were strays or found in hoards; except in Roman forts systematic excavations have given few signs of the existence of such objects and have revealed only a simple material culture which probably goes back to the Late Bronze Age.
The distribution of Piggott’s Group III and IV swords and scabbards is particularly interesting, extending as they do from the La Tene vehicle graves in Yorkshire - the only archaeologically attested example of the settlement of these continental Gelts in Britain (Stead 1979) - mainly west and north-west into Brigantia, southern Scotland and Ulster (Piggott 1950; figs. 6 and 12; Thomas 1963: fig. 2) (Figure 34.1). Presumably only the most optimistic anti-diffuslonist would maintain that these aristocratic weapons had been traded from hand to hand, and a movement of chiefly members of the Yorkshire La Tene lineages to dominate new areas seems indicated.
Figure 34.1 The map illustrates the three main zones of middle and late iron age Scotland. In the southern mainland - the Tyne/Forth (TF) and Solway/Clyde (SC) provinces - are most of the examples of early La Tene metalwork (below), most of the bun-shaped rotary querns and most of the glass armlets.
In the North-eastern province (NE) - which may be said to include most of Argyllshire until about the first century BC - are about three-quarters of the timber-framed hill-forts (all save one vitrified), perhaps nine-tenths of the Pictish stones of Class I (pre-Christian) and II and most of the pit place-names. Most of the late La Tene-derived metalwork is here, namely the massive armlets, spiral armlets and the ‘Donside’ terrets.
The maritime Atlantic province (A - including Shetland) is adjusted here to include only the zone of fine pottery and the main broch concentrations. The shaded area (Caithness and Sutherland) is an intermediate zone where the fine pottery is mainly absent but where there are large numbers of brochs and, in the south-east, many Pictish stones (a few of which also
Occur in Orkney).
Symbols: i - straight-jointed bridle bits; 2 - iron single-jointed bridle bit from Dun Lagaidh; 3 - Group III swords and scabbards; 4 - Group Ilia swords and scabbards; 5 - Group iv ‘Brigantian’ swords and scabbards; 6 - penannular fibulae of Type Aa; 7 - the Deskford carnyx, the Torrs pony cap and the Balmaclellan mirror.
Figure 34.2 This decorated bronze carnyx - part of a horn in the form of a boar's head - was found in about 1816 about 6 ft down in peat on Liecheston Farm, near Kirk ton of Deskford, Banffshire, in the northern part of the North-eastern province. It has been stylistically dated to the first century BC. (Piggoti 1959.)
Likewise derivatives of the the ‘Arras’ three-link bronze bridle bits - the ‘straight bar snaffles’ (Palk 1984) - show an exactly similar spread into southern Scotland, as do the early Type Aa penannular fibulae (Palk 1984; Fowler i960, esp. 16iff.) and their derivatives (Stevenson 1966, n. 46). With one striking exception this early metalwork does not extend north of the rivers Forth and Clyde; the boar’s head trumpet from Deskford in Banffshire is far up in the north-east (Piggott 1959) (Figure 34.2). The only objects with Celtic curvilinear decoration which do are the massive bronze armlets and the decorated terrets, both found concentrated in Aberdeenshire (Stevenson 19661 fig. j), and these are explicable as the final (second century) products of Celtic craftsmen, and their local imitators, who fled north with their chiefly patrons after the heavy defeat of the iron age tribes by the Romans at the battle of Mons Graupius in AD 86. It may not be too fanciful to see this concentration of La Tene-descended tribal leaders in Aberdeenshire in the second century as resulting eventually in the coalescence of the tribes of lowland Pictland into a powerful cultural unity.
The rotary quern is another important Indicator of the cultural distinctiveness of the southern Scottish iron age population, and of its albeit increasingly tenuous links with continental La Tene cultures. There are two types of iron age querns in Scotland, one being the non-adjustable bun-shaped form the distribution of which is almost entirely confined to below the Forrh/Clyde line (MacKle 1971: fig-l); it was probably operated on the ground by some kind of wooden turning mechanism
(MacKie 1989: /ff.)- The same thing seems to apply in Ireland where the bun-shaped querns are found in broadly the same area as decorated La Tene metalwork; both are markedly absent from the southern half of the country (Caulfield 1977; fig. 24) and several of the Irish stones bear La Tene curvilinear ornament (ibid.: fig. 21).
