386. The Picts: Scotland’s Tattooed Warriors (Ep 4)

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2:29William:Welcome to Empire. I'm William Durimple.

2:31Anita:And I'm Anita Arnond. And in today's episode, we're going to be exploring the Picts, the mysterious painted people who ruled parts of eastern Scotland for 500 years. And with us today, We have somebody who's done more than anybody in recent years to recover the Pictish world from complete obscurity. He's Professor of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen. He's Director of the Northern Picts Project and co-author of The King in the North, the Pictish Realms. Gordon Noble, welcome to Empire. Thanks so much for having me. Very nice to meet you.

3:05William:Gordon, very nice to see you. We had a lovely trip together to Burghead last summer and I've been trying to get you on the show ever since. So it's very good to see you here in your new dig at East Lomond. Let's just start with the simple question that most people who don't live in Scotland will be asking. Who were the Picts and what era are we talking about? So it's a name that's first introduced by the Romans in AD 297. It's in a praise poetry to an emperor of Rome mentioning a group called the Picts. And essentially it means the Painted People. So it's a Roman nickname. And for whatever reason, that nickname seems to stick for many centuries.

3:45And as people occupy northeast Scotland, ruling over what was a really extensive kingdom for the time period and disappear around about 900 AD.

3:56William:Taskel authors maintained that they went into battle covered in tattoos and war paint. But Anita is going to be very excited because they were also matrilineal. kingship passed through the female line rather than the male, which is unusual in any society and particularly unusual in the British Isles.

4:17Anita:I never knew that. I mean, in school here in Britain, I think many people who are my age will remember the first thing you do in history is you colour in sort of a paint-by-colour Pictish person, you know, and there's sort of the winding tattoos on their bodies. But why didn't they tell us about the matrilineal succession? So, I mean, almost every other political system, as everybody knows who's listened to this podcast, and particularly in the British Isles, ran through the male line. Why did the Picts do something so very different? Well, it's a subject of great debate, that one. And in fact, Bede actually says it's only at times of stress, really, that they might actually inherit through the female line.

4:58Having said that, Pictish succession does look quite complicated, and it says very rarely father to son, at least until the later period. So there does seem to be a real period of flux in terms of actually how Pictish succession was made up. But to be honest, you know, our sources are so vague, really, that we don't even know if there was always a single Pictish king, how often there were sub-kings or sub-rulers. And certainly Pictish rule seems to be divided at certain times throughout the history of the Picts.

5:28Anita:It's not categorically that it was matrilineal, It just sometimes when they felt like it might have been. Is that what you're saying? Yes, absolutely. That's what bead seems to suggest. So unless we get more evidence, it'd be hard to say more about that. But certainly it seems rare as far as we can tell in terms of this session of the Pictish kings. Gordon, you mentioned bead twice as if we're all mates. You're talking about a man that we at school learn as the venerable bead, one of Britain's earliest historians. By the way, Willie, you'll love this. I got into so much trouble once, first essay, I wrote the venereal bead and they thought I was taking a call to detention.

6:08Anita:It's a venereal. No, I couldn't spell. Anyway, could you tell us more about the venereal, I mean, the venerable bead? Who is the venerable bead? Well, he's this great English historian who's writing about the, well, mainly the ecclesiastical history of England or what became England. And he mentions the Picts at various times, but obviously that information is filtered through the sources that he's able to access. So as well as the kind of matrilineal aspect, he also talks about the Picts coming from Scythia, which is, you know, a modern day area of places like Ukraine. That's probably because he's able now to access classical sources that talk about, you know, tattooed warriors bothering the Roman Empire.

6:55And he's putting two and two together and suggesting that the pics came from Scythia, another noted origin point for an enemy of Rome, really. So there's lots of misinformation, I guess, you know, fluctuating and being communicated through authors like Bede. So it really adds to the kind of mysterious air of the Picts in terms we have lots of snippets about them, but that's clearly not always right in terms of what is communicating about these people who are living north of the Roman frontier.

