- The Early Celts zn Scotland -
Figure 34.2 This decorated bronze carnyx - part of a horn in the form of a boar's head -was
found in about 1816 about 6 ft down in peat on Liecheston Farm, near Kirkton of Deskford,
Banffshire, in the northern part of the North-eastern province. It has been stylistically dated
to the first century Be. (Piggott 1959.)
Likewise derivatives of the the 'Arras' three-link bronze bridle bits - the 'straight
bar snaffles' (Palk 1984) -show an exactly similar spread into southern Scotland, as do
the early Type Aa penannular fibulae (Palk 1984; Fowler 1960, esp. 161ff.) and their
derivatives (Stevenson 1966, n. 46). With one striking exception this early metalwork
does not extend north of the rivers Forth and Clyde; the boar's head trumpet from
Deskford in Banffshire is far up in the north-east (Piggott 1959) (Figure 34 .2). The
only objects with Celtic curvilinear decoration which do are the massive bronze arm-
lets and the decorated terrets, both found concentrated in Aterdeenshire (Stevenson
1966: fig. 5), and these are explicable as the final (second century) products of Celtic
craftsmen, and their local imitators, who fled north with their chiefly patrons after the
heavy defeat of the iron age tribes by the Romans at the battle of Mons Graupius in
AD 86. It may not be too fanciful to see this concentration of La Tene-descended
tribal leaders in Aberdeenshire in the second century as resulting eventually in the
coalescence of the tribes of lowland Pictland into a powerful cultural unity.
The rotary quern is another important indicator of the cultural distinctiveness of
the southern Scottish iron age population, and of its albeit increasingly tenuous links
with continental La Tene cultures. There are two types of iron age querns in
Scotland, one being the non-adjustable bun-shaped form the distribution of which is
almost entirely confined to below the Forth/Clyde line (MacKie 197 I: fig. I); it was
probably operated on the ground by some kind of wooden turning mechanism