Another clear indication of the continental links of the middle iron age peoples of southern Scotland - in which they contrast with the tribes both north and south of them - is seen in the liking of their leaders for translucent glass armlets inlaid with coloured patterns (Stevenson 1966: 28 and fig. 3; MacKie 1989: 3-4). The great majority of these ornaments are made of ice-green Roman glass so they clearly could not exist until this became available after the conquest. Yet the tribes of southern England and the midlands, conquered first, have hardly any; the concentration is heavily in central and south-eastern Scotland and in north-east England with a few outliers in the North-eastern and Atlantic provinces. Glass armlets are characteristic of the La Tene cultures northern and north-western Erance (Giot et al.
1979), and of course of their Yorkshire relations (Stead 1979), and it is difficult not to conclude that the armlets suggest the same as the decorated metalwork, that the south Scottish tribes had an unusually strong continental La Tene heritage. It is curious, however, that no complete armlet has been found on a settlement site; the ends of the fragments have often been carved as if to be mounted on something.
The North-Eastern Province
The iron age cultures of the region between the river Eorth and the Moray Eirth, and east of the great central highland massif, are not as well understood as those further north and west. Partly this is because, with one or two exceptions, the few excavated sites have not yielded either long sequences of occupation or rich and informative material cultures; neither has the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland yet surveyed this vast area fully. However, there are a number of clues which suggest that this province had a distinctive culture at the end of the first millennium BC.
The most striking of these are the stone-walled hilltop strongholds known colloquially as vitrified forts but more accurately as timber-framed forts (MacKie 1977a). The archaeological evidence obtained from excavated sites like Einavon, Abernethy and Sheep Hill shows a sparse but consistent material culture, the most important components of which seem to be barrel - and bucket-shaped urns of thick, gritty pottery and jet ring-pendants and bracelets; later iron age bronze ornaments - for example three La Tene Ic brooches (for which V. G. Childe suggested a Swiss origin) and a few spiral bronze finger-rings - appear on some sites. Radiocarbon dates indicate that the oldest of these timber-framed forts probably belong to the eighth century BC, making highly plausible the hypothesis - offered by Piggott before C-14 dates were available (1966: 7-8) - of their origin among the late bronze age Urnfield cultures of the Gontinent. An analysis of their distribution by size strongly suggests an eastern origin with the forts becoming smaller as they spread west into the mountains (MacKie 1977a: 444, fig. 6). Only the presence of some strangely early thermoluminescence dates for the vitrified rock on some of these hill-forts disturbs this rather clear picture (Sanderson et al. 1988).
There are hints in the local late bronze age metalwork and pottery of strong contacts between Aberdeenshire and north Germany in the seventh century BC (Coles i960) and the timber-framed hill-forts are now known to be suitably early to be part of that foreign influence brought directly across the North Sea. Such origins would perhaps explain the early presence in the north-east of a p-Celtic dialect, later to become Pictish, which is distinct from other such in north Britain and appears to have closer links with Gaul (Jackson 1955) although the picture is not at all straightforward (MacKie 1970: 17-21).
However, signs of the influence of the classic iron age La Tene cultures are absent except, as we have seen, for some late items which can explained as the result of Roman conquests further south and which are not associated with the hill-forts mentioned. Likewise at a late date appear the distinctive underground galleries or souterrains, concentrated immediately north of the river Tay and in central Aberdeenshire; Stevenson has persuasively argued that these also represent the activities of proto-Pictish tribes galvanized by the influx of tribal elites from the south (1966). In early historic times the area evolved the distinctive Pictish kingdom with its unique art style (Henderson 1967). Thus the iron age tribes of the area - Maeatae, Caledonii and the rest - could be described as Celtic-speaking but with a distinctive cultural and genetic ancestry (Mackie and Mackie 1984); they seem to have had no links with the La Tene cultures until very late.
