Behold the shiny things (with a surprising amount of penis)... Part two

Some more pics from the National Museum over in Edinburgh, though this time with fewer shiny things per se... We'll start with a statement piece, though:

There were quite a few of these in the museum, though unfortunately I didn't spot any of the ones with Pictish symbols engraved on one end. As you might guess, the chains are typically thought to be Pictish in origin, probably dating to around the 5th to 9th centuries CE, and they're more than likely to have been worn by those of high status – not just the aristocracy, but royalty, the information board reckons. Just like the penanular brooches the Gaels wore (like the Tara brooch, for example), they were probably worn as an indication of rank. They were worn around the neck and fastened together with a "terminal link" – the bits that have the Pictish symbols engraved on them, which were originally highlighted with red enamel. Each link is made of solid silver (probably recycled Roman silver), and given the weight of them – up to 2.9 kilos (6.4 lbs) each – it seems unlikely that they were worn as regular, everyday pieces of jewellery. Instead it's thought that they were probably worn "during important ceremonies."

From a slightly earlier period – late Bronze Age – we have the Ballachulish idol:

Which is surprisingly huge – I didn't know it was actually life-size... The figure was discovered in a peat bog with the remains of some kind of wickerwork structure covering it. The site is situated overlooking a sea loch, so it's thought that the figure was meant to represent a goddess of some sort, "probably associated with fertility" – she's holding a "phallic object over her abdomen" so yeah, OK. I think equally the situation of it, overlooking the sea loch, could imply a protective purpose as well?

If you get up close then you can see the quartz pebbles that have been used for her eyes:

Given the long association of white quartz with the dead, could their use be significant? Or were they just convenient?

Speaking of phallic object, the museum has a surprising number of them. You can blame the Romans for this one:

It's described as "an undressed stone with carved phallus, Birrens," on the information plate, and dates to the first century CE.

You can blame the Romans for these ones, too:

These are pretty small, and were used as amulets to ward against the evil eye, or perhaps as fertility charms.

Here we have some "mysterious stones" from Neolithic Skara Brae, one of which looks pretty penile at the least:

We don't know what these stones were for – maybe "ritual," perhaps simply decorative – but number 13 here is one of the better known examples:

I couldn't get a good close up, unfortunately, but the detailing is spectacular.

Finally, here we have an unusual carved stone, known as the Bullion Stone (taking its name from where it was found, Bullion, in Angus), which dates to around the tenth century CE:

It's unusual because it's not often that you find stones that have a comical or unflattering tone to them like this one does, and by this point in time carved stones were almost exclusively Christian in its symbolism. Clearly whoever this guy is, he's a little worse for wear and the bird's head on the end of his over-sized drinking horn is looking a little judgemental there. The man appears to be a warrior, with his shield, but he's old and bald – not a flattering look when baldness wasn't considered to be a desirable trait. His horse looks tired and is maybe a little past it, too, as it plods up the steep hill. The drinking horn is maybe intended to indicate a Norseman here, since they introduced them to Scotland, hence the unflattering imagery?

Behold the shiny things! (Part One)

Last October, if you might remember, I took a trip with the kids down to visit my mother in Suffolk. It's not my favourite place on earth, but on the upside I managed to convince my mother to make a day of it in London so we could make a visit to the Celts exhibition at the British Museum.

Over all I was a little disappointed with the exhibition, but I was interested in seeing it again once it got to Edinburgh in the new year, just to see if it was much different. It's a bit of a trek from here to get to Edinburgh, so I wasn't sure when we'd be able to manage it, but it turned out that our plans to go visit my family and friends down south weren't going to work out – schools in Scotland finished for the Spring break just as schools in England were returning from theirs and the timings just weren't going to align. So instead, seeing as Mr Seren had already booked time off from work, we decided to have a few days out, and Edinburgh was one of them.

We got there a little late in the day thanks to a slight detour (which meant we got to see the new Forth road bridge that's being built at the moment, and that was pretty cool), so by the time we'd parked up and got into the city centre it was well past lunchtime. It was nearly 3pm by the time we got to the museum, which didn't give us long to look around. Tom wasn't so keen to come and look at the Celts exhibition again, seeing as there was also a Lego "build it" thing on in the museum, so he and Mr Seren decided to do a bit of that before going off to look at the natural history stuff. Rosie decided to come with me so she could look at the shiny stuff again. She likes the artwork.

