What inspired early “writing” unique to Scotland?
In the first of two features about early scripts in Britain, we visit north-east Scotland, where Pictish symbol stones tease the imagination with their appealing designs and mysterious origins. A new project has dated them, finding they were inspired by contact with the Roman world, like runes and ogham. Gordon Noble, Martin Goldberg and Derek Hamilton report
Pictish symbol stones are an iconic element of the archaeology of the Picts, the late Roman and early medieval occupants of north-east Scotland. The symbols, a striking series of animals, objects and abstract designs, are found on over 200 stone monuments from eastern and northern Scotland, and are also seen occasionally on metalwork, bone and stone portable objects.
Who made them and when? What do they mean? These are difficult questions to answer. Traditional study has largely relied on art-historical analysis. A better appreciation of their archaeology was needed, the first requirement of which was scientific dating. One of the major research strands of the University of Aberdeen Northern Picts project has been to construct more robust chronologies, to help us rewrite the history of these symbolic traditions and understand more clearly the context of their development and use.
New dates
There have been repeated attempts to decipher the meaning of the stones since the 19th century, with wideranging interpretations including icons of pagan or Christian religion, symbols of rank or tribe, memorials to the dead, and countless fringe ideas. Current consensus suggests that the symbol system was a form of naming script. The roots of this research lie with Ross Samson, who in 1992 saw the common pairing of symbols as key: he argued that pairs worked together to represent personal names. Some monuments seem to support this. On the back of a cross-slab from Dunfallandy, Perthshire, for example, two seated figures and a mounted individual are shown with symbol pairs directly next to them.
The dating of the symbol system has been another area of huge debate. Early studies suggested the tradition was active in the seventh or eighth centuries ad, but others had proposed dates as early as the fifth century and perhaps even a late Roman inspiration. Dating has remained controversial. Most of these proposals were based on art historical analysis as opposed to scientific dating.
It is difficult to obtain absolute dates. One symbol-bearing object from the Broch of Burrian, in Orkney, had been directly dated previously by National Museums Scotland: an ox bone bearing two symbols, a crescent and v- rod and a mirror case, possibly a gaming piece, gave a radiocarbon date of ad570– 655. Few further organic objects were available for direct dating, but over the last five years we have also dated or redated burial and settlement contexts from which symbol-bearing monuments have been recovered.
In terms of objects we were able to sample an ox phalange decorated with a crescent and v- rod and rectangular symbol found at the multi-period settlement at Pool, Sanday, Orkney. This gave a date of ad410– 570 (95% probability) or 420–540 (68% probability), the earliest direct date yet for a symbol-bearing object. A decorated pin also from Pool, bearing a double-disc and z- rod, was too delicate to sample without significant damage, but modelling of the immediate discovery context provided an estimate of ad425– 575 (68% probability), broadly contemporary with the directly dated ox phalange.
These dates pushed the chronology of the symbol system earlier than had been demonstrated before, showing that it was in use in the Northern Isles in the fifth or sixth centuries ad. We also redated a burial from Dairy Park, Dunrobin, Sutherland with an associated symbol stone. Previous radiocarbon dates from this burial had poor resolultionwwith resolution with conflicting results, but a high precision technique used by Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre dated the burial to ad575– 625 (68% probability).
With limited direct dates available, we also looked at contextual dating of sites with symbol stone finds or potentially in situ monuments. From 2015–17 the Northern Picts project excavated at the sea stack of Dunnicaer, Aberdeenshire, where at least five symbol stones were recovered in the 19th century. The Dunnicaer stones stand out from the broader corpus as being relatively rudimentary, and along with similar designs found in caves, they had been suggested to be early examples.
The excavations showed that the stones had come from a substantially eroded promontory fort which had traces of a rampart around the south s side of the stack and multiple hearths of s structures within. Much of the site has b been lost to erosion, but the excavations r revealed traces of a major settlement a and finds included very rare Roman i imports for this far north of the frontier, w with Samian and coarseware pottery, g glass and a lead weight.
Promontory forts of this kind are w well known from the earlier Iron Age a and early medieval periods in northe east Scotland, but the artefacts from D Dunnicaer were surprising. Occupation i in late Roman times, when very few f forts of this kind are known from this r region, was unusual. Radiocarbon d dating and Bayesian modelling s supported the artefact, suggesting t that the settlement at Dunnicaer m most likely began around ad130– 220 a and had ended by 345–425.
We have also been working at Rhynie, Aberdeenshire where a Pictish symbol stone, the Craw Stane, unusually still stands at the entranceway of a fortified settlement visible in air photos and excavated over many seasons (feature, Sep/Oct 2011/120).
