In Our Time - The Picts

Episode Date: November 9, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Picts and, to mark our twentieth season, that discussion takes place in front of a student audience at the University of Glasgow, many of them studying this topic. According to Bede writing c731AD, the Picts, with the English, Britons, Scots and Latins, formed one of the five nations of Britain, 'an island in the ocean formerly called Albion'. The Picts is now a label given to the people who lived in Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde line from about 300 AD to 900 AD, from the time of the Romans to the time of the Vikings. They left intricately carved stones, such as the one above with a bull motif, from Burghead, Moray, Scotland, but there are relatively few other traces. Who were they, and what happened to them? And what has been learned in the last twenty years, through archaeology? With Katherine Forsyth Reader in the Department of Celtic and Gaelic at the University of GlasgowAlex Woolf Senior Lecturer in Dark Age Studies at the University of St Andrewsand Gordon Noble Reader in Archaeology at the University of AberdeenProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, the Picts, according to B, writing in the 8th century, were one of four peoples of Britain, along with the Scots, the Anglo-Saxons and the Britons. In the 10th century, the last three still existed, but the Picks didn't.

They left stone monuments carved with the astonishing artistry, and intricacy, and other peoples wrote about them. But where was Pictland? What language did the Picts speak, and why did they disappear as a distinct group? As we mark our 20th season, we're discussing this before an audience of students, many of them studying the subject,

and so it may transpire with Pictish ancestors. With us here in the Memorial Chapel at the University of Glasgow to discuss the Picts are, Catherine Forsyth, reader in the Department of Celtic and Gallic at the University of Glasgow, Alex Wolfe, Senior Lecturer in Dark Age Studies at the University of St Andrews, and Gordon Noble, reader in archaeology at the University of Aberdeen. And afterwards, we'll be taking questions from our audience,

which you can hear in our podcast and on our website. Now, business as usual. Catherine, Catherine for sight. The Romans were the first to mention the pics. What did they say about them? The first mention comes in a poem praising the emperor and comparing his achievements. to Julius Caesar.

So the first mention is in 297, but it's a sort of retrospective one. And they, we have a number of references to the Picts, sometimes just the name, but they are presented as the sort of iconic enemies of Rome. They are the enemy, and they are presented as bloodthirsty savages who run around without clothing and covered in tattoos.

And so it's a very sort of stereos, type image of this hostile barbarian living in the north. It was the Romans who called them Picta, isn't it, the painted ones? Well, the word on the face of it is a Latin word, meaning painted people. There is a possibility that it could be a native word. There is a Celtic word, Picti, and that's the Pictones are a tribe in Gaul. That's where we get Poitiers and Poitou from. But it is probably more likely that it is just, as it seems, the Roman word.

And this notion that they were painted people or tattooed comes through, again, and again, yeah. We know that Constantine from his base in York, he was just about to become emperor, fought one of these great battles against the Picts. That gives them an authority, doesn't it? I mean, he was a great warrior emperor. Yes.

And he came all that far north, beyond the Antenine War, right about to fight these people the Picts. What do you make of that? Well, I think, yes, they were perceived as a very important enemy, and we have a very different kind of evidence from archaeology. there's a wonderful little dice box that was used for playing games. It comes from the empire, from the frontier near Cologne,

and it's encarved with an inscription that says, the Picts are defeated, play in safety. So within the Roman army, the Picts are an iconic enemy. But the reference to Constantine is interesting because they refer to them as the Caledonians and other Picts. So this kind of suggests that Picts is an umbrella term that's being used loosely to cover a range of tribal groups in the north of Britain at the time. And he saw that an ancestor of the pics, Calgarcas came out with a great phrase Tacitus.

The Romans created a desert and called it peace. Yes, well this is really interesting because in Tacitus time, so Tacitus is writing about Roman military incursions into the north of Scotland in the 80s AD, and this comes to head at this famous battle of Montegraupius, and the leader there is Calgacca. But to Tacitus, he doesn't use the word Pits. This is about six or seven generations before the first use of the word Picks. He calls them Britons, the Britons of Caledonia, and that's very important. But for Tacitus, he has a positive view of the PICs.

They are the kind of noble, heroic savages, untainted by the decadence of civilization. And I think that's really important because there's a shift from this kind of grudging regard for these heroes, the last of the free, as Tacitus calls them. But over the centuries, that hardens because the Picts become distinguished from the Britons to the South. In Tacitus's time, they're all Britons. Alex, can we go on to, can we take that forward, Alex Moore, to the distinction. The Romans are making distinctions between the Picts and other Britons. We're coming to beat in a minute with the four people's of this island, as it were. What were the Romans making any distinction,

saying the picks are like X and the Gauls were like one? And so and so forth. Well, I think, as Catherine was hinting out at the end of what she just said, what happens in the period of Roman occupation is that the Romans, or the Britons within the frontier, gradually become Romans. They become provincial citizens. And the name Britain gets attached to them.

So we need to have some other word to describe the Britons who are not yet conquered. Perhaps because, from very earliest, times, from the time of Caesar's invasion, the stereotyped identity of the Britons was that they were painted. Presumably the civilised ones are no longer painted. So they're saying, we're not the painted Britons. The painted ones are up there north of the wall. And so it's because the Britons become two different groups of people, a Roman provincial nation, who ultimately become the Welsh and so on, and an unconquered group who continue in the trajectory of barbarism. So that wall, that Hadrian's Wall, south of Hadrian's Wall, they became Romanised,

and particularly north of the Antenine Wall, a few hundred or so miles north of that, they stayed the same, developed in their own way. They developed in their own way, which was largely being more conservative, but not completely unchanging. And as you say, that the area between Hadrian's Wall and the Antenine Wall is a kind of grey area. Ultimately, the people south of the Antonine War managed to win the right to be called Britons, but they're clearly from archaeology and so on, they're not nearly as Romanised.

