Pod Insights The Ancients The Picts: Rulers of the North About this episode Tristan Hughes journeys up to windswept Scotland to uncover the secrets of the Picts — fierce warriors, skilled artisans, enemies of Rome and rulers of the North.
In this special episode of The Ancients - recorded on site at East Lomond hill fort and National Museums Scotland - Tristan is joined by Professor Gordon Noble and Dr. Martin Goldberg explores how the Picts lived, fought, and thrived in Britain’s wildlands. From mysterious symbol stones and silver hoards to rare warrior artefacts, discover how archaeology is rewriting the story of Scotland's most famous warrior people.
Tristan's new TV documentary 'Enemies of Rome: In Search of the Picts' is out now on History Hit. To watch, sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.
Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited and produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds
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0:00 Tristan Hughes? Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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1:09 Speaker 03 I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing, and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one. And I'm Carter Roy, and this is What the Fact? Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.
1:38 Tristan Hughes? Hello, everyone. Just a quick message from me before we get into the episode. Thank you once again to everyone who came to our live show a couple of weeks back. And you can now listen to the audio from that event all about ancient Carthage with Dr. Eve McDonald. You can listen to it now if you are a subscriber of The Ancients, because we have just released it as a special bonus episode for our subscribers. If you're interested in that and would like to become a subscriber, there is a link to press in the show notes. Now, on with the episode.
2:18 Tristan Hughes? What you can hear around me now is the sound of discovery. I am in the far north of the British Isles at East Lomond Hill, the site of an ancient hillfort, filming for a new history hit documentary. Once a bustling high ver-iron age settlement and activity, East Lomond Hill has lain dormant for thousands of years. That is, until now. Since 2017, this hillfort has been the subject of several archaeological digs, like the one I'm visiting today. Their aim is to uncover traces of a people woven into the legends and stories of ancient Britain, a people famed for their hardiness and fearsome brutality, but also their sophisticated artistry, their cymbal stones and silver working.
3:02 Tristan Hughes? They are the Picts, the Scourge of Rome and rulers of the North. But who were they really? How much can we know of them? And what was everyday life like for one of Britain's fiercest peoples? Join me in this special episode of The Ancients as we embark on a northern odyssey to discover just how the Picts survived in Britain's ancient wildlands.
3:29 Tristan Hughes? The Picts were an ancient people who inhabited what is now north-east Scotland, north of the Forth River, during the late Roman and early medieval periods. But deciphering who they were and where they came from is a fiendish exercise. Very little that the Picts wrote down about themselves has survived the rigors of time. This means we have to rely on what the Romans and other British peoples said of them. The land that became Scotland, that the Romans invaded in the first and second centuries, was split into a colourful patchwork of tribes, from the Caledonian and Vacumargi, living in the rugged highlands, to the Venicones, based just north of the Antonine Wall and the Firth of Forth.
4:14 Tristan Hughes? Gradually, however, these disparate peoples were forced by the Roman threat to unite into larger, more centralised polities. Only by coming together could they hope to face up to the marauding legions raiding their southern flank. And so it was that the Picts emerged out of this melting pot in the 3rd century AD as a new culture to oppose an empire on their doorstep. The word 'pict' was first used by a Roman author writing in the year 297 to describe these northern tribes. It derives from the Latin word 'picti', which meant 'painted ones', perhaps referring to a practice of tattooing or body painting.
4:54 Tristan Hughes? Indeed, several Roman sources, including letters written by Julius Caesar himself, describe ancient Britons as half-naked and covered in frightful, snaking blue patterns. Now, I must point out that it is quite debated now whether the ancient Britons, including the Picts, dyed themselves with woad. And there is another possibility, that the Picts more regularly painted themselves a striking reddish colour. Red paint was easily made from iron ore or hematite, and we do also have a mention from the later Gothic historian Jordanes that the Picts wore iron-red paint. But that debate is for another day.
