Pins and the Chronology of Brochs

Abstract

Prehistorians have unreservedly extended the Early Iron Age in territories north of the Roman Empire to include, in addition to a pre-Roman Iron Age, a Roman Iron Age during which the native barbarism evolved without a break though not unaffected by the Empire. That a Late Iron Age continued in Scotland, as in Scandinavia, during post-Roman times has been less readily realized. Professor Childe nominally ended his Prehistory of Scotland with the 4th century A.D. and spoke of an unbridged chasm thereafter, four or five centuries long, to which few and undecisive relics were attributable. The extent of archaeological perplexity 30 years ago was such that J. G. Callander maintained that Skara Brae represented the same Iron Age culture as the brochs and earth-houses. Following the studies of brochs and wheel-houses by Lindsay Scott and Lethbridge, which agreed that they formed a single culture datable to the first three centuries A.D., the latter wrote recently that the culture of the Western Isles between the 3rd century and the 9th ‘is completely unknown and I think unsought’.