But within Britain itself, even within the province of Britain, the levels of Romanisation varied enormously. And we might imagine, although here it has to be speculation, that for people living in the South East, where there were lots of villas and fully developed towns, perhaps even people in Yorkshire might have been thought of as a bit Pictish. But everyone, because they were less civilised, they were less like the Romans.

Did you associate them with Kent? You mean people compared with the South East? people in Yorkshire were Pictish? Well I think being Pictish in this period is about being less Roman So is it a term of abuse almost? I think it probably is a

pejorative term of the uncivilised and it's a loose generalised term like red skin For example for Native Americans It's not a specific tribal term As Catherine said we have the Caledones and the Vituriones and other Pictish tribes and Maiatai

are still existing and those are the political units in the late Roman world north of the wall. But they're all picti because they all still paint their bodies and they don't go to the Senate house to decide things in the way that the Romano-British people in Silchester or Syracester or St. Albans do. They try to concentrate that in a location quite soon. What's the difficulty of studying the Picts

without any of written records? The difficulty of studying them without written records from the Picts. We know mostly about them from external view. first the Romans, subsequently the Irish and the English from about the time of Bede. One of the problems is knowing when this term seems to become firmer. In the last century or so before the Picts disappear, there's definitely a sense in our Irish and English sources

that there was a Pictish kingdom that there were kings of the Picts. And it stopped being that loose terminology. But we're still always looking at it from outside. We don't know whether even at that late period the people who we call Picts would have used that word themselves, even when they were writing in Latin, they probably did. And that's the likely thing is that they adopt that terminology, perhaps, in the 7th century. When they become Christian and they start engaging with classical material, they may think, oh yes, that's us, we're the Picts. There have been enormously forwarded in Pictish studies

in the last 20 years. And one has been put into, I presume, and most stuff, amazing stuff has been found. Yes, I mean, it's a combination of things. there's been an enormous amount of archaeological work which is still going on and Gordon is one of the leading people digging away. Coming to Gordon in a second. But also I think one of the things that happened began to happen in the 1990s

was that a lot of the textual evidence that does survive was reviewed with a much more critical eye. For a long time this period of Scottish history was still following the sort of template of narrative that had been established in the late medieval early model. modern period by chroniclers like John Fawden or Barber and Bauer and people like that who wrote these big histories of Scotland in the late 14th, 15th century. The sort of people who were the source for Hollinshed, who in turn was the source for Shakespeare.

And I think by and large people accepted that as the basic narrative and simply modified it. But then in the 1990s we began to get people going back and really say, well, let's more or less completely ignore the late material and look at exactly. contemporary material, try and tie it in with new thoughts about ethnicity and the ancient world that have come more generally and so on. So I think this source criticism approach changed things from his style perspective. Gordon O'Me, let's just bring in Bede at this moment. Our father of British history, one of the world's great historians, and he was very clear about it, wasn't it? So let's start Bede about 700,750, what he said about the Picts. Well, Beed's writing in Northumbria,

one of the southern neighbours of the PICs. And he, as you said at the start, has this very famous statement that there's four peoples of Britain and five languages with Latin uniting these people. And then he goes on to have this fantastic account of the origin myth of the PICs,

saying that they come from Scythia, you know, kind of Eastern Europe, central Eurasia. And they sail all the way to Ireland, initially, but Ireland's full up. So the Irish say, you know, why don't you head over to the next island, Britain, and settle there.

But they don't have any wives. So they ask the Irish for wives, and the Irish give them wives. And the Irish say that, you know, if there's ever a doubt in the succession of the Pictish royal line, then you should favour the

maternal line. This is where we get idea that the picks were, had matrilineal succession. Do you give credence to any of that? No. No. Right. So it's a fantastic origin myth. All the peoples have similar myths, you know,

the Scots have similar myths about coming from Scythia as well. But Bede seems very sure of his we have to respect him, although of course we have to qualify him as well. He's very sure of his ground, four people. He's putting him on the same plane as the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons and so on. So they were

important to him then. I'm trying to assess where they were. So we're talking about just after 700 and this is an important group of people. Certainly. You know, certainly by the 8th century we have a very clear evidence that there is a Pictish over the kingship and he

is obviously in this northern kingdom. He has good knowledge of what's going on to the north and he's also aware that in the 7th century there's a period when the Anglo-Saxons and Northumbrians have a over kingship of the picks.

So he's aware of more recent history and obviously that over kingship ends in 685 with the Battle of Nexon smear. So he's very aware of recent history but he also looks back into deeper history as well so he says by tradition the pics come from Scythia and the like so he's trying to look at the earlier origins

of this gens, this people of the pigs. Alex sort of scattered the pics across the island a few minutes ago and had them in Yorkshire had them all. I think we can be a bit more localised. There weren't Picts in Yorkshire. He was Pictish. I'm slightly. Gordon, where were they?

