The North-South Divide - Iron Age Style!!

I was going to put up this post yesterday, but ran out of time and energy!

When we went out on our walk through Murshiel Country Park, our destination was Windy Hill.  There's supposedly lots of prehistoric hut circles scattered around the place, but even with the vegetation at its lowest, I couldn't see hide nor hair of them...

Someone has very kindly reconstructed one.  It's a crude, drystone structure with a scruffy roof.  It conveys a perfect impression of a miserable, prehistoric past. 

 

Now, contrast this if you will with an equivalent reconstruction from south-west of England.  This is a replica roundhouse at the Peat Moors Centre in Somerset, which is based on examples excavated at Glastonbury Lake Village.  It's cosy.  It's pleasant.  It's stylish. It has a PORCH!!!!

 

There's been a long-running assumption, epitomised best by a work by Sir Cyril Fox called The Personality of Britain, which assumes that native 'British' culture was always more highly advanced in the south-east of England.  The landscape was less harsh there, the climate more amenable, and the inhabitants more open to technological improvement, perhaps because they were regularly invaded by more advanced 'cultures' from continental Europe (the best known of these perhaps being the Romans).  Therefore, their culture was richer in all respects.  Archaeologists have been battling to refute these assumptions for years, but the ghost of Fox's theory still lingers on.

 

Here's a photo of a 19th century farmsteading at Murshiel, with its cultivated land to the right.  My apologies for the darkness of the image, but it conveys the mood of the place very well.  This is marginal land.  People are scratching a living here.  In the Middle Bronze Age, it was probably good farmland, but the climate took a turn for the worse in the Late Bronze Age and after this time farming in this kind of area really would not have been viable, except perhaps on a seasonal basis.

 

To think all of Scotland's roundhouses were more like the Muirshiel example and less like Glastonbury is to misunderstand the situation.  There are BIG hut circles in Scotland (with porches!).  They're found on the low-lying plains in areas like the Lothians, Angus, Ayrshire; places which are heavily farmed to this day.  But the Iron Age and Bronze Age of Scotland in their entirety are still dismissed as backward and impoverished.  The Bronze Age has plenty of pottery, but compared to England, very little bronze.  And the Iron Age has hardly any pottery, which is just plain weird.

There's more to all this than meets the eye.  We recently excavated an Iron Age site which produced an awful lot of pottery, and it was nice stuff, too, so it's not as if there's a complete absence of pottery on these sites.  I'm sure there's more to the Bronze Age and Iron Age in Scotland than is currently acknowledged, and it's a subject I want to study in depth at a later point.

As if I don't have enough things to keep me occupied in my life already!

The North-South Divide - Iron Age Style!!

I was going to put up this post yesterday, but ran out of time and energy!

When we went out on our walk through Murshiel Country Park, our destination was Windy Hill.  There's supposedly lots of prehistoric hut circles scattered around the place, but even with the vegetation at its lowest, I couldn't see hide nor hair of them...

Someone has very kindly reconstructed one.  It's a crude, drystone structure with a scruffy roof.  It conveys a perfect impression of a miserable, prehistoric past. 

 

Now, contrast this if you will with an equivalent reconstruction from south-west of England.  This is a replica roundhouse at the Peat Moors Centre in Somerset, which is based on examples excavated at Glastonbury Lake Village.  It's cosy.  It's pleasant.  It's stylish. It has a PORCH!!!!

 

There's been a long-running assumption, epitomised best by a work by Sir Cyril Fox called The Personality of Britain, which assumes that native 'British' culture was always more highly advanced in the south-east of England.  The landscape was less harsh there, the climate more amenable, and the inhabitants more open to technological improvement, perhaps because they were regularly invaded by more advanced 'cultures' from continental Europe (the best known of these perhaps being the Romans).  Therefore, their culture was richer in all respects.  Archaeologists have been battling to refute these assumptions for years, but the ghost of Fox's theory still lingers on.

 

Here's a photo of a 19th century farmsteading at Murshiel, with its cultivated land to the right.  My apologies for the darkness of the image, but it conveys the mood of the place very well.  This is marginal land.  People are scratching a living here.  In the Middle Bronze Age, it was probably good farmland, but the climate took a turn for the worse in the Late Bronze Age and after this time farming in this kind of area really would not have been viable, except perhaps on a seasonal basis.

 

To think all of Scotland's roundhouses were more like the Muirshiel example and less like Glastonbury is to misunderstand the situation.  There are BIG hut circles in Scotland (with porches!).  They're found on the low-lying plains in areas like the Lothians, Angus, Ayrshire; places which are heavily farmed to this day.  But the Iron Age and Bronze Age of Scotland in their entirety are still dismissed as backward and impoverished.  The Bronze Age has plenty of pottery, but compared to England, very little bronze.  And the Iron Age has hardly any pottery, which is just plain weird.