5:35 Tristan Hughes? For some 600 years, roughly between 300 and 900 AD, Roman and British writers alike used the word 'picti' as an ethnic term to describe a people who inhabited what came to be known as Pictland, a region that at its height stretched from Fife in the south, up past the Moray Firth to Caithness on the north-eastern tip of mainland Britain, and may have even encompassed the northern and western Isles. As the descendants of many of Scotland's Iron Age tribes, the Picts were left with a rich landscape in which they chose to settle and build their homes. In this period, Iron Age hillforts were reused and forts also built anew to provide a handy
6:18 Tristan Hughes? refuge from raids, and in some cases, these became important centres of power. To find out how life unfolded in these hillforts, and how important they were to maintaining power in the heartlands of pictish Scotland, I travelled to Falkland Hill, also known as East Lomond, the site of an Iron Age hillfort that was inhabited continuously between the 3rd and 7th centuries AD. Standing here, near the summit of East Lomond, just north of Edinburgh, it's easy to see why this place was an attraction. ...to fortify. You can literally see for miles with fields and fields stretching out below me. I can see the fourth estuary to my south, the beginning of the Highlands
7:01 Tristan Hughes? to my north. It is quite the sight. But this exposed hilltop also means it is very windy. The wind sweeps across the hills and I'm having to make sure I've got a strong foothold as I do this. You can imagine these hardy Picts warriors standing strong against the gusts and looking out across the vast countryside on alert for danger or for approaching traders with their goods from other places in the British Isles, maybe even from beyond Britain's shores. Any hostile forces, Roman or otherwise, who aim to besiege this place would have had little chance of approaching with any kind of surprise. Meanwhile, from the ground, the hill is visible for miles around. Any fort built atop its summit, therefore, was a significant symbol of strength.
7:45 Tristan Hughes? Fife, the region in which East Lomond is situated, was of great strategic value. It is essentially an eighty-five-mile-long peninsula that juts out into the North Sea, flanked to its north and south by the Forth and Tay waterways, vital arteries of trade into the very heart of the country. Dominance of Fife meant dominance of these rivers and granted its ruler significant status as regional power brokers. Even though it's the height of summer, you can tell we're up against the North Sea because the wind is still biting. But this hillfort and the area surrounding it meant more to its Picts inhabitants than mere strategy. First and foremost, it was home, and it's played host to a huge
8:26 Tristan Hughes? variety of everyday life activities. Since 2014, archaeologists have been delving into the soil around East Lomond in search of objects and artefacts that might shed light on how the Picts lived. So time for me to climb down from this hill and talk to the head of the Northern Picts Research Project, Professor Gordon Noble, to find out what exactly has been unearthed.
8:49 Tristan Hughes? Gordon, why did the Picts like hillforts so much?
8:52 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, that's one question that we're trying to really establish an answer for. Certainly in our early sources for the Picts, hillforts do appear as reference places, which is very, very unusual and rare for this time period because we have so few actual places documented in our historical sources. So the classic view of the Picts has been that hillforts are really central to power then governance. And I think that's probably true, but always a big challenge has been finding other types of settlement. So in the lowlands, there must be, you know, everyday farmsteads of the Picts, but for whatever reason, they haven't survived well. So that's why we often go to hillforts is because it's one of the areas in which
9:37 Speaker 04 the everyday life of the Picts can be attested through archaeological evidence.
9:42 Tristan Hughes? And what would the hillfort at East Lowndes, what would it have looked like 1700 years ago?
9:48 Speaker 04 Again, that's just really what we're trying to hopefully establish over the coming years. It certainly develops through time. So we've got a large settlement there in that late Roman period, third and fourth centuries, and probably enclosed within a lower wall, an annex wall. And we think that the hillfort itself would have been occupied in some way, but we just don't know how complex that would have been until we start excavating on the hillfort itself. But certainly by the seventh century, we've got evidence for, you know, really extensive settlement, lots of different houses and structures within the annex wall there. And that's really exciting because again, because we have so little evidence for the everyday life of the Picts and what their buildings look like, what their architecture was like.
10:33 Speaker 04 Then to have a site like this where you have, you know, deep stratigraphy with structures and buildings represented through four or five centuries of that hillfort's life, then that's an amazing evidence base to work on.
10:47 Tristan Hughes? Would the hillfort have looked terraced with layers of houses and ramparts stepping down the hillside?
10:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, certainly at one stage it would undoubtedly have looked like that, but probably developing over time. So that style of hillfort is called a nuclear hillfort with all these different enclosures springing off the central focus of the hillfort itself. That's a fairly classic early medieval form, so you get major power centres like Dunad or Dundurn, and these are sites mentioned in our sources that look like that. And East Lomond, certainly at one stage in its life, probably, you know, 7th century, at least it would have been that really complex hillfort style. But again, we're not sure just how that develops through time, so that's what we're hoping to establish over the coming years is, you know, how complex a hillfort was this in the late Roman period?
11:37 Speaker 04 Was it actually a hillfort or was it an open settlement that later developed into a complex hillfort like that? And through tracking that kind of development, we can say a lot about how society is developing through time, how complex the hierarchy might have been within the settlement, and, you know, it's long distance and local connections through material culture and the like.