Where were they geographically? Can you just tell our listeners where the Picts, as far as you know, where they were? Well, obviously, you know, it's probably a territory. It changed over time. Atham Nan, who's writing The Life of Colombo, says that Picks occupy the area east

of Drom Island, the ridge of Britain, somewhere east of the highlands of Scotland. So are we talking to Inverness, Aberdeen, up that area? Yeah, Great Glen. Columbus goes up the Great Glen. He meets Pictish King, Brithae, at the head of Loch Ness in that area. B'd talks about them occupying the area north of the fourth,

so north of modern-day Edinburgh. And in the Pictish Kingless, there's this fantastic another origin myth, again, fantastical, talks about Kruthni, the father of the Picts, and he has seven sons. And they have really suspicious names like Feefe for Fife and Kate for Keth Ness.

Basically, it's a claim to territory. So again, it suggests that they're occupying an area from Fife up to Kath Ness, possibly the Northern Isles. So Adavann talks about Brithai being over king of of the Orkneys.

So at times the Northern Isles, possibly the Western Isles, may have been part of that territory. So it's worth, as a generalisation, and you're quite rightly not putting up with generalisations, that's absolutely, but then the far north of Scotland, and yet it seems far away, but yet they still, they have the power to impose themselves on bead, Constantine's got to go and fight them, and then we're going to come to one of the great battles of the early Middle Ages, defining both were up there. Catherine Passaid. Did they become Christianised

because as Gordon said there were five languages, four and then Latin? Certainly very much so. And I'm conscious we're sitting here at the University Chapel and we have these beautiful stained glass windows of Ninnean and Columba, the two saints who in Beads account are presented as the evangelists of the pits.

And as Alex said, many of the sort of historical paradigms that we've been working with up until very recently are shaped by that. narrative of the great men, the heroic missionaries. But in fact, if we look at the contemporary evidence, it's a much more diffuse and multifaceted process. And it seems that the pits are first exposed to Christianity

through their contact with the Roman Empire. We're talking earlier about the hostile contact, but in fact, we can see in the archaeology a lot of interaction between the people to the north of the frontier and the Roman world. And so Christianity spreads north through contacts like that. just as it did to Ireland beyond the imperial frontier. And we have a reference, St. Patrick in the 5th century writes a letter

to the British king Coroticus to complain about his slave raiding in Ireland in company with apostate Picts, implying that they're already Christian Picts who have reneged on their faith. And so we have evidence of Christianity in Pictland from the 5th century onwards. But where does I own a figure in any significant way now. I mean, it's up there on... Iona is very important. Yes. So we have the Celtic...

As well as coming out from South, we have the Celtic influence emanating from Iona. Yes, so we have a strand that's coming up through this sort of British, Romano-British influence, but also coming in from the west in the Gallic world. So Iona off the coast of Mull is at the sort of northern... It's just to the south of Pictland. So Pickland is from Sky, up the West Coast and so on. And so... we have references to Colomba coming and preaching to the tribes of the Tay.

But the sources don't say that he converted them. So it's unclear whether... He has a competition with the local musicians to see who can change the weather. He does, he does, but it doesn't... Yes, and also a run-in with the Loch Ness monster as well. Yes, no, these are great stories. They're retrospective stories, but none of them say that he converted anybody. So it's possible to read these stories.

is that the Picts were already Christian and he's coming and preaching to them. But certainly there's a very, very strong influence coming from the Gallic-speaking West and from Ireland, mediated through INA, but not just Iona, other churches as well. Now we come, thank you very much. Now I think we come to, you tell me,

we come to the great moment in Pictish history and a great moment in British history, the Battle of Nectonsmere in 685, one of the greatest battles in this island of the Middle Ages is when Egfrith, King Northumbria, who was on course to unite almost the whole country, because Northumbria had either conquered other places in the region, or he had got allegiance, or he's got his replacement.

And for some reason or other, he went far north to meet the Picts. And completely unexpectedly, after winning battles for 30 years, he was not only defeated but killed, and so were his top henchmen in Neckensbrier, and that changed everything. Can you say that more elaborately than I did, please, with more scholarships? I'll try.

Yes, I mean, it is one of the defining battles of British history. And what Bede says, who was actually about 12 years old when it happened, is that from that time, the strength and power of the English ebbed away. And 100 years later, the Welsh author of the Historia Britonum, the history of the Britons, chose to end his history at that point because he saw that as the end of history, and as I rather Francis Fukuyama way, that what had seemed in the 6th and 7th centuries

to be the unstoppable spread of the English, as you said. Based in Northumbria. Based in Northumbria, but also on other frontiers as well, the West Saxons heading into the southwest and the Mercians into Wales. It seemed like the whole of Britain was just a matter

of time, but in 685 it stopped. And it seems to be that Edrith had previously invaded Pickland at the beginning of his reign and that coincides with a change of kingship there.

And Pictish King, another not the same one that Gordon was referring to. It was rather confusing. There's a few Pictish names and they get repeated. But this Breitay, who was Edgefith's cousin, may well have actually been put on the throne by Edgwreth. He may have been an exiled prince or one of a number of competitors and was probably initially, for those first 10 years of Edgford's reign, on message as one of his placemen, as I think you used the phrase. but something happens and what seems to be happening is

we see a number of references in the run-up to Necht and smear that Breed is beginning to spread his wings so in 682 we're told that he deleted the Orkneys, whatever that means. Rob them out it means, isn't it? Yes, exactly. Presumably it means it wasn't nice to be an Orchadian at 682.

And similarly, he seems to expand in other frontiers and that seems to worry Edgith. Edgith goes north expecting presumably that Breeday will co-tow, but it doesn't happen at some place, somewhere in the north of Scotland, his arm is wiped out. Sorry, where is Necton's Mare?

