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Ritual and remembrance at a prehistoric ceremonial complex in central Scotland: excavations at Forteviot, Perth and Kinross

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Gordon Noble  and
Kenneth Brophy
Gordon Noble
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, St Mary's Building, Elphinstone Road, Aberdeen AB24 3UF, UK (Author for correspondence, email: [email protected])
Kenneth Brophy
Affiliation:
School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, The Gregory Building, Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK (Email: [email protected])
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Aerial photography and excavations have brought to notice a major prehistoric ceremonial complex in central Scotland comparable to Stonehenge, although largely built in earth and timber. Beginning, like Stonehenge, as a cremation cemetery, it launched its monumentality by means of an immense circle of tree trunks, and developed it with smaller circles of posts and an earth bank (henge). A change of political mood in the Early Bronze Age is marked by one of Scotland's best preserved dagger-burials in a stone cist with an engraved lid. The perishable (or reusable) materials meant that this great centre lay for millennia under ploughed fields, until it was adopted, by design or by chance, as a centre of the Pictish kings.

Keywords

ScotlandStrathearnNeolithicBronze Agethird millennium BCcremationpalisaded enclosuretimber circleshengecist burialdagger burialPictish palace
Type
Debate
Information
Antiquity , Volume 85 , Issue 329 , September 2011 , pp. 787 - 804
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 2011

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