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Neolithic Culture of the Hebrides

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Lindsay Scott
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Extract

The publication of Dr Daniel's last essay on the typology of British chamber tombs seems to make it desirable to offer such a note as present circumstances allow on the writer's excavations in the Hebrides, subsequent to the publication of his papers on the Rudh' an Dunain tomb in Skye and the Clettraval tomb in North Uist. For to Dr Daniel the Hebrides are something of a mystery, and a good deal of an embarrassment, lying as they do between the Clyde group of tombs and the groups of Caithness and the Orkneys, and yet not playing the part that could be desired in any line of typo-logical development. To Dr Daniel the area is one of mixed culture but the explanation, though it may be true, is a little like a confession of uncertainty—a little like the late M. Reinach's ultimate explanation of Glozel. Fresh facts would, it is felt, be welcome.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 16 , Issue 64 , December 1942 , pp. 301 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1942

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References

1 P.S.S., 1941, pp. 1 to 49.

2 P.S.A.S., LXV, 188 ff; LXVIII, 194 ff and LXIX, 480 ff.

3 Brief note in Man, Feb. 1939, p. 25; one of the restored vessels from this site was illustrated by Mrs Hawkes in Journ. Arch. Inst., 1938, p. 139 and sherds in pl. v, p. 150.

4 A note on a vessel from the site was published by the writer in P.P.S., 1938, pp. 336 and 337.

5 Ant. J., 1938, p. 403.

6 I have argued elsewhere that Sir Cyril Fox’s encrusted urn sequence should be reversed, the elaborately decorated vessels of Ireland and Scotland being the earliest.

7 P. Héléna, Les Origines de Narbonne, 1937. Mrs J. Hawkes, ANTIQUITY, 1934, p. 24 ff, and Journ. Arch. Inst., 1938, pp. 138 and 154 ff.

8 There is a radical difficulty in the way of the derivation of the Hebridean wares by the Garonne route from Languedoc in that developed rims are exceedingly rare in the latter area; only one example is known to the writer—an unpublished sherd in the Aries Museum from the Grotte des Fées. Organized patterns in the manner of Languedoc executed in groove technique are found round the estuary of the Tagus, though nowhere else in southern Iberia, and some of the vessels show fully developed rims which have become a vehicle of decoration. Prof. Childe, who has seen this pottery, very kindly confirms its similarity to the British wares, and on present evidence it seems to provide the most probable immediate source of the Hebridean styles of groups 2 and 3. It may none the less be that Languedoc is a more remote source; for there is some evidence of cultural contact between the Gulf of Lyons and the Tagus mouth by the Ebro-Jalon-Tagus route in the spread of Palmella bowls to Ciempopozuelos, Somaen and Catalonia, and the use of this route in the reverse direction would explain the origin of the groove decorated wares of the Tagus estuary better than the development of those wares from the vaguely scrawled groovings on the pots of the aborigines who lived in the Spanish caves.

9 Prehistory of Scotland, p. 40.

10 P. Dikaios, Archaeologia, LXXXVIII, I ff, and A. J. B. Wace, Archaeologia, LXXXII, 121 ff.