Where is Necton's Mare? The name Necton's Mare, the English name that survives, is actually not, doesn't appear until quite late. The Irish Chronicles call the Battle, the Battle of Dunehton, the Fort of Necton, the Lake of Necton. So where is it? Well, there are two places in Scotland that have that name today.

One of them is Dunachen, in Angus and the other is a place For those who don't know those Scottish issues I'm better tell people where Angus is. Angus is the area just north of Dundee It's about halfway between Dundee and Aberdeen but inland a bit

For those people who don't know Scottish geography The other place is a place called Dunachton which is in upper space side Quite close to Aveymore Which people have probably heard of the skiing resort Both have Pictish stones near them Both have lochs near them

Which may be the mere So we can't be certain which, but it's one of those two or certainly. Can I just ask you probably an impossible question? Gordon, you might want to take it over. How come that this relatively small number of people from that, they were known to be very powerful, enough evidence that they were powerful warriors, Constantine had to go in. How come that they took on this man who had never lost the battle in 30 years,

Egbis? Did he take it for granted? When you said he just went with a token troop expecting to walk it, was that what happened? I suspect that is what happened. I suspect he was overconfident. He probably also thought that Breeday was ultimately his friend. He was his cousin. They'd worked together for over a decade.

He probably thought, I've just got to read him the riot act. And I suspect it was hubris, followed by nemesis. Big nemesis, he was killed. Most of his leading nobles were killed. And then what did the Picts do in their moment of victory? Well, this is probably the time when Breeday, who's technically at this stage the King of Fortryue, the northern Pictish kingdom based around the Murray Firth, around Inverness and so on,

expands his power south into the southern Pictish areas, which would probably be more heavily under Northumbrian overlordship. So we're talking here about what you might think of, the central eastern part of Scotland, the areas around the River Tay, Perth, Dundee, maybe Fife and so on. It's probably those areas that get taken over after that, and that's when you have a firm Pictish overlordship stretching, as Gordon said earlier from Fife to Caithness. Gordon, you've been involved in a lot of the recent excavations

over the past few years and bring forward enormous stuff. Can you tell us about those at Port Mahomac? And what came out of that? Just near Inverness up there, what came out of that was surprising and is adding to the richness of your view of the picture. Sure.

Those weren't my excavation. but they were certainly inspirational to what I have been doing. Oh, you're a working arena, aren't you? So this was Professor Martin Carver at University of York working on the site at Port Mahomac. And it's basically the largest ever investigation of a monastic site of the Picks. So it's located on the Tarbert Peninsula,

up in Easter Ross, north of Inverness. Prior to the excavations, there were some aerial photographs taken in the 1980s, showed a... a large enclosure around the church of St. Coleman. And this essentially is the monastic vallum, the ditch that marks the sacred space of an early church. And excavations by Martin and his team from 1994 to 2007 uncovered an amazing wealth of evidence.

So he found a roadway leading up to the church with huge amounts of metalworking, evidence, industrial activities around about this roadway. They were producing metal work for relicaries and other metal work. And huge amounts of sculpture found as well. So there were about 19 pieces of sculpture prior to Martin's excavation. But finding fragments of amazing cross slabs, parts of shrines, corbels and finials from a stone church. So it's showing an incredibly wealthy...

monastic foundation here at Port Mohamed. And then some of the most exciting evidence doesn't sound that exciting. It's bone pegs that they found. And an amazing piece of detective work worked out that these are actually from wooden frameworks to stretch calf skin to make vellum. So they were actually producing books at Port Mohamed. So there was a lot of speculation about, you know, did the pics right? did they have books?

And I think, you know, the excavations Port Mohameda shows very clearly they did. They're perhaps producing illuminated manuscripts there. So fantastic evidence. And just really shows you what archaeology can bring. You know, traditionally there's been very few sites we can associate with the pics, which seems very strange, you know,

despite the fact that, you know, we've got these powerful kingdoms emerging. Actually, there's only, you know, a few dozen sites that we can identify, apart from the sculpture. And there's been very few. large-scale excavations. So Martin's excavations

uncovered this fantastically wealthy settlement, and it seems to have came to an end sometime in the ninth century. It looks like it was perhaps sacked by the Vikings. And so it's a whole new world that's opened up with Bellarm. And I mix you up, because your exhibitions are at Ryan. We're going to come to that

in a few minutes. But a whole new idea of the Picts, instead of these hairy warriors, we have people on a par with something's not unlike Sutton, who, not on that scale yet, we never know. And so that's what's going on. It's more normalising it within the British

experience. What do you say, Catherine? Absolutely, but I think that these stereotypes that were established in the Roman period are remarkably enduring and it's one of the things that draws people to the Picts, but if you just call them sort of arty Christian farmers, it doesn't have the same glamour,

but really that's probably more accurate. And I think the sculpture, Gordon, mentioned that... Yes, can you just give my listeners a view of the sculpture? I've got it's one of the great sort of treasures of the picts and there's some of the finest contributions to European art culture in the period. Stone sculpture. Stone sculpture is what survives.

Monumental, big slabs. Can you just give us what's on them? What's on them? Well, we can maybe talk later about the symbols on the earlier ones. No, it's better just to get it over with now. well people maybe be familiar with Irish high crosses

and interlaced crosses from Northamberia so a similar kind of thing in Pictland but the Picts drew their crosses on slabs which means that there are rectangles in the corners to fill with other decoration and so

these are six seven eight foot tall beautifully decorated with very very intricate at geometric patterns, interlaced patterns. Some of the most complex and virtuoso displays of geometry are on Pictish stones, but also weird... Which monsters in Commer Skeltic, don't we?