There's more to all this than meets the eye.  We recently excavated an Iron Age site which produced an awful lot of pottery, and it was nice stuff, too, so it's not as if there's a complete absence of pottery on these sites.  I'm sure there's more to the Bronze Age and Iron Age in Scotland than is currently acknowledged, and it's a subject I want to study in depth at a later point.

As if I don't have enough things to keep me occupied in my life already!

A Saint Valentine's Day Post...

Today, of course, is Valentine's Day.  My husband and I carried out the time-honoured ritual exchange of chocolates, which means that I now have (thanks to my beloved) a worthy stash of interesting Thornton's chocolates which will keep me going at least two months.  I will be sampling the Organic Truffle collection, amongst other things.  Yum!!

I also cooked dinner, which was a once-in-a-blue-moon event.  I haven't cooked since Christmas Day, but thankfully I hadn't quite forgotten what to do.  I used a Jamie Oliver recipe - I've got one Jamie Oliver cookbook, even though I get really irritated by Jamie Oliver's style.  I can't be bothered with all the smug photos of the Author, Family and Friends scattered through the book.  It's too glossy and schmalzy.  The Essex boy prose style also leaves me cold. 

But some of the recipes are rather good.  My chosen recipe of the day was 'Smashed Celeriac' - cubes of celeriac cooked with garlic, thyme and a little stock.  I served it with vegetarian Cumberland style sausages, and home-made potato 'chips' done in the oven with olive oil and herbs.  It was good comfort food for a dreich winter's day.

I now have the misfortune to find myself watching David Dimbleby's Seven Ages of Britain.  I've been studiously avoiding this series until now.  I watched some of an architectural series he fronted a few years ago and hated it because I found it dumbed down beyond belief.  This new series is no different.  In fact, it's even worse than I'd anticipated.  It's the Tudors tonight; so far it has focussed entirely on England.  In fact, it should probably be called the Seven Ages of England. 'The Golden Age' that Dimbleby's referring to was pretty rough on the Scots.  Our abbeys got wrecked in the Rough Wooing and Henry's cronies were keen to exploit pre-existing schisms in the Scots nobility to their tyrannical King's advantage.

This programme's being shown at 9pm but it feels like it's aimed for primary school kids.  It's a shame, because I'd expect better from David Dimbley.  He's an intelligent political journalist and interviewer, and I really don't know why he can't put his name to something a bit more high-brow.  I don't really see why it's given such a prominent place in Scottish programming, either...  Watching David Dimbleby doing a daft impression of someone fighting with a poleaxe (complete with stupid sound effects) really doesn't do anything for me whatsoever.

Bettany Hughes talking about the role of women in the Bible, aired earlier this evening on Channel 4, made much better viewing...

A Saint Valentine's Day Post...

Today, of course, is Valentine's Day.  My husband and I carried out the time-honoured ritual exchange of chocolates, which means that I now have (thanks to my beloved) a worthy stash of interesting Thornton's chocolates which will keep me going at least two months.  I will be sampling the Organic Truffle collection, amongst other things.  Yum!!

I also cooked dinner, which was a once-in-a-blue-moon event.  I haven't cooked since Christmas Day, but thankfully I hadn't quite forgotten what to do.  I used a Jamie Oliver recipe - I've got one Jamie Oliver cookbook, even though I get really irritated by Jamie Oliver's style.  I can't be bothered with all the smug photos of the Author, Family and Friends scattered through the book.  It's too glossy and schmalzy.  The Essex boy prose style also leaves me cold. 

But some of the recipes are rather good.  My chosen recipe of the day was 'Smashed Celeriac' - cubes of celeriac cooked with garlic, thyme and a little stock.  I served it with vegetarian Cumberland style sausages, and home-made potato 'chips' done in the oven with olive oil and herbs.  It was good comfort food for a dreich winter's day.

I now have the misfortune to find myself watching David Dimbleby's Seven Ages of Britain.  I've been studiously avoiding this series until now.  I watched some of an architectural series he fronted a few years ago and hated it because I found it dumbed down beyond belief.  This new series is no different.  In fact, it's even worse than I'd anticipated.  It's the Tudors tonight; so far it has focussed entirely on England.  In fact, it should probably be called the Seven Ages of England. 'The Golden Age' that Dimbleby's referring to was pretty rough on the Scots.  Our abbeys got wrecked in the Rough Wooing and Henry's cronies were keen to exploit pre-existing schisms in the Scots nobility to their tyrannical King's advantage.

This programme's being shown at 9pm but it feels like it's aimed for primary school kids.  It's a shame, because I'd expect better from David Dimbley.  He's an intelligent political journalist and interviewer, and I really don't know why he can't put his name to something a bit more high-brow.  I don't really see why it's given such a prominent place in Scottish programming, either...  Watching David Dimbleby doing a daft impression of someone fighting with a poleaxe (complete with stupid sound effects) really doesn't do anything for me whatsoever.

Bettany Hughes talking about the role of women in the Bible, aired earlier this evening on Channel 4, made much better viewing...