Imports from the Mediterranean and continental Europe attest to a very high status site, probably an early royal centre. A total of 35 radiocarbon dates were available from all phases and major structural components including a feature that is likely to have been the socket for another Pictish stone. The chronological model from Rhynie estimates that activity began probably in ad355– 380 and ended in 510–560.
New history
The new dating allows us to reconsider the symbol system’s history. The objects from Orkney and the settlement at Rhynie show that the tradition was almost certainly in use by the fifth or early sixth century. However, our new work also suggests yet earlier origins.
We cannot directly date the carved stones from the Dunnicaer stack, but antiquarian accounts make it clear that when discovered in the 19th century they were associated with a stone wall built along the stack’s edge. We found remains of this wall during the recent excavations, and showed it to be a rampart enclosing the settlement. Several of these symbol stones have been interpreted as “plaques” suitable for being set into such a wall, rather than the more normal standing stone type. The rampart at Dunnicaer has been dated to ad285– 350, which is supported by the artefactual evidence for the site with no indication of activity after the settlement went out of use. Thus, there is a strong argument for the symbol stones being contemporary with the promontory fort, and that symbol carving originated in a Roman-Iron Age context. The excavation has shown that the stones came from a high-status fortified settlement, as with Rhynie shortly after.
The Dunnicaer evidence sheds new light on other sites with similar styles of carving, such as Sculptor’s Cave, Covesea, Moray. The last evidence for use of this cave dates to the third to fourth centuries ad, making it broadly contemporary with Dunnicaer. The material from the caves includes radiocarbon-dated human remains and an unusual assemblage of Roman coins, metalwork and pottery.
There are also Pictish symbols in caves at East Wemyss, Fife. Very few in situ deposits have been found during excavations at the caves, but in one, the Sliding Cave (which has carvings of a double-disc, serpents and a comb case), excavations by Time Team found an intact floor layer dated to ad240– 390, again broadly contemporary with the dates from Dunnicaer. While this dating is not on the stones themselves, we are unlikely to obtain a more robust chronology unless we are very lucky and find more objects with symbols that can be directly dated or further examples of in situ symbol stones from other sites.
All this provides new input to the old debates about the symbol tradition. The evidence from Dunnicaer and cave sites suggests that unelaborated carvings, generally of a smaller size and less standardised compared to those on the later standing stone monuments, are likely to be early in the sequence with the tradition perhaps originating in the third to fourth centuries ad. Rhynie suggests the larger standing stone monuments in eastern Scotland were being set from the late fourth to the early sixth century ad, and Pool shows symbol use in the most northerly
parts of Pictland from as early as the fifth century and certainly by the early sixth century.
At Dairy Park doubt has been cast over the association between the symbol stone and cairn, but the stone was found directly over the cairn when the field was ploughed for the first time in 1977. The burial has now been precisely dated to ad575- 625. This outline chronology suggests an increasing elaboration of the symbol style through time. Relatively plain carvings are found across the corpus from sites like Dunnicaer and Rhynie, whereas the symbols found on the stone from Dairy Park and on the ox phalange from Broch of Burian, dated to late sixth or seventh centuries, are more complex with internal elaboration of the basic symbol designs.
Roman influence
Pushing the symbol tradition earlier makes contact with Roman culture a likely factor in its origin. In the third and fourth centuries ad raiding, trading and diplomatic gifts and bribes shaped contact between native groups in eastern Scotland and the Roman world. It is in this context that the idea of some form of written script or monumental symbolic system may have emerged. An earlier dating horizon also makes sense for the symbol tradition to fall into the same milieu as other similar epigraphic traditions across Europe. In Scandinavia, for example, runes can be traced back to the early centuries ad and was a tradition influenced by
Mediterranean societies to the south. In Ireland, ogham also emerged through contact with the Roman world, and an origin in the early centuries ad has also been proposed.
If, like runes and ogham, Pictish symbols were created in response to Roman influence, in this case it was non-alphabetic. Ogham and runic inscriptions were primarily used for recording names, but the symbols were perhaps more narrowly focused, with their non-alphabetic character limiting both their range of use and our ability to understand them. By analogy, the main purpose of Pictish symbols certainly seems to be to communicate identities, and where wellcontextualised they often appear at high-status locations. Given their context of use, it may be that Pictish symbols operated like early hieroglyphs in Egypt, which evolved as a public form of display concerned with prestige and high-status identities and activities.
The dating project was co-ordinated by the University of Aberdeen in collaboration with National Museums Scotland and dating experts at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre ( suerc). Gordon Noble is reader in archaeology at the University of Aberdeen; Martin Goldberg is principal curator, medieval archaeology & history, National Museums Scotland; Derek Hamilton is director of research at suerc, University of Glasgow. See “The development of the Pictish symbol system: inscribing identity beyond the edges of Empire,” Antiquity (2019)