Well, but it's part of that same heritage. Well, interlaced is something that comes from the Mediterranean but is absorbed into the art of Britain and Ireland and taken in all kinds of amazing new directions and the Picts are really sort of masters of that. But also there are weird monsters. They have particular fascination. with the hybrid creatures attacking humans,

which are probably sort of quite sophisticated meditations on evil and death and Christian salvation and so on. We also have a lot of depictions of sort of apparently secular scenes, so Pictish men and women, which is very unusual in this period, in contemporary dress and on horseback and so on and so on. And there's a wonderful real, a beautiful salmon I can remember from one of the stones. Yes, well that's... And then great clunking bulls,

looks. Yes, well that's from an earlier period. These are sculptures of the 6th and 7th century, which are incised. And one of the things that, you know, I was sort of joking about the art of Christian farmers and emphasising how similar the pits are to other peoples in Britain and Ireland and in Europe. But one of the things that is unique about them is this system, this graphic system that they invented of symbols which they carve on stones. Can I go across to Alex for that? Can you briefly tell us about the symbols?

There are about three dozen. What are they? And what do you make of them? Well, yeah, as you say, there's about between 30 and 40. Some of them are very naturalistic animal images, like the salmon you mentioned, and the bulls, and there's also wolves and eagles. Many of the others are much more geometric and quite a lot of time is wasted by people like us, speculating on whether they might be an attempt to represent something from a funny angle. But they tend to appear. They have quite a lot of them, and they're repeated.

They are repeated. They're repeated almost always in pairs. And never more than about four usually. Maybe a few sculptures have more than that, but usually it's one or two pairs on each sculpture. The most likely thing is that they're some sort of label, possibly a personal name, although it's not writing in any normal sense.

But they seem to be, they recur across the whole range of Pictland in this same very standardized format with very little variation. So they obviously are a system for communicating ideas and some sort of label and various people, including Catherine,

have tried to decipher them. My own view is that unless we get some sort of Rosetta Stone text, we're not going to ever know exactly. But they're definitely being used to produce labels quite probably names associated with things. Can I go to you, Gordon, again?

Rineanin, you've been doing away at Riney, which is I got it wrong for several years now. What does that bring? You've told us what the Port Maham brought. What does Riney bringing to enrich this Pictish story? Sure. Well, Riney's telling us about the earlier period.

The site dates to the 4th to the 6th century. And it's got this fantastic place name. Riney comes from this early Celtic word, Re for King. So it means a place associated with a great king. So

It's a fantastic clue in an area where we have very few historical documents. These place names are really important. And then the site was also known for eight of these Pictish symbol stones found from the 19th century onwards. It includes one stone still standing in its original place, the cross day, which has a salmon and a Pictish beast on that, so that's paired symbols. And in 1970s, there was the discovery of the Rhineman, who's this fantastic, almost full-length figure with big pointy teeth, and he's carrying this axe over his shoulder,

and that was found just next to the cross stain. And then there was a series of aerial photographs that showed inclusions. Was he the sacrificial axe? Well, yes, I think that's the most likely interpretation. So he's likely to be some sort of pagan god, a symbol of sacral kingship. So our excavations from 2011

targeted the site of these symbol stones. And essentially what we've shown is that the stones stand within a high status settlement of the 4th to the 6th centuries AD. And we've found fantastic artefax amphra that's coming from the eastern Mediterranean, so it picks drinking Mediterranean wine probably. We've got glass coming from Western France, glass and metalwork coming from Anglo-Saxon, England. And also objects, we're finding objects that you see on the stones. So, for example, we've got this little axis.

pin. It's only about five inches high. And it's made out of iron and it shows a little axe with a serpent biting onto it. So it's very much like the axe, the sacrificial axe that the Rhineman holds. So the amazing thing about excavations like Port Mohamed and Rani is that we're finding objects that you can see depicted on the stones and it really illuminates and again enriches our view of the picks. It gives a totally different view of the pigs, doesn't it? Catherine, you wanted to come in.

Well, I was just in terms of the symbols because there's something that is enduringly fascinating, but parallel with runes, it's a kind of response. Yes, it's a response of people beyond the empire to Roman literacy. So another example of, but a reflection of identity as well.

Let's go towards, I think, let's go towards the end of the pick. We're talking about 300 AD till about 980-ish. That'll have to do. That's all right, here? That's all right. Okay. The Vikings have a part to play in the demise, departure.

of the Picts? Well certainly they have a very important role to play in the political changes that happen at the end of the Pictish Kingdom but also to sort of linguistic changes that are happening. On the political front there's a sustained series of military campaigns, major battles, the most important of which happens in 839 when the King of the Pits, his brother and the King of the Gales of Dalryada and Argyle are all killed along with innumerable others. And this precipitates a major cultural, sorry, political upheaval in the kingship of the Picts. But the Vikings are also very important because we have very extensive Viking settlement in Pictland, the Northern Isles, Orkney, Shetland, Kathness, Sutherland, the Western Isles, the Western Coast.

And so that has a major impact on the kingdom and also a kind of knock-on effect by increasingly extensive. extent of Gallic influence from the west into the east in Pictland. And this gallicisation of Pictland is instrumental in understanding the disappearance of the pigs. Gole. I think we can also track these changes through the archaeological record as well. So things like symbol stones and defended settlements really seem to come to the fore in this Pictish period.