7:28William:Gordon, before we leave women, I know Anita will be very keen to pursue this. One of the most famous, possibly the largest and most famous Pictish stone does have a Pictish queen or a large image of a Pictish aristocratic woman of some sort riding side saddle with warriors around her and hunting dogs and a huge penannular brooch on her front, the Hilton of Cadbol slab now in Edinburgh. So that again is a little bit of evidence that you don't see in English sculptures of the same period any pictures of women, but you do see it very prominently on the biggest ever Pictish lab. In the burial record, you know, places like London, Lakes and Fife, we have burial monuments that are full of the burials of women.

8:13So there's clearly something interesting going on there in terms of picture society. But it's probably things like archaeology and genetics is going to tell us more about the relationships between people in the picture period than our traditional historical sources, perhaps.

8:30William:Let's start, Gordon, with what your excavations have actually found, because particularly Rhine is a discovery that really began to change everything. That's when I first heard about you. Where is it? And what is it about that excavation that began to change, or how we look at Pictish symbol stones, but also the Picts in general? Yes. So Rhine is fascinating. And it's amazing that I didn't myself know much about this, or indeed know anything about the Picts really, until I went to university. It's quite embarrassing. how little we teach our kids in Scotland about the pics. But anyway, I started this, what I thought was going to be a sideline project to look at picture society through this place called Rhiney.

9:12And it's a place that's about 40 miles west of Aberdeen, the city of Aberdeen, where I'm a professor at. And it's got this really interesting place name, which comes from this early Celtic word, re for king, and it seems to mean a place associated with a great or a sacred king. But we don't have any historical sources to this place But that's not surprising We only have a handful of pictures places actually mentioned in our sources And from Rhinie there's this whole series of carved stones So the Picts are famous for their carved stones And probably the most impressive one is this carving called the Rhinie Man And this was found by the farmer in 1978 ploughing his field He hit this big stone, probably broke his plough and he turned the stone over and there was this figure carrying this axe over his shoulder with big pointy teeth.

10:04Such an arresting image. And the question was, you know, what on earth is this stone doing in this arable field, just the south of this very small village of Rhinie? And so we set out to find out more. And in the same year that Rhinie Man was found, they flew over the site and they recorded these crop marks on top of this glacial knoll, so this kind of naturally prominent place in the landscape. And to cut a long story short, that series of enclosures that were identified from there turned out to be this really wealthy Pictish settlement, befitting of that title, you know, a place associated with a great king.

10:42So we had large timber buildings, some sort of rampart or enclosure, and inside we find all the kind of material you might associate with elite places of this time. So they were importing wine amphora from the Eastern Mediterranean, glass from Western France, from drinking goblets. So the kind of thing we associate with courtly society in the early medieval period. And this material has never been found this far north or east before. So this was really exciting. Hang on, hang on.

11:18Anita:Mediterranean wine. Now, Now, wait a minute, because that wasn't in my Pictish colouring book. So, I mean, that would suggest that if you're finding Eastern Mediterranean wine in Aberdeenshire, that they picked what trade is. I mean, is that too much of an inference in the 5th century that they were doing foreign trade? Absolutely. I mean, this material seems to be coming up the west coast of Scotland and Britain more generally. It's probably associated with the metal trade in places like Cornwall. So this material is coming in as part of early Christian networks and early trading networks in this post-Roman period, in the so-called Dark Ages.

11:57And it's finding its way all the way up to Rhine, which is 40 kilometers away from the coast. So it's amazing this material found its way there. And it just shows you how powerful these people were at Rhine that were able to tap into those trade networks. And we would never have guessed that. We had these amazing carved stones from Rhinney, but we had no clue that this really, really wealthy settlement was located there. And then that just turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. So we started working in the wider landscape. And there's this huge hill fort that overlooks Rhinney called Tapanoth.

12:31And it's got this 17 hectare enclosure. It's a huge, huge hill fort, one of the largest known from Northern Britain. And this was always thought to be a prehistoric monument. But we excavated it and dated it to the Pictish period. And it's got something like 800 houses inside it. So this was a huge community and the kind of scale of society that we had no idea existed in the Pictish period. So, you know, almost overnight, we've overturned so many things about Pictish society and really showing it's way more complex than we perhaps assumed.