12:00 Tristan Hughes? And do we know anything about Picts lifestyle? Were they pastoral, rearing livestock? Were they agricultural? How did they live off the land?
12:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, we're starting to build more and more evidence about that. So again, with the traditional lack of settlements, it's been really difficult to even say the basic things about society. But with East Lomond and some of our other digs like Burghead up on the Murray coast, we're able to really tell us a lot more about the economy and society. So yeah, they were agriculturists and economy very much based on arable agriculture and animal economy, so they have cattle, pig, sheep as their kind of main dominant species, but they're also certainly at some of the elite sites, they're hunting and they're fishing. So we're gradually building up a view of the Picts economy.
12:51 Speaker 04 And also in terms of, you know, their everyday life, we've got things like... Turning up at East Lomond and other sites, so they're playing board games within their houses at these sites. We've got agricultural tools emerging. We've also got, you know, weapons of war as well. So we can see the kind of warrior elements of society and how that underpinned some of these elite centres in this late Roman and post-Roman context.
13:18 Tristan Hughes? So you mentioned some of the archaeological discoveries from East Lomond. What are some of your favourites? I mean, those gaming pieces sound fascinating.
13:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, oh God, it's like asking what your favourite child is when you've got lots of them like me.
13:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, I don't know, it's hard to say what my favourite find would be. I love our diggers finding objects. But what's important to me is understanding the context of those objects, you know, are they coming from a house or are they coming from a external midden? And that's for me is when objects get really exciting is when we can piece them together with the kind of evolution of that site through time. And begin to understand, you know, how these objects fit within the everyday context of, you know, a house or a structure or the like. So I think the range of evidence we're getting at East Lomond is really quite exceptional. There's not many hill forts with this, you know, well preserved of evidence.
14:15 Speaker 04 As we're getting at East Lomond, you know, getting complete spearheads or complete agricultural tools is really, really exciting and just shows you that this was, you know, quite a wealthy community. There's lots of material culture kicking around in the settlement, the fact that they could lose some of these things and, you know, not care too much or that sounds terrible, but you know, I mean, it just, there's so much material culture going around that they leave some of the stuff behind for us archaeologists to find, you know, 1500 years later.
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15:30 Speaker 05 Are you looking for the perfect podcasts to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?
15:36 Speaker 06 Well, look no further than the award-winning After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds, and the Paranormal, with me, Maddie Pelling.
15:43 Speaker 05 And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.
15:48 Speaker 06 From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore, feel transported back in time on After Dark, out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
16:00 Speaker 05 And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.
16:08 Speaker 03 I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing, and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one. And I'm Carter Roy, and this is What the Fact? Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it, the history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.
16:46 Tristan Hughes? So here in Fife, we are close to the upper limits of Roman settlement in Scotland. We're not too far away from the Antonine Wall line and the Gasbridge, places like Ardoch Romanford. Is there any hint of diplomatic relations between the Picts and the Romans here?
17:02 Speaker 04 Oh, definitely some sort of relationship there. Also, the real kind of heart of the chronology really kicks off in the third century. And by that time, the Roman frontier would have been back at Hadrian's Wall. But we do have hints of maybe first or second century finds that could have been created into those later phases. But certainly from that late Roman period, we've got things like Neen Valley ware, Oxfordshire ware. These are pottery types that have been made in Roman Britain. So there's some sort of connection there, whether those are gifts in terms of fine tableware and foodstuffs. Or this is stuff that the Picts and their predecessors are gaining through raiding
17:45 Speaker 04 or other less positive relations, I guess, with the Romans. But certainly it's really interesting that this site is really starting to take off in that third and fourth century context. And it's a bit like Tappanoff up in Aberdeenshire that we've worked on before, where we've got these very large hillforts just emerging in that kind of mid to later third century context, when that Roman military influence is lesser, I think, in these parts of northern Britain.
18:14 Tristan Hughes? So we've got the River Tay to our north and the River Forth to our south. Given how important rivers were as nodes of trade back then, do we see Roman pottery and amphora being brought into Pixland via these routes?
18:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. So in that late Roman period, you've got the Oxfordshire wares and Neen Valley wares. So they may well be coming in through sea connections or other means. But I think what's particularly interesting in that respect is the kind of post-Roman evidence. So we've got late Roman amphora, we've got a couple of sherds that we need. To get specialists to look at, but we think they're fairly convincing and that's amphora vessels, big storage vessels that are coming from the Eastern Mediterranean in the late fifth century or early sixth century. And they're coming up the Irish sea ways and they're found at really high status sites and normally royal sites where we have documentary evidence in places like Ireland.
