Adrian Maldonado

Early medieval burial in Scotland: new questions

Abstract THIS ARTICLE presents a summary and interpretation of burial practices in Scotland in ad 400–650. Due to the dearth of documentary sources, mortuary archaeology provides a window on the changes occurring at the juncture between prehistory and history. Yet previous work has generally approached burial as evidence for a single aspect of this transition: the conversion to Christianity. Rather than signalling ethnic or religious affiliation, it is argued that graves should be understood as acts of structured deposition which enabled new relationships to be forged between the living and the dead at a local level. The composition of the grave with stone, sand, timber and earth can be seen as a form of furnishing cognate with the use of grave goods elsewhere in Britain and the continent.This article presents a summary and interpretation of burial practices in Scotland in AD 400-650, during the transition from the Iron Age to the early medieval period. Due to the dearth of primary historical sources from this period relating to Britain north of Hadrian’s Wall, the numerous burials provide the main evidence pertaining to the knock-on effects of the collapse of the Roman province of Britannia, and the era which saw the formation of Pictish, British, Scottish and Christian identities that would define the region for the remainder of the early medieval period. Yet previous work has generally addressed these sites as evidence for a single aspect of this transition: the conversion to Christianity. This paper summarises the relevant results of the author’s doctoral research, which involved the creation of a database of all burials from Scotland covering the first millennium AD. With a body of nearly 300 individual radiocarbon dates, the Scottish evidence allows theoretical advances into the archaeology of death and burial to be combined with an unprecedented level of chronological precision. This has the potential to influence the discourse on the sub-Roman period in the British Isles, framing new questions about the function of death and commemoration in the longer processes of conversion, the establishment of new social identities, and the formation of ethnic kingdoms.

The serialized past: archaeology news online

Maintaining the public’s interest in the past has long been a major concern among archaeologists, and practitioners since Mortimer Wheeler have appreciated the value of reporting their finds through mass media outlets (Moshenska and Schadla-Hall 2011). While teaching the honors module Archaeology in Contemporary Society at the University of Chester in 2015, I wanted to assess the portrayal of our discipline in the news. I put together a computer lab session that collated headlines into word clouds and found some peculiarities of reporting across news sources. Yet when it came time to producing essays, few students chose to write about this subject. While there have been some great studies of archaeology in the media, they are aging fast and new work has yet to catch up with the digital world of online news.

Barrows and the conversion of the landscape at Forteviot, Perthshire

If we are to say anything of substance about the conversion of the Picts, we need to understand not only early Christianity but also the existing cosmology onto which the new religion had to be mapped. The challenge should first be to problematize what we mean by religion itself in this period, and question the extent to which it played a role in the material changes in burial practice in the area which constitutes the Pictish cultural zone from the fifth to ninth centuries. An ideal site with which to embark on a fresh examination of the evidence is Forteviot, Perthshire, which emerges into the historical record of the ninth century as the site of an important Pictish royal palace, monastery, and assembly place, but is now a rural hamlet with several fragments of early Christian sculpture. Between 2007 and 2011, the University of Glasgow’s Strathearn Environs and Royal Forteviot (SERF) project established the broad chronology of this ceremonial centre through targeted excavations and radiocarbon dating of various features across the landscape. By focusing on the later Iron Age and early medieval phases, Forteviot gives us an unprecedented opportunity to study the cosmological terrain before, during, and after the arrival and acceptance of Christianity.

The Early Medieval Antonine Wall

Archaeological fieldwork in the Forth-Clyde isthmus has been dominated by the World Heritage Monument of the Antonine Wall, the Roman frontier built in the second century a.d. Considerably less attention has been given to the evidence for post-Roman experience of the Wall and how it was remembered (and forgotten) in the subsequent centuries. This paper will briefly summarise historical notices of the Antonine Wall, then consider the archaeological and toponymic evidence for early medieval occupation. The role of the Forth-Clyde isthmus as a political frontier is shown to be less significant to our understanding of this period than the evidence for mobility, memory and the contested legacy of Rome in early medieval Scotland.