13:07William:We had a series on Gaza last year and those torpedo shaped jars from Gaza, the sweet wine. Was it one of those? Was it the ones with the kind of little thing at the bottom? Was it Gaza wine or Alexandrian wine? They seem to come from various locations in the eastern Mediterranean. It's hard to tell from the tiny shards that we found exactly where it might have came from. But yeah, it was just so remarkable to find that material. And we found it within the first few days of excavating at Riney in 2011. and I was able to phone up one of my friends who's a specialist in these imports and say, well, we've got this very strange looking pottery and we've got this glass with white trails.

13:47And he was like, well, you've got an import site here and that's just amazing. And it was just meant to be a sideline project. I was doing prehistoric archaeology, but I'd always been interested in the picks. But I'd never really pursued that because people were like, well, don't bother doing the archaeology, the pics because there's nothing to find out and you'll just get lost in the symbols and there

14:07William:lies there lies madness essentially yeah many fine scholars have gone down that way fast exactly gordon last summer i drove up to see you in in burghead which is another spectacular site we always knew that burghead was there with this mysterious well system down at the bottom but you were the first person again that firmly dated that to the pics you've suddenly given the pics a whole range of sites and a whole load of Pictish fortifications and towns which we didn't know existed. Yeah, absolutely. So this is a slightly different kind of site. So it's a promontory fort, so it sticks out into the Murray Firth, this amazing kind of connected area of sea.

14:47And it's this huge fortification. And it was first identified in the modern period in the 19th century, and they did various excavations after the modern town of Burghead had to be built over around about half of the Pictish Fort there and destroyed a huge chunk of the site. And again, people were like, well, you know, don't really go to Burghead because there's nothing to find out. But in those 19th century excavations, again, they found some amazing carvings, carvings of boules, about 30 individual monuments with boules on them. There's only six surviving today, sadly, one in the British Museum, one in the National Museum and others held locally.

15:26William:One in Elgin, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And what are these carvings? What do they denote? And what we've got there is really a fortress and settlement that dates to when the Pictish kingdoms are at their height in the 7th and 8th centuries. So this is really when the over kingdom of the Picts is established. and they're creating these huge fortresses with walls that are eight metres thick, six metres high. It's like, you know, kind of castle architecture in the Pictish period. And then a huge settlement inside with these long distance connections being demonstrated through the material culture. So again, it's really, really overturning what we thought we knew about the Picts.

16:08Anita:Do you know, there's something else that's going to overturn the peace and quiet of Birkhead. I'll tell you that for a fact because I think it's the site where Christopher Nolan filmed part of the Odyssey. So just expect lots of people in tab arts taking little visitor groups up there. It's just a crazy thought, isn't it? Sort of a Bronze Age epic being filmed in the largest Pictish fort in Scotland. I kind of find it delicious. Let's talk about it. I mean, I'm just keen to get a little more meat on the bones of this very sort of scanty history that we were always given, which was just basically nothing deeper than skin deep, than the tattoos.

16:47Anita:And Willie, you've been really into the stones rather than the skin, haven't you?

16:52William:I am obsessed with it, like many people, because despite many, many works coming out on them and generations of scholars looking at these stones, starting with a man called Romilly Allen who went around the highlands with a horse and cart photographing every one of these pictures. and I bought, I got a copy of this fantastic, fat, leather-bound volume that he did in the 19th century. And his work really has not been improved upon as a record of these beautiful, beautiful carvings. But give us an idea, because as you say, it's something that's driven generations of scholars bad, because they come up with elaborate theories, and there's actually, there's very little to prove what is true, what isn't.

17:31Yeah, there are amazing things, and it's why I got interested in the picks, you know. and I was studying art history and my lecturer put up some slides of some of these symbol stones. And again, I grew up in northeast Scotland and never seen any. And I was just like, my goodness, what are these and why aren't they better known? So the early examples are often just the symbols on large boulders or standing stones. And there are things like, you know, abstract symbols, things we call double discs and crescents, but also these amazing animal carvings. The pics are so famous for being amazing craftspeople.