19:11 Speaker 04 And so that's really exciting because there's, you know, literally a handful of sites in Scotland that has that material. And then kind of late sixth, early seventh century, you've got Eware coming from Western France. Those are vessels for things like exotic foodstuffs or dyes or other goods that are again coming up that Western sea ways. And there's about 20 odd sites in Scotland that's got that material. But again, they're really significant sites. So it really puts East Lomond in that bracket of the kind of upper status sites of the time period. So the pics are famous for their symbols carved onto stones. It begs the question, have there been any stones discovered at East Lomond with pictish patterns on them?
19:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. So there's a number of older finds from East Lomond and roundabout. So there's a carving of a bull from the fort itself that was found in an earlier time period. And that's of the kind of pictish tradition. We find bulls carved at other major power centres like Burghhead up in Murray. So that's really exciting. That's in the National Museum now. And then just down towards Falkland, the village down below East Lomond, there's two Class One pictish symbol stones were found, again, in a later context, built into a barn. And those suggest that, again, there might have been a lowland focus in this landscape
20:38 Speaker 04 that, you know, tallied with the power centre on the hill itself. And then just from this year, we got an amazing tiny little stone object that appears to be a little face, it's got eyes and a little, almost like Bart Simpson style haircut. So we need to get that looked at, but it's kind of similar to how they depict certain people within things like illuminated manuscripts in the early medieval period. So that's super exciting. I don't really have any parallels for that stone object. So yeah, it'd be really exciting to see what else shows up in the coming years.
21:15 Tristan Hughes? Now, one of the most fascinating finds made in East Lomond is of a rare bronze spearbutt, uncovered by a volunteer archaeologist last year. Experts identified it as a spearbutt from depictions on Picts carved stones, including one at Cullessy, a few miles down the road from the East Lomond dig site. These carvings suggest that the spearbutt may have been used in close combat. Imagine a dull bronze doorknob about the size of your palm, that has a slight green tinge to it due to oxidation on the metal. One end is flat and rounded at the edges like a mushroom. It then narrows severely into a tube that can be attached to the end of a wooden shaft.
22:00 Tristan Hughes? I sat down once again with Gordon Noble to find out what this spearbutt tells us about how the Picts waged war. Gordon, firstly, what is this spearbutt?
22:10 Speaker 04 So it's basically just the base of the spear. So you've got the spearhead at the top, you've got the shaft, and then sometimes they have just little metal spikes, so you can spike that into ground. Or in this case, this is, looks, it's called a really romantic name. It's a doorknob spearbutt, and it literally looks like, you know, an old fashioned Victorian door handle. But it's really cool because the Romans talk about the Caledonae, who are predecessors of the Picts, having a spearbutt that looked like a globe, so a kind of circular shape, that rattled when they were in battle. So almost kind of psychological warfare. And you also see these depicted on Picts warrior carvings.
22:54 Speaker 04 So there's one at Cullessy, which is only seven miles from East Lomond. There's one at Rhiney, which we think is this early Picts royal centre, and one at Tullet, which was found recently. And so you see warriors carrying these spears with the same spear, spearbutt there. And we found across northern Britain, there's, you know, moulds, and there's literally, I think, you know, two or three of these actual objects known. And so for one to come up, Beeslament is, you know, super exciting. So that just came from near a hearth, from one of the upper phases of settlement that we excavated last year. So it's great to get in context. We'll be able to already carbon date the settlement
23:37 Speaker 04 layers. And we've actually got what looks like the remains of the spear shaft, actually partly preserved within the object itself. And that's a fruit wood. That's kind of what you would use to make a spear shaft today. So we could probably directly date that as well. So that'd be fantastic to say, you know, when were these spear types in use? And that can help us date the sculpture that shows these spears as well. So yeah, it was a super exciting find in terms of, you know, like if we create the checklist of things we'd like to find on this kind of site, that was definitely one of them.
24:10 Tristan Hughes? And you said there that it's one of the only ones we have, and how it can help us date all sorts of other objects. Does that add to the significance of this find?
24:21 Speaker 04 It does. Again, it's, you know, it's fantastic to have context in regards to the object. So we know it's coming from a building. So it's near a hearth. So someone, you know, laid it down within this house, or something happened within that building, or they deliberately left it there. So we can tell something about the life history of that object. But again, we can date it as well. You know, if things have no context, then we can't get any dates from it. And obviously, we can't directly date the sculpture. It's just carved stone. And so the fact that we might be able to date the, you know, the wood within this spear butt itself
25:00 Speaker 04 is, yeah, hugely exciting and begins to, again, help us place the Picts stone carving tradition into a chronological horizon. So that's, that's super exciting.