So you get promontory forts emerging in the third and four centuries, which match the counts of the emergence of the picks in that same late Roman period. And once we get to the end of the first millennium AD, you can see that many of these forts are being destroyed. So Burghead, for example, is the largest Pictish fort, known in Northern Scotland, and it seems to be sacked by the Vikings, and there's lots of Viking-age material culture

beginning to be found through metal detecting around about that fort, and also in excavations actually within the fort itself. So you can see that some of these, key power centres in the north are being destroyed in this time period. We're talking about the disappearance of the Pigtish language, aren't we?

Alex. Now, there are invasions and invasions. When the Normans came, they try to eliminate English, which they sort of did for 300 years, then it came back. So did the Vikings crush the Pigtish language or did the Pictic language go somewhere else? What happened? Well, I think different things happened to the Pictish language in different

parts of the Pectish Kingdom. Certainly in the Northern Isles, in the most of the Hebrides, and in the far north of the mainland, by the time we get good historical documents in the 12th century, everyone seems to be speaking Norse. So Pictish language has been disappeared under Old Norse. The degree to which that was genocide or cultural mixing is unclear, probably a bit of both in different places. But in the bulk of the Pictish territories, as Catherine said, it's actually Gallic that replaces Pictish. But we're far, less certain about how that happens. And one of the differences in the two areas is that in the

areas where Norse takes over, there are no remains of Pictish place names, no settlements have Pictish names. One or two of the islands probably have old names, but no settlement names, whereas many of the settlement names of Gallic Scotland are inherited through Pictish or from the Pictish times. So, for example, the easiest ones to spot are the ones that begin with the word Abba, which is the old British word for a river mouth, like. you get in Abelisst, with in Wales, but you also get Aberdeen, Aberfeldy, Abernethy, and so on. These names have survived Galicisation, and that suggests there was much, that for part of that period, there was much more interaction, that there was much more continuity between the Pictish

Kingdom and the later Kingdom of Scotland. Probably that explains all of it, but is there another reason why, for almost a neat thousand years, the picture forgotten, from 900 to about 1900? Well, it's a kind of a rebranding in a way, this label of the Picts, which is only an external label. Yeah, but why didn't nobody take any notice of them for a thousand years? Well, they did take notice of them. Who did? Well, already by the 11th century, people like Henry of Huntingdon who've read Bede and said,

oh, well, we're picked. Well, like, where are they? But that's mentioning them. Did they do anything about it? Well, they scratched their heads, thought what's happened to them. And, you know, we have the, from a very similar period, we have this historian-Noegia, the history of Norwegians, which is very archaeological, looks to Orkney,

and says, well, there's all these suitoranes. Oh, this is where the Picts live. We have these wonderful stories about the Picts, you know, coming out by night to build big towers and in the day, hiding in the... So they're sort of wondering about them and speculating, and this is where we get these myths about the Picts as little people, you know, hiding away in their,

in their underground dwellings. You couldn't really, well, maybe I'm happy to be completely wrong because that's part of what I am on this program. But they did seem, there wasn't much going on with the pics was it from about nine.

Am I wrong in that, Gordon? Sorry, by... There wasn't much scholarship about their picks for that thousand years. It wasn't much... They became part of it, and there were little people and all the rest of it,

but was anything really... Yeah, I mean... I'm interested why there wasn't any interest. Well, I think there was some interest, as Catherine says. You know, in the 16th century, for example, etchings of the pics by John White.

And he's depicting the picks as these incredible savages. And he's basically saying to the Elizabethan court, we shouldn't be scared of the Native Americans because in our past we've got even more savage communities. But it's really in the 19th century that this interest in the picks reemerges and people begin to associate things like symbol stones by the 1850s with a Pictish identity.

So it's really the 19th and 20th century that you really get the modern scholarship beginning to emerge on the PICS. Do you have expectation that you will find writings from the book? We've talked about Bellum, that implied. Do you have expectation that you will find written records that you will be able to decode? It's possible.

There are a number of reasons why we don't have it. One, the Pictish territory is much smaller than the other nations. Two, writing in vernacular languages was really only beginning to take off at about the time the pictures were disappearing. and most of the books produced at a place that Port Mahabuk would probably have been in Latin.

We may have some of these books. There's a gospel book in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, a St John's gospel book, which has an image of an eagle on it, which looks exactly like the eagles for the Pictish symbol of things. So that was probably a Latin gospel book made in a Pictish monastery. And maybe if we examined that book and one of two other books like that with image-enhancing technology, we might see little glosses in Pictish of a hard word explained or something.

But I think we're unlikely to find texts in the Pictish language simply because so little survives. What survives from Wales and Ireland was largely stuff that was recopied at a later date because the original texts had worn out. But it's the archaeology, isn't it, Catherine, that's giving us so much information now. Intense, as Gordon has pointed out. Yes, but also, I mean, we've mentioned place name evidence a couple of times.

There's a lot of these... I think one of the things that's very exciting about pictures studies at the moment is interdisciplinarity. So taking together evidence from different sources and putting it together, in the absence of historical information, we can squeeze out more understanding from these different sources.

So archaeology has very important art history, but also other things like saints cults as well, which allow us to reconstruct political alliances and things like that. And so they've emerged, Gordon, finally, they've emerged much stronger than they were thought to be 50 years ago or so. I think so.

