'Twas the Scots Who Built This Country

[livius drusus]

England, that is. An iron age chariot, strontium and hundreds of cattle skulls (http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1434066,00.html) tell us so.

The slender man, who was in his 30s or 40s, 5ft 9in tall with excellent teeth, was initially thought to be a local warrior, and the cattle remains traces of a ceremony to mark his burial.

"But high strontium in his bones shows that he was not from Yorkshire, but almost certainly from the Scottish highlands," said Ms Boyle. "And the cattle remains date from the first century AD when the Romans were establishing themselves here.

"The evidence suggests that the site of the burial may have been venerated for all those years after his death - and then became a place for the tribes to rally and perhaps remember a great national leader of the past."

[LadyShea]

Oh cool! Sounds like quite a find!

Ms Boyle said that the delicate iron wheels, jewellery and bones were in "an unparalleled state of preservation" and more discoveries could be expected.

[livius drusus]

I love how there's evidence of huge feasts there. My mom always made up clean up after a picnic.

[Crumb]

Yeah but someone shows up for you and carries away the garbage. These guys probably threw their feast remains into a hole or somesuch, leaving it for us to find. :wink:

[Dingfod]

Or it could be they did like the Anasazis did, bury their dead in their trashpiles most likely because that's where the easiest digging was.

[godfry n. glad]

Ahem...<niggle on>

If the human remains date to a couple of centuries before the feast remains, as I understand it, that would put it a couple hundred years before the turn of the millennium...before the Common Era. In that case, neither our hero, nor the feasters who celebrated later, would have been "Scots". As I understand it, the people who became known as the Scots colonized the area now known as Scotland during the third through the fifth centuries of the Common Era (200 - 499 CE)...after our newly found hero was interred; long after, by several hundreds of years. When the Scots, raiding and settling from what is now northern Ireland (Ulster), arrived, they met the folks then populating Hibernia, or Caledonia (probably neither, but what is now highland Scotland), and probably initially engaged in conflict, but eventually, after establishing permanent settlements amongst them, intermarried with the indigenous Picts.

I'd bet the buried leader was more likely a Pict than a Scot. <niggle off>

[Ensign Steve]

"But high strontium in his bones shows that he was not from Yorkshire, but almost certainly from the Scottish highlands,"

What is strontium? A brand of whiskey?

:drunk3:

[Darren]

Ahem...<niggle on>

If the human remains date to a couple of centuries before the feast remains, as I understand it, that would put it a couple hundred years before the turn of the millennium...before the Common Era. In that case, neither our hero, nor the feasters who celebrated later, would have been "Scots". As I understand it, the people who became known as the Scots colonized the area now known as Scotland during the third through the fifth centuries of the Common Era (200 - 499 CE)...after our newly found hero was interred; long after, by several hundreds of years. When the Scots, raiding and settling from what is now northern Ireland (Ulster), arrived, they met the folks then populating Hibernia, or Caledonia (probably neither, but what is now highland Scotland), and probably initially engaged in conflict, but eventually, after establishing permanent settlements amongst them, intermarried with the indigenous Picts.

I'd bet the buried leader was more likely a Pict than a Scot. <niggle off>

The niggle can be taken further than that. In the 1st century AD there was no England, Scotland or Wales. There was Alba, and it wasn't a unified country in any sense. The distinction between the people we call Britons and those we call Picts in all liklihood arose from the later romanization of tribes south of the Antonine wall (roughly running from where Glasgow is now accross the central belt to the Firth of Forth outside Edinburgh). From this romanization there arose the client kingdoms of Strathclyde, Gododdin and Rhegedd - South of the Antonine and North of the Hadrian wall. These romanized brythonic people were Britons while those North of the wall and outside the direct influence of that Empire became known as Picts - possibly from Roman legionary slang referring to a practice of warpainting. Very little is known of the Pictish language - place-name evidence shows that it was almost certainly a P-celtic or Brythonic language closely related to Old Welsh (the language of the romanized britons) and thus to modern Welsh and Breton. The Goidelic (or Q-celtic speaking) peoples came over from Ireland (Hibernia) to parts of what is now Scotland during the period you refer to above - this involved the settlement of the Western islands and the region now known as Argyll as part of the kingdom of Dalriada (which spanned the Irish Sea), as well as the settlement of Galloway, about which little is known beyond place-name evidence. The settlement of the entire highland region and parts of the lowlands by these people occurred progressively up until about the 12th century AD, by which time the Picts had disappeared from the map as a culturally distinct people.
The word Scot derives from the name of the Goidelic speaking tribes originally inhabiting what is now Northern Ireland, while the modern Gaelic word (from Goidelic) for Scotland is Alba, and the word for Scot is Albannach.
Scotland as a kingdom and country is generally reckoned to date from 1018, clearly demarcating it in opposition to the Kindom of England (around a century older) very roughly along the lines of the Roman Hadrian's wall.
At no time was Scotland peopled entirely by Scots in the narrow sense of that word. In the beginning (1018) there were Scots (Gaels if you like) in the North-West, Picts in the North-East, Britons in the South-West and Angles in the South-East, although the dominant culture of the time was indeed Scots (Gaelic), Gaelic being the language of the royal court, which gradually ceded to the Anglian influence over much of Scotland after the massive influx of refugees escaping the Norman conquest of England later in the 11th century. Since then there have been strong Norman, Norse, French, Flemish, Chinese, Pakistani and Indian cultural influxes which have vastly altered the networks of cultural links defining Scotland as a 'place' in the world to the degree that it can be hardly considered to be the same 'place' as the original kingdom.

The cultural map of what are now Scotland and England has never ceased changing. I think it's a mistake to 'back-date' our assumptions about the cutural networks from the present time to past ages when such networks would have been quite different.

[livius drusus]

Excellent niggles, godfry and Darren. Thank you kindly for the thumbnail histories. My knowledge of the period is somewhat sketchy, so your posts were very informative indeed.

I think it's a mistake to 'back-date' our assumptions about the cutural networks from the present time to past ages when such networks would have been quite different.

Generally speaking I agree, although I do make allowances for using the occasional discovery to needle current cultural dynamics. That's what I think such articles are really about: not so much projecting our current culture onto a past which would find it entirely foreign, but applying present-day prejudices and assumptions to get a little dig in at the people who hold them with a certain fervor.

[Godless Dave]

I saw the thread title and thought you were talking about the US or Canada, in which case I was going to say "Damn fucking straight!"

[godfry n. glad]

I saw the thread title and thought you were talking about the US or Canada, in which case I was going to say "Damn fucking straight!"

Nah, GD, that's just too modest. This book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609809997/qid=1111081516/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-8917754-2703862) makes the appropriate claim on behalf of the Scots.

[The Lone Ranger]

What is strontium? A brand of whiskey?


Strontium (Sr) is element number 38. In its pure state, it's a soft, silvery metal that's so reactive it will burn in air and react violently with water.

Chemically, it's very similar to calcium, so if there's much strontium in the soil, it'll wind up in your food, and then in your bones. So, someone with unusual amounts of strontium in his or her bones presumably came from a place where there was lots of strontium in the soil.

As it happens, the Highlands of Scotland have quite strontium-rich soils. In fact, the name "strontium" comes from the Scottish village of Strontian, where the ore was first found.

Cheers,

Michael