Stuart Piggott - The Prehistoric Peoples of Scotland

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
ARCHAEOLOGY

Volume 45

THE PREHISTORIC PEOPLES
OF SCOTLAND

First published in 1962

This edition first published in 2015

by Routledge

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1962 Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited

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ISBN: 978-1-138-79971-4 (Set)

eISBN: 978-1-315-75194-8 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-138-81489-9 (Volume 45)

eISBN: 978-1-315-74714-9 (Volume 45)

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THE PREHISTORIC
PEOPLES
OF SCOTLAND

edited by

STUART PIGGOTT

Contents

Illustrations

PLATES

FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

by the Ministry of Works.

T HE chapters constituting this volume originated as a series of lectures given to the Scottish Summer School in Archaeology at its Edinburgh meeting in 1955. On the death of the Schools organizer, Dr. F. T. Wainwright, I have taken over the editing of this volume, and while of necessity the long interval between the original construction of the contributions, and their appearance in print, has led to changed viewpoints and an accession of new material, so far as possible the necessary adjustments have been made.

STUART PIGGOTT

I T is a sobering thought, and one conducive to a proper sense of historical perspective, that before the first savages set foot upon the soil of Scotland the first urban, and in that sense civilized, community had been flourishing at Jericho for more than a thousand years.

The evidence for the earliest colonization of Scotland by man has been exhaustively examined by Lacaille,1 whose conclusions accordingly need only a brief discussion here. In common with other workers, he distinguishes four main groups of pre-neolithic communities, each identified by its own characteristic stone and flint industry, and each referable to some part of the later stages of the Post-Glacial period. In terms of climatic and vegetational history, these mesolithic communities of hunter-fishers belong to the final stages of the Boreal and to the ensuing Atlantic phase; or in terms of the absolute chronology now being established, even if still only in skeletal form, by radio-carbon determinations, to the period from about 5500 B.C. to 3000 B.C.

The principal evidence upon which these signs of early occupation have been dated is their relationship to the raised beach deposits laid down around the coasts of Scotland at a time when the mean sea-level stood some twenty-five to thirty feet higher than it does today, and the present littoral was consequently submerged. This submergence appears to have begun about the time of the Boreal-Atlantic transition, around 5000 B.C., and to have reached its maximum during the fourth millennium. Thereafter the sea-level gradually dropped, and it is likely that the shorelines were still receding seawards when the first neolithic colonists arrived during the third millennium B.C.1

The earliest mesolithic community hitherto identified is that represented by the Early Larnian flint assemblage recovered from the Post-Glacial raised beach on both sides of the North Channel. The incorporation of these worked flints in the beach deposits shows that they must be the remains of littoral settlements which flourished at an early stage of the coastal submergence and were subsequently overwhelmed by the rising sea. The original deposition of this material can thus be dated not much earlier than the end of the sixth millennium B.C.

The Larnian flint industry is characterized by the predominance of flakes and blades, and by the marked absence of microlithic elements. Generically at least it resembles the final stages of the Creswellian industry of the British Upper Palaeolithic; and it has in consequence been supposed to represent the results of a north-westerly migration of palaeolithic hunters, in Late Glacial or Early Post-Glacial times, from their former habitats in northern England, and their subsequent adoption of a strand-looping existence on the shores of the North Channel and the Clyde and Solway Firths.

By contrast, the microlithic industries differ very markedly from the Larnian both in distribution and in content. They occur notably in the valleys of the Clyde and Tweed (between which the Biggar Gap provided an easy route across the intervening watershed) and on Deeside in the neighbourhood of Banchory.2 All the known material consists of surface finds, and no deposit has so far been discovered which can be securely dated by pollen analysis or other means. The resemblance between the Scottish material, however, and the microlithic industries of northern England3 suggests that both are of much the same date. The Scottish sites, therefore, should represent settlement of the main river basins of the east and south of the country in Atlantic times (that is, during the fifth and fourth millennia B.C.), presumably by wandering bands of hunters moving gradually northwards up the eastern coastal plain of Durham and Northumberland to the Tweed, and spreading thence westwards to the Clyde by way of the Biggar Gap.