25:11 Tristan Hughes? When you imagine Picts, you imagine? Imagine these painted warrior people. Does this spearbutt hint at a warrior culture?
25:18 Speaker 04 Uh, no, I think, you know, all societies that we know of in this time period, in terms of Britain and Ireland, they were a warrior kingdoms, they were warrior cultures. Prowess on the battlefield was certainly something that was factored into leadership and kingship in this time period. And a lot of our iconography from this time period involves, especially in Pickland, involves warriors, often with spears, occasionally with swords, but spears much more commonly. And the sources we have, the Irish annals, you know, Life of Columba, Bee's History, they all talk about warfare and battles being, you know, obviously quite prominent within society.
26:02 Speaker 04 Not to say that they were always constantly fighting, but certainly warriorhood and battles were important in terms of the power politics of this time period. And we have, in terms of objects, we have so few actual weapons, again, because of the lack of settlement sites. And in Pickland, they don't bury their dead with objects as a general rule, unlike in Anglo-Saxon England. So we don't really have that kind of range of evidence to draw upon. So anything that we do find in that respect is really exciting in terms of interpreting the character of Picts society.
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27:24 Speaker 05 Are you looking for the perfect podcasts to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?
27:31 Speaker 06 Well, look no further than the award-winning After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds, and the Paranormal with me, Maddie Pelling.
27:37 Speaker 05 And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.
27:42 Speaker 06 From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore, feel transported back in time on After Dark, out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
27:54 Speaker 05 And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.
28:13 Speaker 05 Now, so many of our sources about the Picts are written by people who weren't Picts. We've got the Romans, you've got the venerable bead, you've got Irish chroniclers. Is that why these artefacts being unearthed at places like East Lomond are so valuable for learning more about the Picts? Because they were clearly owned by Picts. This is more direct evidence.
28:33 Speaker 04 Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that's why archaeological evidence is so important. So we have these, you know, external sources. The only thing we do have them, Picts themselves, is this king list, which is literally more or less just a list of kings through time. So that's why archaeology is so key. This allows us to illuminate the lives of everyday people, whether they be high status or not. So yeah, it's great to begin to have these very rich sites with this rich stratigraphy and architectural evidence and material culture evidence from the Picts.
29:10 Speaker 05 And do we have any idea just how widespread and developed metalworking was at East Lomond?
29:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, it's another exciting element of the site is we're getting lots of evidence for smelting iron, but we also have crucible fragments and a few mould fragments as well from precious metalworking, so things like bronze and silver probably. So a whole range of different craft activities and industrial processes being carried out on site. So again, we'll be able to map that in terms of the settlement through time. Is there particular industrial areas, are there particular craft working areas? What range of metals are they producing? Are they actually making tools and weaponry on site?
29:57 Speaker 04 I strongly suspect they are, just because of the character of this hillfort, but we need to begin to kind of pin down those areas and pin down that evidence. And we'll only do that through more digging, I guess.
30:09 Tristan Hughes? Gordon, thank you so much for your time.
30:10 Speaker 04 No worries.
30:13 Tristan Hughes? Like many Iron Age societies, metalworking was central to life among the Picts. But their smiths were skilled in far more than just crafting brutish weapons, spearbutts, tools for agricultural use. It was their work with silver, refined into intricate jewellery, that truly showcased the sophistication and artistry of Picts craftsmen. Roman-era silver has been discovered at archaeological sites across Scotland. The Dairse Hord, for example, was discovered a few miles away from East Lowndes, whilst the largest hord of Roman hacksilver ever found anywhere outside the borders of the Roman Empire was discovered on the hillfort of Tropene Lough in East Lothian, not far
30:58 Tristan Hughes? from Edinburgh. Much rarer, however, is silver smelted by Picts smiths. That is why the Norries Lough Hord, discovered in 1819 in Lago, is so spectacular. Along with several pieces of Roman hacksilver, it contains a remarkable leaf-shaped oval plaque with Picts symbols, similar to those you find on the iconic stone pillars. Also uncovered was a Celtic brooch and spiraled fingering. The hoard is on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, along with some other jewellery from another hillfort at Berghead, near Moray, overlooking the North Sea. I went to the National Museum of Scotland to speak to Dr Martin Goldberg,
31:42 Tristan Hughes? Principal Curator for Medieval Archaeology, to discover what these finds tell us about Picts society. Martin, it is such a pleasure to be here. Can you tell me, first of all, what exactly is the Norries Law Hoard? The Norries Law Hoard is a collection of hack silver. And we call it a Picts hoard, but our recent work has allowed us to re-date it and pull it much closer to the Late Roman world. And so, whereas previously, based on art historical dating, it was thought to be perhaps sixth or seventh century, we can pull it several hundred years earlier into the fifth or sixth century as it's accumulating.