The Atlantic Province
This is the name given to the maritime highland and island zone west and north of the highland massif, an area always open to invasion and settlement by sea and one of the last places except Iceland to which a fugitive from further south or further east could go. This is well seen in Early Neolithic times in the distribution of the chambered cairns (Henshall 1972, end maps) and in early historic times by that of Norse place-names, indicating where the Vikings settled (Nicolaisen 1976: ch. 6). In the Middle Iron Age the province is equally well, though slightly differently, defined by the distribution of brochs - a form of defended wooden round-house with a high, thick dry-stone wall containing a remarkable series of hollow-wall architectural features unique to Scotland and giving the whole tower-like proportions (MacKie 1965). By contrast with the rest of Scotland the associated material culture is rich and informative and the pottery styles numerous and well made.
The hollow-walled brochs, with superimposed tiers of galleries inside the wall, appear to constitute the great majority of the sites about the architecture of which anything useful can be said (themselves a small proportion of all known and suspected brochs) and none have been plausibly dated to before the first century BC. A few broch-like buildings, and some slimmer stone round-houses, have been explored in Orkney and Caithness and the latter do go back to the end of the Bronze Age (Hedges and Bell 1980; Hedges 1990). Likewise there are plausible hollow-walled broch prototypes in the Western Isles which go back somewhat earlier (MacKie 1992). However the crucial point here is that all these stone structures seem to have been locally developed; only the two - or three-storeyed wooden roundhouse enclosed by the hollow-walled brochs (but not by the others) could be said to be an imported idea, presumably from iron age cultures further south in Britain (although determined anti-diffusionists doubt that also - Armit 1991).
The iron age material culture of the Atlantic province is exceptionally rich and diverse, the many well-made and finely decorated pottery styles for example not only provide a sharp contrast with the sparse sherds of plain undistinguished wares which are found on contemporary mainland sites but could be providing many clues to the influences that impinged on this maritime province from several different regions beyond the seas. The richness of the material culture makes it possible to formulate some tentative hypotheses about the origins of the middle iron age populations which lived there. Moreover, several excavated sites - like Jarlshof in Shetland (Hamilton 1956), Howe in Orkney (Carter et al. 1985), Crosskirk in Caithness (Fairhurst 1984) and Dun Mor Vaul on Tiree (MacKie 1974) - proved to have been occupied for many centuries, beginning at the end of the local Bronze Age. These show clearly that there was an early iron age horizon with a sparse material culture quite distinct from the middle phase that followed and to which the brochs and allied structures belong. This early horizon typically shows carinated pottery, very occasionally black-burnished, resembling comparably dated ware in southern and eastern England; however, much of the pottery seems to be local.
The radiocarbon dates for the early iron age horizon cluster in the sixth and fifth centuries BC (uncorrected) and those for the middle phase in the first centuries BC and AD (MacKie in press: table i); the latter horizon is also clearly tied to the Roman occupation of southern Scotland between about AD 80 and 180, samian sherds having been found on several sites near the top of the primary middle iron age occupation levels. Thus despite a number of valiant recent efforts (Armit 1991) it is really not possible to argue for complete continuity between the two phases, although some important pottery styles are clearly locally descended; the Middle Iron Age sees a wholesale transformation of the buildings and the associated pottery and artefacts which - unless one rules out the possibility on theoretical grounds (Renfrew 1990) - seems to argue for the arrival of an influential if not substantial new population and the galvanizing of the flourishing local cultures in various ways.
