Revealing a new picture of Scotland’s painted people
Work by University of Aberdeen archaeologists is revealing a different picture of the early societies of northern Britain.
The Picts have long been regarded as a mysterious people, leaving behind little evidence of their presence other than their iconic carved stones. Their image in popular culture is of a wild warrior tribe of painted people.
But work by University of Aberdeen archaeologists is revealing a different picture of the early societies of northern Britain given the name 'Picti' - meaning 'Painted Ones' - by the Romans.
Their excavations have shown the Picts to have been a much more sophisticated society, trading across Europe and creating large, hierarchical settlements.
At Tap O’ Noth, an imposing hill which rises above the village of Rhynie to the north of Aberdeen, they have made their most spectacular find yet.
Using radiocarbon dating and aerial photography, they uncovered evidence which indicates that as many as 4,000 people may have lived in more than 800 huts perched close to the summit, rivalling the largest known post-Roman settlements in Britain and Ireland.
Professor Gordon Noble, who led the research, says:
"The results of the dating were simply incredible. They show that the huge fort dated to the fifth to sixth centuries AD.
The size of the upper and lower forts together are around 16.75 hectares making it bigger than anything we know from early medieval Britain. If each of the huts had four or five people living in them, it means there was a population of upwards of 4,000 people living on the hill.
That’s verging on urban in scale, and in a Pictish context nothing else compares to this. We had previously assumed that you would need to get to around the 12th century in Scotland before settlements started to reach this size.
It is truly mind-blowing and demonstrates how much we have yet to learn about settlement around the time that the early kingdoms of Pictland were being consolidated."
The discovery adds to the growing evidence of a more complex Pictish society.
In the valley below Tap O’ Noth, University archaeologists discovered evidence for the drinking of Mediterranean wine, the use of glass vessels from western France and intensive metalwork production at a site at Barflat farm, just outside Rhynie. This suggests it was a high-status site, possibly even with royal connections.
The team has also shed new light on the origin and development of the Picts’ yet undeciphered system of symbols, which has divided historical opinion for more than a century.
Their findings support the idea that the symbols represent a script likely to be a naming system communicating the identities of Picts and that this was developed in the same era as other writing systems across Europe, like the ogham script of early Ireland and the runic system developed in Scandinavia.
“The general assumption has been that the Picts were late to the game in terms of monumental communication, but the new chronology we have developed shows that they were actually innovators in the same way as their contemporaries, perhaps more so in that they did not adapt an alphabetic script, but developed their own symbol tradition.”
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