In London the exhibition cost £16.50 to get into, but in Edinburgh they're charging £10 for entrance (kids go free). The actual price is £9 but they've added on a pound extra for a "donation" to the museum, and while they do tell you that and ask if you want to make the donation, it's a bit cheeky to do that. Again, there's no photography in the exhibition which still pisses me off. I didn't bother trying to sneak pictures this time because there were way more members of staff around; it just wasn't going to happen.

Once we got in to the exhibition it was already very noticeably different. In London there was a three-minute slideshow as soon as you walked in, and while that would have been very informative, it clogged everything up from the get go. In Edinburgh we walked straight into a section with a few pieces on display that I think were intended to set the tone for the rest of the exhibition. They were a different selection from the ones chosen in London, in throughout the rest of the exhibition there were some pieces that were very noticeably missing – the bucket and flesh-hook I managed to snag pictures of in London, for one, along with a very impressive Gaulish statue of some dude with a big headdress. Those were the more obvious pieces I noticed missing and I'm sure there were others too. I noticed a few pieces I didn't think I'd seen before but I suspect that all in all there were some major artefacts that didn't make it to Edinburgh from the London exhibit.

That aside, I think the layout and flow of the Edinburgh exhibit is much better. The Gundestrup cauldron is on display in a room all by itself, and it's been set at a more sensible height so you can see all around it. The lighting is a little better, too, so it really becomes a feature all of its own rather than just one more shiny thing in a sea of shiny things.

There's a chariot (or replica of what the chariot would have looked like when it was fully intact) and goods on display that were recovered from a burial, and Rosie commented that she wasn't sure the people would be too happy to find all their stuff on display in a museum instead of in the ground where they left it. Wouldn't they want it to be left alone? she wondered. That's a perennial question in archaeology, I said. A lot of the time these things are dug up because they're going to be destroyed otherwise, so is it better to destroy them or try and recover them and preserve them so we can learn about the past? Rosie decided that perhaps the best thing would be to stop building stuff on top of important places like other people's graveyards and put the buildings somewhere else. I couldn't really argue with that, to be honest. But still, she loved looking at all the metalwork and jewellery, and we spent quite a bit of time looking for all the hidden faces and anthropomorphic features. When we got to the statue of Brigantia she was pretty excited and wondered if she was related to Brigid.

After we came out of the exhibition we met back up with Tom and Mr Seren and I decided I wanted to look at the "Early Settlers" section where all the early Scottish stuff is. We only had an hour left before closing by this point and I really didn't have time to look at everything I wanted to, but even so the place is amazing. One thing I noticed is that where the more well-known items had been taken for the Celts exhibit, they often replaced them with replicas, unlike in London. I thought that was a nice touch.  

There were plenty of shiny things like the Pictish "plaques" from the Norrie's Law hoard (one of which was in the Celts exhibition):

In pictures you might think they'd make a nice pair of earrings, but they're way too big for that. Silver hoards are pretty common in this period of Scotland's history because there wasn't much raw material available, so they had to rely on recycling silver instead. In some cases the hoards consist of Roman silver, which were presumably given to the local Picts, Britons or Gaels as bribes.

But it's not all about the shiny stuff, and that's one of the reasons I really wanted to go to the museum in the first place, because I wanted to see this – an almost perfectly preserved woollen Pictish hood:

Which was found in St Andrews parish (I presume that means the St Andrews in Fife, east coast of Scotland) and dates to some time between the 3rd-6th centuries CE.

There's also a hat, woven from hair moss, that dates a little earlier than the hood, around the first century CE. It was found at Newsteads, near the Scottish border:

And this is what the hair moss thread or twine looks like close up:

Things like this are what interest me most because it brings home the fact that we're not just dealing with something so nebulous as "a culture," but actual people.

I mentioned in my post from the London museum that there were the "divination spoons" on display in the Celts exhibition, and they were on display again in Edinburgh with a note to say they may have been used for magical or "healing" purposes. Nobody really knows what they were used for, but I found a set on display in the main part of the museum that had been recovered from the east coast of Scotland:


There seems to be some deep politics surrounding these things, because while there's the pet theory that Miranda Green pushes about their being "divination spoons," which is reflected in how they're described down in London, Edinburgh chooses to simply describe them as "a pair of sacred spoons, possibly buried with a holy man:"

These ones are bronze, as you can probably tell, and they were recovered with a bronze dagger, too. They aren't as well preserved as the ones in the Celts exhibition, but if you look closely they have the same kind of markings – one spoon being quartered, and the other with a hole in it. People seem to get weirdly invested in the idea of their being used for divinatory purposes, but there really could be any number of other explanations. I can see why divination has been suggested, but it bugs me that the idea gets treated as absolute truth by some.

