The next horse bones from Scotch deposits available for study consisted
of the skulls and limb-bones from Newstead, already referred to.
Several of the horses in the possession of the Roman auxiliaries who
garrisoned the Border Fort in the first century were over 15 hands, and
had the face bent downwards on the cranium as in Kirghiz horses,—in one
case the deflection is so great that the hard palate forms an angle of
nearly 20’ with the cranium (in the forest horse the face is in a line
with the cranium). In one of the bent skulls the molars have as short
pillars as in _E. stenonis_ (fig. 21) of the Italian Pliocene.[F18]
Two of the Newstead skulls belong to ponies about 12 hands high, one
to a pony, Arab-like in make, with metacarpals measuring 214 mm. by
28·8 mm.—_i.e._, to a fine-boned pony about 13 hands at the withers.
The skull and teeth of the 12-hands ponies indicate that one was about
two-thirds “forest,” the other two-thirds “Celtic”; the teeth as well
as the skull and cannon-bones of the 13-hands pony indicate that it
was nearly a pure member of the Celtic or Libyan race. According to
Dio Cassius, the Caledonians “went to war on chariots as their horses
were small and fleet.” The two 12-hands Newstead ponies were probable
members of the race which the Caledonians, Mætæ, and other tribes
of northern Britain yoked to their war chariots. It is conceivable
that soon after the Roman period ponies were taken from the mainland
of Scotland to both the Western and Northern Islands. That ponies,
resembling in make and size the small Newstead horses, reached Shetland
some centuries before the northern islands fell into the hands of
the Norsemen, is suggested by a broken pelvic bone belonging to a
pony between 11 and 12 hands, found in 1911 at the Jarlshoff broch,
Sumburgh, by Mr Charles M. Douglas. During the autumn of 1912, by
permission of Mrs Bruce of Sumburgh, and with the help of Mr Bennet
Clark, I examined a number of old hearths at Jarlshoff, probably formed
about the same time as the deposit in which Mr Douglas found the
broken pelvic bone.
[F18] Until the Newstead skulls were found it was believed horses with
short-pillared teeth became extinct thousands of years ago.
The bones of the Celtic shorthorn and of turbary sheep, the presence
of hammer-stones, pieces of pottery and scrapers, of limpet and other
shells, together with the bones and implements collected during the
excavations by the late Mr John Bruce of Sumburgh, support Mr Douglas’s
view that horses reached Shetland some centuries before the turbulent
Norse jarls, harassed by Harold Fairhair, began to settle in the
Northern and Western Islands of Scotland.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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