32:27 Tristan Hughes? And there's the odd fragment of Late Roman silver in there, but a lot of the material is fragments of things that we otherwise don't see anywhere else. It only really occurs in this hoard. And it wasn't till we made a new discovery in 2013 of another hack silver hoard that we started to find comparisons between the two. And this other discovery from Galcross had even more Late Roman material in it. And so, we're now looking at a spectrum of hack silver material that's coming out of the Late Roman world. That silver is being reused and remade into new objects. And some of those are being hacked up and traded and passed on
33:12 Tristan Hughes? and accumulated into collections like the Norries Law Hoard. And how much variety is there in the objects which have been hacked up in the Norries Law Hoard? So, there's huge amounts of things. We've got fragments of various categories of objects, from pieces of silver sheet, we've got pieces of vessels that we otherwise don't know anything about.
33:36 Speaker 04 Lots of pieces of arm rings. And the arm rings are a type of object that is only found in these two hordes from Noris Law and Gold Cross. And they seem to be operating as some sort of proto currency. So not coins, but probably made from melted down late Roman coins. Worn on the wrist and used as currency in larger exchanges beyond the Roman frontier.
34:03 Tristan Hughes? So this could actually potentially, this hoard, give us an insight into the Picts economy at that time as well?
34:10 Speaker 04 Certainly the sort of status economy, yeah, the gifting of silver. Whether that's by a war leader, you know, whether it's extracted from the late Roman world or whether it's used as pay or subsidy. But yeah, it's telling us about the the Picts economy, how important silver became in the display of wealth and status. And also how that display and status still maintain some sort of connection with the late Roman Empire, with the origin of where this bright shiny material came from.
34:45 Tristan Hughes? Do you think hordes like this, do you think it helps bring the story of the Picts further and further back into ancient times? As well as its continuation into the medieval period?
34:54 Speaker 04 Well, if you rely on the very few historical fragments that refer to the Picts, you've got the late Roman sources. And then you've got a gap of several centuries before you get people like the Northumbrian monk Bede writing in the eighth century about the Picts. The thing about the silver, the silver hordes like Noris Law is that they help us to fill that gap, those couple of centuries where the historical sources aren't actually telling us anything. So these are like new historical documents, especially when new research can look at this material.
35:29 Speaker 04 In different ways, make new theories about it, use new scientific techniques to explore the quality of the silver. We can learn a lot more by looking at some of these older discoveries and, yeah, shuffling the dates about and allowing us to fill gaps in our knowledge.
35:45 Tristan Hughes? Now, I noticed that some of these objects, they have pictish artwork on them. Can you tell us a bit about this?
35:52 Speaker 04 Well, it's the pictish artwork that allows us to more clearly define them as pictish hordes. So, the Norries Law Horde is found beyond the late Roman frontiers, it's found in, what is, modern day Fife? And so, it has that association beyond the frontier. But the pictish symbols and the way that those symbols are decorated, they help us connect the pics with their own past. This form of communication through the symbols that is used on large stones in the same way that the Ogum script is used in Ireland or runic script is used on objects in the Germanic-speaking world.
36:36 Speaker 04 We see symbols on silver, like the runes, how the runes are used. We see symbols on large stones, like Ogum is used. So, we think that this is a form of communication that is unique to the pics. So, they're taking the idea of literacy and monumental literacy and status literacy. They're doing something different, though. They're not creating an alphabetic script. So, Ogum is an alphabetic script, Latin is an alphabetic script. We can translate between Latin and Ogum because we have stones that have both sets of scripts on them. The pictish symbols retain this sort of enigmatic quality because we haven't yet deciphered
37:21 Speaker 04 them.
37:22 Tristan Hughes? And can you tell us what these pictish symbols are that we see on the Norries Law Horde and on what object they're shown?
37:28 Speaker 04 So, the pictish symbols, because we don't know what they mean or what they say... They tend to have quite obscure, modern names that have been given to them that kind of describe what they are. So there's lots of animal symbols. And one of the symbols on the Norris Law plaque is a sort of beast head. But it has a fin, you know, or a flipper. So it looks like an aquatic creature. The pics from all of their art seem to be very into creatures of the imagination.
