Early Medieval Landscapes of the Dead: the monumental Pictish barrows of North-East Scotland

Author(s): Gordon Noble; Juliette Mitchell

Year: 2015

Summary

During the 5th and 6th centuries the dead become more visible in the landscapes of eastern Scotland. Elaborate square and circular burial mounds were constructed to commemorate certain members of society, possibly a newly emerging elite. These barrows are often sited along ridges and form grouped, sometimes linear distributions in the landscape. Few have been excavated and most are known through aerial photography alone.This paper presents some of the results from a project that consolidated and reviewed the evidence of burial practices of the northern Picts, and also evaluated the position of these sites in their wider social, cultural, political and religious landscapes. A variety of methods were utilised, including full transcription of the cropmark sites; analysis of the barrow types and morphological characteristics; and the wider landscape context through GIS analysis of the relationships with natural topography, boundaries, routeways and relation to prehistoric features.

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Cite this Record

Early Medieval Landscapes of the Dead: the monumental Pictish barrows of North-East Scotland. Juliette Mitchell, Gordon Noble. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 398417)

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Keywords

General
Cemetery Landscape Pict

Geographic Keywords
Europe

Spatial Coverage

min long: -11.074; min lat: 37.44 ; max long: 50.098; max lat: 70.845 ;