Scotland in Pagan Times; The Iron AgeAnderson, Joseph
History
Scotland in Pagan Times; The Iron Age
Anderson, Joseph
Scotland -- Antiquities
millstones or querns, mortars, pestles, pounders and hammer-stones,
whetstones and point-sharpeners, bowls, cups with and without handles,
lamps, and culinary vessels of various kinds, net-weights, sinkers, and
spindle-whorls. They made pottery, plain and ornamented of various,
kinds, chiefly round-bottomed globular vessels with bulging sides and
everted rims. The women practised the arts of spinning and weaving, and
probably also made the pottery and ground the grain, while the men made
the weapons and tools of metal, and the ornaments and implements of bone
and stone, did the hunting and fishing, and the warfare when needful,
and erected the great structures which made the industrious quietude of
domestic life possible to them.
That the people thus occupying these peculiar strongholds were the
people of the soil, and not strangers effecting a lodgement in a hostile
territory, is obviously suggested both by the character and relations of
the typical structure, and by the character and relations of the relics
of their domestic life. It has been demonstrated in the previous Lecture
that while the typical structure, taken in the totality of its
characteristics, stands absolutely alone and quite apart from all other
types of construction, ancient or modern, its essential features are
those which are characteristic of early Celtic constructions. It is
circular, it is dry-built, its doorways have inclined instead of
perpendicular sides, the roofs of its chambers are formed of beehive
vaulting of overlapping stones, and its galleries are comparable to a
series of earth-houses placed one over the other. It has now been shown
that the relics of the life of the occupants of the Brochs constitute a
group of objects differing widely from those which characterise the
Scandinavian occupancy of the north and west of Scotland. No group of
objects in its general _facies_, entirely comparable to the group which
is characteristic of the Brochs, exists on the continent of Europe or
anywhere out of Scotland. But when the typical forms of the Broch group
of relics are compared with those of other groups existing in Scotland,
it becomes at once apparent that they are forms which are characteristic
of the Celtic area and of post-Roman times. This unique series of
objects from a unique type of structure illustrates a peculiar phase of
the early Celtic or Iron Age culture and civilisation of our country
which until recently was absolutely unknown. And as we find the
investigation on which we have embarked continuously disclosing series
after series of similarly unique types, it becomes increasingly apparent
that its final result can be nothing less than the establishment of the
fact that Scotland has an archæology—in other words, that the unwritten
story of her early systems of culture and civilisation is dispersed
among the _disjecta membra_ of her scattered remains, and is only to be
disclosed by the systematic collection and study of all existing
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