38:01 Tristan Hughes? It's like a seahorse, maybe, or something like that, mythical?
38:03 Speaker 04 Something like that, perhaps, yeah. But it's the more abstract symbols that tend to sort of pick up modern names. So the one that is on the Norris Law plaque is called a double disc and zedrod. And that's pretty much describes what it is. There are two discs connected. And then a sort of slashing figure of S or zed shape.
38:26 Tristan Hughes? It's like a zorro kind of thing, yeah.
38:28 Speaker 04 Yeah. So it's one of the more common pictish symbols. You see it on a lot of the pictish stones. You see it on one of the massive silver chains that are found in Scotland. So it's a symbol that certainly meant something in different places. But across a wide area of what we would think of as pictland.
38:49 Tristan Hughes? And you mentioned this plaque, and that was one particular object from the hoard where we have those decorations on?
38:54 Speaker 04 Yes, so Norris Law is famous for this one leaf shaped plaque that has a pair of symbols on it, beautifully incised. The decoration of the double discs is minute triskel spirals that interconnect. You know, the craftsmanship is stunning. When you see that same symbol on a massive silver chain from Whitecluuk, it's actually taken to an even smaller scale and another appreciation of the minute, delicate workmanship that goes into these things.
39:26 Tristan Hughes? We'll certainly put a link to an image of that astonishing plaque in the description of this episode. We have all this array of artefacts from the Norris Law hoard. Very rich, very beautiful artefacts made of silver. Do we have any idea what they would have been used for, or who would have used them in pictish society?
39:43 Speaker 04 So when we're trying to sort of extract information from these Hack Silver hordes, we are looking at what the objects might have originally been used for, and some of that is zones of use that we don't fully understand yet, because a lot of this material is only found in this hoard or in the Gaul Cross hoard, then we've only recently analysed both in relation to each other. But because they're fragments, they often don't tell us the full story. We've tried to piece together as much as we can. There are dishes that would have been used as vessels, there are the arm rings, there are forms of jewellery like finger rings or pins or penannular brooches, but often
40:27 Speaker 04 there are fragments of other objects that we don't fully understand. Often fragments of folded up sheet, and what tends to have happened is they've been packaged up into parcels, and so they have a second life. They're valued for their material as bullion rather than the original objects that they were designed as. So you're trying to explore the sort of multiple lives of these objects as they've made their way into this sort of greater collection of Hack Silver. And we think that the bullion weight of the Hack Silver is telling us something about payment, about the economy, about relations with the late Roman world, where certain
41:10 Speaker 04 standards of weight and certain standards of quality were very important, and this seems to have filtered into the the Picts connections with the late Roman world.
41:20 Tristan Hughes? So if we move along from the Norries Law hoard to another set of artefacts which are extraordinary and do seem to have a link to the Picts, which are these brilliant, pretty unique silver chains, can you tell us About these?
41:34 Speaker 04 Well, the massive silver chains are sometimes miscalled Picts silver chains, and that's because two of them have pairs of Picts symbols on them. But the vast majority of them are plain. They represent huge amounts of silver that are making their way north of the late Roman frontier. But they are unique to Scotland and particularly found in southern Scotland, so almost between what we would think of as the Picts zone north of the fourth and the late Roman frontier on Hadrian's Wall.
42:07 Tristan Hughes? So is that between the tweed and the firth and fourth today, that area?
42:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, so that part of southern Scotland is where the vast majority of these silver chains are found. And they obviously represent some sort of zone of interaction between the Picts world and the late Roman world. And some of them will have been worn by people who were important in the Bretonnik-speaking kingdoms that were developing in that late Roman world too, but that were also interacting with the people beyond them, the people that they called the Picts.
42:40 Tristan Hughes? And so who do we think would have been wearing those massive silver chains as necklaces?
42:45 Speaker 04 Well, again, this is something that has come out of our more recent research. Regardless of the size of the links of the chain, there is a pretty common size diameter of the neck that they would have been worn around. And that isn't the neck of a big, large warrior. It's not even the size of neck of you and I, a modern male neck. It's much smaller and it's, these objects are probably worn by either adolescents or women. And this is common across the whole range of these silver chains.
43:19 Tristan Hughes? But they still have a clear link, you know, with those two which show Picts symbols on to the Picts world. And I know it's only a theory at this time, but could potentially these chains be evidence that in the Picts world, there were communities ruled by strong queens?