I think the interest in the PICs has always been there. but I think the scholarship is really beginning to help illuminate this fantastic period of Scottish history, really, and they are really iconic. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Gordon Noble, Alex Wolfe and Catherine Forsyth, and our student audience here at the University of Glasgow, who are about to ask questions which you can hear later in our podcast and on our website. Next week we'll be discussing Germain de Stahl, the great French woman of letters. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Okay, now, usually at the end of the programme, we do the podcast, which adds to the programme, goes out all over the world, frankly. And I start by asking, what did I miss out? But I'm not doing it this time. You've got a couple of mics. You've got this place for, so can we have questions from you? Anybody like to start?

Put up a hand and a mic will rush to you. Okay, thank you, it was that. fascinating insight into the PICS. What was about it came out to me that a lot of, as well as we learned about the PICS, has really come to the four in the last couple of decades. So I'm wondering from the audience, where do you see the investigation at the PICS going?

Is there a certain direction or certain sites that are possibly going to unlock more about them in the future? If you'd like to answer that, Gordon, can you keep your hands up? then the people with the microphone know who to come to? Gordon, you're like to answer that. Well, I think, obviously, as Kate says, interdisciplinary studies is a massively rich theme, which we need to explore further.

From my perspective, you know, the archaeology is really limitless in terms of what we could do. There's so many other sites that we can investigate, and I think Martin Carver's excavations, Port Mohamed, our work at places like Riney really shows that what an ambitious form of field work

can do in terms of uncovering sites of Pickland. We're working on a project called Northern Picks, and we are continuing to investigate other sites like Burghead. We're working on that now as well. So hopefully there'll be a lot more to come in coming years in terms of the archaeology and also the wider discipline as well. Okay, over there? There are two people at the front here, one you're right.

You over there? My understanding is it used to be thought that Argyle was originally a pick, Terry, and then it was colonised by the gales coming in. But I've kind of read that that's not really accepted as much anymore. Or there's some debate. I just wanted her opinion on it. You're right, there has been some debate. I mean, the traditional view is the one that comes from Beed's origin legend that Gordon told us about earlier

that there's a migration from Ireland in the early 6th century. This has been questioned largely by initially by Ewan Campbell, the Glasgow archaeologist, and it's partly on the basis that unlike Eastern Scots, there's no suggestion of pre-Gallic place names, there's no sort of hints of the earlier culture. I think though this is an area that's still fairly complex because some of Campbell's argument was based on the absence of stereotypically Irish archaeological features,

which in fact some of them emerged a bit later, some of them were never that common in the north of Ireland. I suspect we should probably simply see the narrow seas between Western Scotland and the northeast of Ireland as always being an area where people are going back and forth and going much further back into prehistory, you see connections between these regions. So there was an article in the news that came out recently

about a new stone that was uncovered in Perth and Kenross. And I know it's got a naked man holding a spear on it, and I was hoping you might be able to maybe forecast a little bit about why that find is exciting. and I wonder also if there might be any kind of connection with the man and the stone from your excavations, Gordon. Well, that's one of the exciting things about Pictish studies is that they keep finding new stones.

Almost every year we find a new stone, and the one that you're describing is very interesting because it has on it a figure which is very similar to other examples elsewhere in Pickland, including one at Riney. Gordon described the figure with the axe, who's clothed, but there's also another stone at Riney depicting a naked warrior very similar to this one. And this is interesting because it shows links over a wide area, just as the symbols do, a sort of common cultural area.

So the one that you're describing is also very interesting because he's carrying a spear that has at the bottom of it a boss, a sort of knobbed butt at the bottom. and that is exactly as is described by the Roman writers, Amiens Marcellinus, who describes the Caledonians as having this spear. So it's a nice kind of link back to that Roman period as well. My question for the speakers is about the end of the Pictish period, and the term sort of rebranding was used in the discussions. And so I would like to hear more about what happened around AD 900, when the term pick stops being used.

And what that means if they, you know, was there a disappearance or just a change, etc.? Well, it's a change. Obviously they disappear at some point, but we don't know whether the change of the label is the point at which culture changed. Almost certainly not. The first people who are called kings of alabar, the successor kingdom, or called kings of Scots by the English, are actually the grandchildren of the last people to be called kings of the, children, the sons, are the last people who call kings of the Picts. So Constantine MacEtha, the first person to be called king of the Scots. In English sources, is the son of

Aeth, son of Kenneth Macalpin, the last person to be called king of the Picts. So the dynasty is clearly the same. It's rather puzzling that both in English sources and in Irish sources, the word Pict stops being used. But in Irish sources, one reason for that is that the main chronicles switch from being written in Latin to being written in Gallic. And so since Pict is a word, it may simply, to some extent, be the fact that people are writing in the vernacular and picked has always been a rather learned, external generated name. So it may be that nothing particularly stunning happened around about 900, but there's a long-term cultural trajectory that's in play at that point.

How about that? So if there's not much credence given to the origin myth of coming from Cynthia, along with the Scots, is there any idea of where the picks might have been pre-Briton? You want to talk? Catherine? Well, I think this old notion of the Pictus being

a people who came from somewhere is misleading, because it's not a people, it's an identity. And so in a way, Picts is a sort of ethno-linguistic label, but it's also in a way a chronological label like the Victorians. You wouldn't say, where did the Victorians come from? It's just at a certain

point you start using it, that label. and at a certain point you stop using that label. So the Picts are the Britons, the Northern Britons, and at a certain point it's appropriate to call them Picts, and at a certain point it stops being appropriate to call them Picts. So they were always there, and they're still there in terms of genetics, their descendants are there. And many of the aspects of medieval Scotland,

whether it's parish structure or politics or other things like that, have their roots very deeply in the Pictish period, but they've just been rebranded, as we said. You said genetics, that's interesting. What does that give you, genetic? As a Pictish line, Gordon. Well, we don't really know enough about genetics. There has been some work.