Allowing at least for the possibility of the arrival of some new dominant tribal elites - either to form dynastic alliances with relations in the north (Fitzpatrick 1989) or avoiding the Romans and looking for new territories - at the start of the Middle Iron Age (probably in the first century BC), where might they have come from? The first striking aspect of the province in this period is the complete absence of decorative bronze metalwork in the La Tene style. No bronze or iron bridle bits, or decorated sword scabbards or early penannular fibulae of the Aa type have been found in the many excavated brochs, wheel-houses and allied sites. The one iron three-link bit known from north of the Forth/Clyde line - from Dun Lagaidh on Loch Broom (MacKie 1977a: 515, x) - comes from a dun (small dry-stone fortified house with comparatively low walls) of Argyllshire type which lacked the Atlantic material culture. Also completely absent from the maritime zone are fibulae of La Tene type, though, as noted, a few early ones have been found in the southern and eastern lowlands (Stevenson 1966: 20, 25 and figs, i and 2).
It may be mentioned at this point that some of the items on Thomas’s map of 1963 purporting to show the spread of La Tene influence from Yorkshire into Scotland can now be seen to be irrelevant in that context, and they include the two objects which appeared to extend this zone of influence into the Atlantic province (Thomas 1963: fig. i). The bronze and iron bent ring-headed pins are now known from pottery impressions at Dun Mor Vaul to go back to the Early Iron Age (MacKie 1974: fig. II, no. 16 and fig. 12, no. 87), and the same is probably true of the long-handled ‘weaving combs’, seen at the early iron age site of Bu in Orkney (Hedges et al. 1987: fig. 1.14). Thus the maritime province is in that sense more distinct from the lowlands than used to be thought.
On the other hand there are artefacts clearly of southern English type - the bronze spiral finger-rings and the various types of glass beads - which are consistently found in Atlantic middle iron age layers but not before, but are also common in the southern lowlands. As always with such small ‘exotic’ ornaments it is hard to tell whether these signify more than trade, or gifts between lineages forming alliances. However, there are two important artefacts which, together with the absence of La Tene-derived metalwork already mentioned, suggest that any exotic population elements in the Atlantic middle iron age cultures are truly distinct.
Rotary querns seem not to pre-date the Middle Iron Age here and are of a quite different type from the beehive and bun-shaped stones of the southern mainland (MacKie 1972, 1989: 5ff.). Not only are they larger, flatter and thinner - hence the term ‘disc querns’ - but they appear to have had a sophisticated adjusting mechanism for coarse and fine grinding, as outer Hebridean and Orkney and Shetland querns did until very recently (Curwen 1937; Fenton 1978: 392). This means that they rested on a table rather than on the ground. The crucial element is the lower stone, with a complete perforation through which the movable spindle passes, raised and lowered from below; the spindle slots into the bridge or rind fixed across the bottom of the hole of the upper stone and thus alters slightly the distance between the stones and the fineness of the flour produced. A non-adjustable quern has only a socket in the lower stone for a fixed spindle and the vast majority of the pre-Roman bun-shaped and beehive querns in Britain and France appear to have this (MacKie 1989: fig. i). However, no disc quern with a socketed lower stone has ever been found among the scores recovered from excavations on Atlantic middle iron age sites. Such adjustable disc querns are thus quite distinct from those of the entire western La Tene province and their origin is as yet unclear. A preliminary assessment, however, does suggest that we may have to look to Brittany and ultimately to Iberia for the origin of this ‘non-La Tene’ rotary quern.
The second element is a pottery style - black or plain, bulging-waisted jars with sharply everted rims and omphalos bases, some with a curious decoration of horizontal fluting along the inside of the rim. These fluted-rimmed jars - especially the black-burnished examples - strongly resemble late Hallstatt cremation jars in north-west France (Giot et al. 1979: 26iff.) and they appear suddenly with the earliest defended (pre-broch) site at Clickhimin in Shetland (Hamilton 1968: ch. 5 and figs 42-4) and with the broch at Dun Mor Vaul, Tiree (MacKie 1974: i9ff; 1970: map 3). Only at the Shetland site are the jars numerous and the date of this occupation - discovered before C-14 dating was applied in the north - is disputable; a case can be made out for the first century BC rather than the excavator’s estimate of the fifth (MacKie 1969b).