Anyway. One last shiny thing before I finish off:

These are very late Bronze Age, and while the swords are set next to some moulds, I don't think they're the actual moulds that were used to cast them.

There's very little evidence for Bronze Age metal-working in Scotland, but a few sites have been found relatively recently that's changing what we know of the practice. I went to a lecture about one such place (just down the road from me, in fact, situated right on the coast) a few months ago and it was mentioned that the layout and orientation of the site had clear suggestions of ritual or religious purposes. The site, which is thought to have been very late Bronze Age in date, was surrounded by a number of palisades and the entrance was oriented to the south-east (very common for this period and into the Iron Age) with what appears to have been some sort of processional way leading into the main enclosure. One of the most interesting things that they found from the site is that the moulds were often transported across the Firth of Clyde so that they could be deposited at the foot of a major hillfort that dominated the area. This practice continued into the Iron Age, and it's thought that the burial of the moulds is possibly ritual in nature – perhaps an offering of some sort? It's no surprise that there seem to have been religious overtones to the production of metalwork, but it's fascinating to me, nonetheless.

Anyway, I think that's enough for now; I'll continue in another post with some more bits and pieces that piqued my interest another time.

Pictish Puzzle

Earlier this month it was reported that a new project was going to be launched to help piece a Pictish stone back together. The stone, from Easter Ross, dates to around the ninth century and has suffered over the years:

At some point it was knocked over and broken, possibly in a storm, and the bottom portion was lost. It is also believed to have been vandalised more than once during the time of the Reformation in the 16th century. 

In 1676 the original carving of the Christian cross was chipped off and replaced with an inscription commemorating a local man, Alexander Duff, and his three wives. 

Recent excavations of the chapel site uncovered the upright base in the ground and more than 3,000 scattered fragments of the face of a cross.

Gamers take aim at ancient Pictish stone puzzle

So each of the fragments has been scanned and digitised, and a new website has launched today that invites members of the public to help put the pieces together. Go to pictishpuzzle.co.uk and have a go! It seems pretty simple to use, but I think it's safe to say you need to be really good at jigsaws to get anywhere with it...It's kind of addictive, though, even if I'm terrible at jigsaws.

St Andrews – More Pictish stuff

Following on from the last post, here's another picture-heavy post. I'll finish off the Pictish stuff here and then I'll carry on with some more posts with pictures of the cathedral, castle and town etc. I'll start with a few more from the sarcophagus, close-ups of the animals from the hunting scene:

And a wingéd beast, situated to the left of David:

Then we have some other sculptures, with a window in the background causing problems for these two high cross shafts. These ones are a bit later than the sarcophagus, probably sculpted after the Picts were conquered by the Dal Riadans:

And here are some details close-up. We'll start with the funky hair (or possibly helmets?):

I'm really not sure what's going on here, but it's probably best not to ask. The next one's pretty much the same in that respect:

The interlacing here is really fine:

Both of these bits of stonework were re-purposed for use in the cathedral that was built in 1160. They were rediscovered in the nineteenth century.

There were lots of crosses on display, but most of them are only fragments now. This is a relatively late but more complete example:

Smaller, earlier, and simpler:

I'll just add a few more pictures now, because these are getting into the "post-interesting" period, as one of the speakers from the conference referred to the post-Pictish time periods. But I wanted to put this one in so I could say that they just don't make hats like they used to:

And finally, I was surprised to find a Manx triskele:

Even though we're way over on the east coast here, the cathedral at St Andrews was extremely important and influential in its heyday. The triskele here was apparently a part of the cathedral nave after it had to be rebuilt after a fire in 1378. It suggests the Earl of Moray of the time (who had control of Man) was a major benefactor of the rebuilding work.

Many are chosen (few are Pict)

Arf.

I've had a busy few days and about 600 pictures to show for it, which I've spent the whole morning uploading and then sifting through, some of which I'll be posting here (you've been warned!). I went on an outing to St Andrews over on the east coast yesterday and had a great time, not least because I got to see lots of Pictish stuff. Which was kinda handy, because the day before I went to a conference on the Picts, so it was all very topical.

The conference was really interesting (I feel very intellectual now) and although there wasn't really much on pre-Christian Pictish religion there were some good tidbits to chew on. Of particular interest was the mention of the Rhynie Man stone, which shows a man carrying a special kind of axe that had a hammer on one end and which would have been used to stun cattle or oxen before they were killed or sacrificed. If you look closely at the picture you'll see the man has what appears to be a tonsure, and while it's impossible to say for sure, it does seem to gel with what we know of "druidic" tonsures (that wasn't really touched on at the conference, but I thought I'd mention it anyway). What was mentioned was that an iron pin (which wouldn't have been functional, given the fact that it was made of iron, and therefore suggesting it was purely votive) has been found, shaped like the axe hammer, and there are the same kind of axes found on stone monuments elsewhere.

