- Chapter Thirty-Four -
In the Hebrides an appearance in the first century Be seems very likely and these
few jars seem quickly to have developed into a common local hybrid - everted-rim
Clettraval ware - on which is decoration of an horizontal, applied waist cordon
and sometimes concentric curvilinear channelled arches above this. These last
resemble the arches on the bowls of the later Iron Age in southern England and
indeed a local imitation of such a one may have been found at Dun Mor Vaul
(MacKie 1969: pl. vc).
Only here, among the brochs and wheel-houses of parts of the Outer Hebrides,
and at Clickhimin is this everted-rim pottery, with its apparently exotic origins, at all
common. Elsewhere in Atlantic Scotland it is rare and the common pottery styles are
firmly. local, sometimes with origins going back several centuries. Moreover no
middle iron age cremation burials, or indeed any burials, have been found in Atlantic
Scotland so the significance of the pottery is unclear.
Discussion
What can be said about these three archaeological zones of iron age Scotland in the
light of the questions posed at the start? It is clear that we are asking two different
questions, the first being whether there was a Celtic-speaking population in Scotland
in the pre-Roman Iron Age. It appears that there was if the p-Celtic place-names and
the Ptolemaic tribal names are good guides. However, tribal names could simply
reflect the ancestry and military prowess of tribal chiefs and warrior elites and do not
necessarily imply that all the tribesmen were of the same origin (below, p. 667).
Place-names are more difficult; the date of their first application to natural features
cannot be discovered and the question of who in a tribe or clan had the right to give
names to geographical features arises. However, the existence of a historical British-
speaking kingdom in Strathclyde in the mid-first millennium AD surely confirms that
the iron age population of the Tyne-Forth province was largely p-Celtic speaking.
Yet one may doubt whether the same applied to the apparently p-Celtic tribes in the
highlands and islands; here perhaps were larger populations of aborigines and a small
number of early British-speaking elites. Hardly any p-Celtic place-names survive.
With all its imperfections the archaeological picture matches the linguistic one
quite well. The presence of tribal elites with direct links with the Yorkshire La Tene
groups is surely implied by the scatter into southern Scotland of sword scabbards,
bridle bits and early penannular brooches, and the local rotary quern provides a clear
link between the more ordinary households and their presumably p-Celtic-speaking
neighbours further south and on the Continent. It also shows that there was a
profound cultural and probably political frontier at the highland boundary through
which the bun-shaped querns rarely penetrated.
The North-east province is archaeologically distinct with a strong suggestion
of early origins going back to the end of the Bronze Age, yet a clearly p-Celtic
form of language was used there, as well as words quite unlike any others known
Oackson 1955). It is difficult to resist the conclusion that this is partly explicable by
the fleeing north to, and settling in, Aberdeenshire and adjacent areas by thousands
of southern tribal chiefs, gentry and warriors and their families after their crushing
defeat by the Romans in AD 86. No doubt it was this genetic and cultural mixing