In the Hebrides an appearance in the first century BC seems very likely and these few jars seem quickly to have developed into a common local hybrid - everted-rim Clettraval ware - on which is decoration of an horizontal, applied waist cordon and sometimes concentric curvilinear channelled arches above this. These last resemble the arches on the bowls of the later Iron Age In southern England and indeed a local imitation of such a one may have been found at Dun Mor Vaul (MacKie 1969: pi. vc).
Only here, among the brochs and wheel-houses of parts of the Outer Hebrides, and at Clickhimin is this everted-rim pottery, with its apparently exotic origins, at all common. Elsewhere in Atlantic Scotland it is rare and the common pottery styles are firmly local, sometimes with origins going back several centuries. Moreover no middle Iron age cremation burials, or indeed any burials, have been found in Atlantic Scotland so the significance of the pottery is unclear.
Discussion
What can be said about these three archaeological zones of iron age Scotland in the light of the questions posed at the start? It Is clear that we are asking two different questions, the first being whether there was a Celtic-speaking population in Scotland in the pre-Roman Iron Age. It appears that there was if thep-Celtic place-names and the Ptolemaic tribal names are good guides. However, tribal names could simply reflect the ancestry and military prowess of tribal chiefs and warrior dites and do not necessarily imply that all the tribesmen were of the same origin (below, p. 667). Place-names are more difficult; the date of their first application to natural features cannot be discovered and the question of who in a tribe or clan had the right to give names to geographical features arises. However, the existence of a historical Britishspeaking kingdom in Strathclyde in the mid-first millennium AD surely confirms that the iron age population of the Tyne-Forth province was largely p-Celtic speaking. Yet one may doubt whether the same applied to the apparently p-Celtic tribes in the highlands and islands; here perhaps were larger populations of aborigines and a small number of early British-speaking elites. Hardly any p-Celtic place-names survive.
With all its imperfections the archaeological picture matches the linguistic one quite well. The presence of tribal elites with direct links with the Yorkshire La Tene groups is surely implied by the scatter Into southern Scotland of sword scabbards, bridle bits and early penannular brooches, and the local rotary quern provides a clear link between the more ordinary households and their presumably p-Celtic-speaking neighbours further south and on the Continent. It also shows that there was a profound cultural and probably political frontier at the highland boundary through which the bun-shaped querns rarely penetrated.
The North-east province is archaeologically distinct with a strong suggestion of early origins going back to the end of the Bronze Age, yet a clearly p-CeltIc form of language was used there, as well as words quite unlike any others known (Jackson 1955). It Is difficult to resist the conclusion that this is partly explicable by the fleeing north to, and settling in, Aberdeenshire and adjacent areas by thousands of southern tribal chiefs, gentry and warriors and their families after their crushing defeat by the Romans in AD 86. No doubt it was this genetic and cultural mixing that resulted in the emergence of the dynamic kingdom of the Piets two or three centuries later.
Atlantic Scotland is even more distinct from the southern mainland in the Middle Iron Age, cut off from it by mountains and sea and having many peculiar, locally originating dry-stone structures and an array of individual artefacts and pottery styles which are not matched elsewhere and many of which also seem to be local. Absent from this array are signs of links with the La Tene provinces in the broadest sense, except perhaps for the glass beads, spiral bronze finger-rings and curvilinear ornament on Clettraval jars, which suggest a connection of some kind, perhaps brief, with the Wessex area. On the other hand the adjustable disc querns and the fluted everted-rimmed jars might suggest a link with the devolved Hallstatt cultures of Brittany or even Iberia, and links with Ireland are apparent too (Warner 1983).
Pace Renfrew (1990: 250), the great broch tower residences themselves indicate the presence of highly organized tribal societies (MacKie 1989 and below), the leading elements of which may well have arrived from elsewhere (though there are signs in some places - Caithness and Sutherland for example - of their being adopted by indigenous cultures). These elites may have spoken p-Celtic dialects but it seems doubtful if many of their clansmen did; the whole province seems to have been a world apart from lowland Scotland and the rest of the sub-La Tene provinces - a mixture of very long-established aborigines and sea-borne tribal elites from the western fringes of Europe who established themselves among them, anticipating the Vikings by eight hundred years.
World History
