Pagan Symbols of the Picts by Stuart McHardy sampler

the pagan symbols of the picts
the traditional dating of the Pictish period from 297 is arbitrary
and unhelpful – the reference from then is to Caesar having fought
the Picts – and a more suitable date for the commencement of the
Pictish period, suggested by Smyth, would be the Battle of Mons
Graupius, c.80bce. However, there seems to be no good reason
why we should put such a specific limit on the Pictish period as it
seems clear to me that the Picts were the indigenous people of
Scotland when the Romans arrived, and as such were the direct
descendants of the first settlers after the Ice Age, no doubt
intermingled with later small-scale groups of incomers. Or as the
wisdom of the tradition has it, we are all Jock Tamson’s bairns.
When the Romans first arrived in Britain it is obvious that the
population was essentially tribal. The people were living in closelinked
kin groups, in what was essentially a subsistence economy.
This does not mean there were no luxuries. It simply means that
the people lived in small groups and effectively fended for
themselves, without centralised city-states and their political
appurtenances. They were pastoralists, much of whose energy was
focussed on the raising of cattle, but the role of hunting and
foraging was an everyday part of their lives, and crops had been
grown in Scotland since much earlier times. Recent archaeological
thinking is that the old picture of the past in which such tribal
peoples were constantly in fear of invasion and attack and whose
lives were nasty, brutish and short contains very little substance.
Much of such thinking seems to have arisen from the essentially
Victorian idea of progress, wherein humanity was presented as
growing steadily from a primitive and barbaric state towards ever
more technologically advanced civilisation. Given today’s problems
with the consequent pollution and climate change, this idea of
progress would appear to have lost some of its attraction.
However, even before the Egyptians started building pyramids
the people of Britain had created such monumental and magnificent
sites as Calanais in the Outer Hebrides, Maes Howe, Stennes and
the increasingly important Brodgar sites in Orkney, the New
Grange complex north of Dublin, and Stonehenge on the Salisbury
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