43:35 Speaker 04 That's one possibility, and it's certainly a tantalising one. You know, as soon as you make that realisation, yes, you want to reconsider the historical narrative that has talked about matrilineous succession and things like that. But again, because of the zone of where these things are found, between the Picts world and the late Roman world, these objects can tell us about other processes that would have been important, and those might be kinship relationships. Silver might have been exchanged in return for people, important people, and that might have encompassed other processes, social processes, things that were important to creating relations
44:16 Speaker 04 between groups of people, like when you foster your children or when you arrange a marriage alliance. And so there are other ways of thinking of it that may well feed into that wider historical narrative, once we have more evidence of the importance of the female in these societies.
44:35 Tristan Hughes? How important would you say today are these beautiful silver artefacts, whether they be in the Norris Law hoard, all these remarkable silver chains with new research and so on? How important are they in helping us learn more about the Picts?
44:50 Speaker 04 Well, what they help us do, particularly as archaeologists, is fill a gap that has always existed between the historical records of the late Roman world that talked about Picti, the people beyond their frontiers, and then the seventh and eighth century, when other later historical sources, often written by their neighbours, start referring to the Picts again. And this silver material and the importance of that material in the fifth and sixth centuries helps fill this gap in our historical knowledge. It helps us look at the objects that were important to people.
45:30 Speaker 04 It helps us learn about the types of processes that were important in gluing these societies together.
45:36 Tristan Hughes? I'd like to finally ask about the symbol stones, about those stunning Picts stones that have come to epitomise the Picts today. Why were these stones, why were they so prolific amongst the Picts? Why do they hold so much importance to them?
45:50 Speaker 04 Well, we have an amazing collection of Picts symbol stones and the later use of the symbols on Christian monuments here at National Museum Scotland. And seeing them in the context of the objects that people used and the societies that were part of the historical background helps us learn about the Picts, but also helps us dispel some of the mysteries about them. So, yes, we haven't deciphered this material yet. We haven't deciphered the Picts symbols yet, but we can look at them in comparison with other types of monumental literacy, like the omstones or like runic inscriptions on smaller objects.
46:35 Speaker 04 We can make that comparison and that helps us understand what we think the Picts symbols are doing. They're communicating between groups of people. They're communicating in a way that the Picts would have understood. So if the symbol stones sort of create a geographical zone that overlaps with where the historical record tells us the Picts were, we know that that form of communication worked within that zone. We know that other types of literacy helped people from Ireland communicate with people in southern Wales. We know that the remnants of Latin literacy helped people connect with the late Roman past.
47:19 Speaker 04 But the Picts symbols are doing something distinctive in northern Britain beyond the River Forth. They're doing something that meant the same thing or meant similar things to the way that literacy is used elsewhere. We just haven't deciphered it yet. It's not alphabetic, so it doesn't directly translate. But we can point to the symbols of power, whether those are the symbols on silver objects or whether they're on these beautiful monumental stones that are found across Scotland.
47:52 Tristan Hughes? Martin, this has been so interesting. Thank you so much for your time.
47:55 Speaker 04 Thanks for your interest. It's been great.
47:59 Tristan Hughes? The story of the Picts is not one of complete darkness, nor total clarity. It's a tale told in fragments, carved into stone, buried in hordes, and echoed in the contours of ancient hillforts like East Lomond and Burghead. What we do know is that theirs was a life shaped by both hardship and ingenuity. They farmed the land, raised cattle, crafted tools and jewellery, and built fortified homes atop commanding hills. All while navigating the complex realities of trade, diplomacy, and war on the edge of the Roman world. Their enemies painted them as wild and fearsome,
48:41 Tristan Hughes? but the objects they left behind reveal a culture just as refined as it was rugged. From the mysterious symbols etched into stone, to the intricately worked silver of the Norries' law hoard, the Picts weren't just survivors, they were storytellers, artisans, warriors, and innovators. Their hillforts weren't just strongholds, buzzing with life and tradition. And although the Picts eventually faded from the historical record, absorbed into the emerging Kingdom of Alba in the 9th century, their legacy lives on, not only in the landscape of Scotland, but in the craftsmanship, the symbols, and the mystery they left behind.
49:25 Tristan Hughes? If you want to see more of what life was like for the Picts, from the dramatic views atop their ancient hillforts to the treasures they left behind in the earth, then don't miss our brand new documentary on History Hit, out now.
49:49 Tristan Hughes? Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me, I'll see you in the next episode.
50:31 Speaker 03 I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing, and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one. And I'm Carter Roy, and this is What the Fact. Three facts a week, each with a whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.
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