We've been involved in some genetic work, which basically shows that the very few individuals that we've looked at so far are essentially the same genetic signature as you would find in Iron Age, Scotland and Britain. So, as Kate says, it's the same people, but they're adopting a new term for their identity.

So it would be interesting to see what the genetic evidence comes to show in the coming decades, but of course genetics is not the same as identity. I just wanted to go back to something Catherine was saying at the start of the programme about how the Romans gave them the name picks, meaning painted or tattooed. I just wondered why the Romans chose that as a way to define them and also what they signified to the picks themselves.

I think tattooing is interesting it's sort of older studies of the Picts were sort of always wanted to diminish tattoos because in the 1960s and 1970s it was a bit disreputable but now everybody's got a tattoo and so people are much more comfortable with the notion of the picts being tattooed but I think the thing about tattooing along with

going to war in chariots and various other things these are cultural attributes that used to be that lots of barbarians did that but over time, the picks are the ones who are left still doing it. And that's one of the reasons why

this is highlighted. So I'm quite comfortable with the notion of them being tattooed, but it's something that was once a much more widespread practice, but they are the ones who are still doing it because they're less romanized than other people. It's a really simple question, but what do we know about their daily life and the social

social and political structure? Not enough is the short answer. Really there's been so few excavations. We can count the number of animal bone assemblages we have on one hand, for example. But again, it's beginning to get better. So our excavations at Rinean, a place like Port-Mohama, is beginning to put together evidence for the everyday agricultural life cycles that these people were following. But again, we can definitely increase that information through more excavation, more look at comparative material from Ireland and the like. So really, hopefully, again, we're setting the scene for the next few decades of work. But one of the things that I'd just mention is the scenes on the sculpture often depict ordinary picts or elite picts.

And so we know a lot about Pictish hairstyles and Pictish shoes and horse gear. and things like that. So we have a very vivid picture of everyday life from the sculpture which is very appealing. Following the idea of this very, very successful excavation that happened the last few years with Port Mahomac and Raini and also in Iona this year, we think about the southeast area like Angus and Persia.

If there were big excavation to happen in this area now, where would that be for you and what could we expect? Well, there is a major excavation that's just started this summer at Dunkeld at the King's Seat, which is probably the major royal centre of the Caledones, and it's already turned up material that looks like they're doing high-status metal working from the 7th or 8th centuries, going into maybe the 9th century. They only have one season, but they've got money for at least three more, and from straight away, as soon as they opened the earth, they were finding stuff.

So that's going to change everything, because that area, which is the area that Bede says is the center of the southern picks, in the southern side of those same mountains, he says, is clearly a very important area, and there's a lot of stones not too far away in the sort of 15-mile radius around Dunkeld, some of the symbol stones. So that will do something for us. We really need to look at some of the major church sites

where we have sculpture, places like meagel and sub-vigions, but where we've no idea what the buildings and things are like, and we might imagine material like was found at Port Mohameda might be found there. So I would encourage archaeologists to try and find ways of excavating adjacent to places where we have big collections of the Christian stone sculpture. I wanted to ask about the stone sculptures as well. I wanted to ask with the patterns, are they primarily religious artefacts or are the artistic expressions? It's not either or it's both. I mean the production of these is a religious act in and of itself and seeing them.

is a religious act, so that those are not exclusive. Although we should probably emphasize that the symbols are found both on certainly Christian monuments and on some monuments that are early enough to possibly be not Christian. So it's clearly not explicitly pagan or explicitly Christian. There's something different, as Catherine says. There's some cultural identity that isn't directly linked to religion. What relationship did the Picts have with those in the rest of Scotland?

Take that God. Well, I mean, there's shared kingship between Dalrida and Pickland at various points in the 8th century and 9th centuries, for example. We're seeing very clear connections with the artistic motifs found on sculpture and metal work across Western and Eastern Scotland. So clearly you've got important links between the West. and the East throughout the Pictish period. And likewise, now we're increasingly identifying links with Anglo-Saxon, England and beyond with our import material from Mediterranean and Western France and Alexa.

All these areas are open to wide international connections and inspirations, really. Bede tells us that the Pictish Ignaton in the early 8th century wrote to Bede's own monastery asking for architects and stone-based to be set up so he could build a modern style stone church. And that's probably the kind of interaction that there was a lot more of that we just don't hear about. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you very much indeed.

This was an experiment and it's been amazingly painless. And thanks to the three scholars who joined us, Gordon Noble, Catherine Pussheith and Alex All. Thank you to the University of Glasgow and that's it. Hello, I'm Neil McGregor. And I'd like to invite you to listen to my new 30-part series about faith and society. For the whole of human history,

believing and belonging have gone together. And in this series I'm looking at objects and places to see how those shared beliefs have helped to build communities and also to divide them. It's called Living with the Gods, but it's just as much about how we live with each other. You can download the programmes from the Radio 4 website

or on the IPlayer radio app, and there's also a free podcast to which you can subscribe. Search online for Living with the Gods.