18:08So we've got things like wolves, bulls, other animals, and they're so well represented. Salmon, snakes. Yeah. And so, yeah, what do they mean? And so that's been one of the big things that's trying to crack the code. And certain stones give us a few clues. So you mentioned Willie Dunfallandy. And you can see that there's people on chairs, maybe even thrones, and they're labeled with these symbols, often in pairs. So the most likely explanation is that some sort of naming system. So the symbols represent sounds or words, almost like a hieroglyphic or logographic kind of representation. But unless we find a Rosetta stone, we're not really going to be able to say more.

18:54But this is where archaeology comes in. And so one of the other big mysteries is how old were they? What context are they in? So excavations at places like Rhinney shows that Rhinney Mann and one of the standing stones with two symbols on, a salmon and a Pictish beast, they stood at the entranceway into what was probably this royal complex at Rhinney. So you can see the advertising at the front door, essentially, that people of high status and people with influence are located at the site. And we're also finding stuff at Rhinney in the ground, which resembles what you see on the stones. so you can begin to date the stones through these archaeological associations so we found a little miniature axe that looks like the rainy man carries we found these amazing clay molds for making animal figurines which resemble the animals you see on the stones and you can date those archaeological layers you can actually see that the stones date back to you know third fourth centuries perhaps and certainly the fifth sixth centuries so a bit earlier than people maybe had generally assumed.

20:03William:You mentioned this extraordinary find of Eastern Mediterranean wine in the middle of Aberdeenshire, but the symbols themselves have many echoes to very distant art networks, don't they? There are clearly Byzantine borrowings, there's images that we know are Coptic monks from Egypt, and there's even monsters and images that appear to sort of be echoes of stuff coming out of Sasanian Persia. I mean, these are very, very far away places to be influencing carfsmen sitting outside Aberdeen and Inverness and Perth.

20:38Anita:Gordon, I want to talk about something, you know, shiny and exciting, the silver, because, you know, the Gaul Cross Horde is one of the great stories of your project. Tell us a little bit about it. Yes. So we don't have an awful lot of actual complete Pictish objects or often not in context, certainly. So as archaeologists, even at places like Rhyne, we're generally finding what people throw away. So the bits and pieces, scrap and the like. So it's amazing to find more complete objects, but often they don't have context because they were found in the 19th century. So in the 19th century at Golcross, an improving farmer had blown up a stone circle with dynamite to remove it from his land and during that process of destruction he'd found these silver objects but unfortunately only three objects were retained one was a beautiful silver hand pin which is a style of dress pin that's ultimately goes back to roman style a bangle and a piece of silver chain so we went back to the fine spot to say well not really thinking we'd find anything else.

21:48But we involved a local metal detectorist and the National Museum of Scotland, my colleague Martin Goldberg. And we started scanning the field round about where we thought this destroyed stone circle was, which was a prehistoric monument, so earlier than the Picts. But clearly, they buried their silver next to this ancient monument, presumably to go back and get it, or maybe a gift to the gods, perhaps. But anyway, we started scanning the field and we very quickly began to find silver object after silver object and we eventually we recovered

22:21William:over a hundred pieces of silver good day's work yeah it was not bad uh some of it was pictus in style and some of it was roman so we had things like uh clipped roman coins bits of roman weaponry and jewelry and tableware and the like and this is an example of how So the Picts were getting a hold of Roman material, things like silver and glass, melting it down, reworking it, and creating objects and fashion that was very much in the Pictish style, but also perhaps relating to Roman military traditions, for example. So it just shows you revisiting some of these early find spots can really uncover so much more.

23:10And again, we were able then through all this new material culture to begin to actually reassess the chronology of some of these early Pictish objects and again, relate them to the Pictish stones. So some of the material culture we find at places like Gold Cross and Norris Law, you get, you know, for example, symbols incised onto silver objects. So again, it shows you that the symbols on the stones were just part of a wider Pictish culture. And the symbol system had a wider currency, essentially.