Another paper looked at the issue of Pictish language and especially Kenneth Jackson's suggestion that they spoke a pre-Indo-European language and a Gallo-Brittonic language. While it's an idea that's often repeated (even today), Jackson himself wasn't exactly confident in his arguments and he later abandoned the theory in favour of accepting that Pictish was either a Brythonic dialect, or Brythonic-derived language, which academics like Whitley Stoke and W.J. Watson had long argued in favour of. It was argued that Jackson's ideas weren't really based on linguistic evidence, as Stokes, Watson and others had drawn their conclusions from, but were instead primarily influenced by archaeological theories of the time – that evidence of a new material culture is indicative of a new people (i.e. therefore the arrival of Celtic culture in Britain = a Celtic invasion), hence the suggestion of a pre-Indo-European language from the Bronze people as well as a Celtic one from continental invaders of the Halstatt and later La Tene periods.

One of the final papers of the day had some interesting stuff on the influence of Pictish art on insular art by way of a technique called interpenetration (pretty much any academic terminology ends up sounding rude, doesn't it?), especially in relation to the Book of Kells. I'll just link to a summary of the paper as it's been given elsewhere, because I got to see one of the examples referred to at St. Andrews Cathedral the next day. So that leads nicely onto PHOTOS.

The example in question is the St. Andrews Sarcophagus:

The information panel describes is as a "royal burial shrine" that dates to the late eighth century, so we're firmly in Pictish territory here. It's a pretty fine example of Pictish sculpture and I'll give you some close ups of it, although because of the lighting the quality isn't as good as I'd like – I've tried to tweak them for clarity as much as I can. So here's a close up of the panel you can see above, which has examples of the "interpenetration" mentioned at the conference:

Interpenetration is when one artistic motif flows seamlessly into another. On this panel, if you look closely you'll see that the sculptor has "fretwork" flowing into "interlace" and then back again. I think if you look at the bottom part of the equal-armed cross (i.e. to the left of the two crouching people in the bottom right-hand corner) you can see it most clearly. It's very rare to find examples of interpenetration in insular art outside of Pictland so the occurrence of it in the Book of Kells raises questions about who did the artwork, or perhaps where the artist may have drawn their inspiration. And so on.

The longer panel is pretty interesting in its own right as well, and this is because you can see details of people's clothing and hairstyles, along with animals like horses, deer, dogs, and more fantastical beasts. It depicts a "woodland hunting scene," probably of the person the shrine was made for – the best guess is that it was probably the shrine of Oengus, son of Fergus, a Pictish king who died in 761:

The information panel notes that the scene seems to have been heavily influenced by Mediterranean artistic styles, but there are also some Anglo-Saxon elements mixed in with the over all Pictish flavour. Here are some close-ups:

This guy is noticeably larger than anyone else in the scene, and it's probably a depiction of the Biblical King David wrestling a lion (he's kinda nonchalant about the whole thing, don't you think?). There's a ram to the left of his head and what appears to be a dog to his right, so he's protecting his flock from the lion. This is one of the major clues about Mediterranean influences here, what with lions not really being a thing in these parts, for one. His clothes are Byzantine in style and his sword is of a Germanic type that was contemporary to the time of the sculptor, but his shoes are Pictish.

Then we have what is likely to be the occupant of the shrine itself – the king who may or may not be Oengus, son of Fergus:

Like David, the king here is fighting a lion, so an obvious comparison is being drawn. David epitomises the ideal king and shows that good leadership can lead his people to salvation and the mercy of God. So Oengus is a pretty decent guy, too....

This guy beneath the king isn't discussed in the information panel, but it's noted that both he and Oengus are dressed in typical Pictish style and have typically Pictish weapons, too. In the close up of the king you can see the details of the horse's gear. There are no stirrups, though, they wouldn't have been in use yet.

I'll just put up a couple more pictures of the panels that sit either side of the hunting scene, right:

And left:

And I'll finish up now because this post is getting a little long and image heavy. The other side of the sarcophagus hasn't survived, but you can tell by the lack of weathering on the stone over all that it would have been kept indoors, probably in a Pictish church or perhaps a mausoleum. At some point, and for some reason – "not long after the initial period of display" it was then deliberately buried.