Unique Bronze Age burial uncovered

11/08/2009

Archaeologists celebrate dramatic prehistoric find in Perthshire

Archaeologists from Glasgow and Edinburgh universities have discovered a unique “high-status” early Bronze Age burial in Perthshire.

The team working on the site at Forteviot, which has medieval links to ninth century Scottish king Kenneth MacAlpin as well as a large circular henge dating to the Neolithic period, last Friday lifted a massive four-ton sandstone slab that was first discovered last summer.

This year’s excavations by teams of archaeology students and volunteers cleared around the stone, and a crane was brought in to raise the block, which measures two metres by two metres, and is around 40 centimetres thick.

Beneath it they found a meticulously-constructed high-status stone lined cist burial, containing traces of human remains which had been laid on a bed of quartz pebbles and interwoven lattice of birch bark, with copper objects including a dagger with a leather scabbard, fragments of a wooden bowl, and at the head a wooden and leather container. The burial is believed to date to 2200-2100BC.

Aberdeen University’s Dr Gordon Noble, project director, told The Big Issue remains of this type are extremely rare in Scotland, where acidic soil usually dissolves them. “None of us [working on the site] have ever come across anything like this before. It’s the sort of site you read about in textbooks,” he said.

“The real treasure of this burial is not the metal objects in it, but the organic remains,” he said. “This sort of material rarely survives in Scotland and it gives us an insight into what other objects were being used, not just the things that usually survive such as flint tools.

“The objects in the grave and its construction could equate to a high-status person to warrant such a burial,” he added. “To move a four-ton slab of stone in the Bronze Age was quite an undertaking.”

A Historic Scotland conservator removed the organic material over the weekend, to be examined in lab conditions.

The capstone was found to have a unique carving of a spiral and axe shape on the side facing into the burial, while the cist itself had several axes or other weapons carved into the stone at the end where the head of its occupant is likely to have been. Dr Noble said such carvings are “very rare” in a burial in that part of Scotland although there are similar examples at Kilmartin Glen, in Argyll.

The excavation of the site, which has been ongoing since 2006, has identified a massive Neolithic timber henge dating to 2600BC which project director Dr Kenneth Brophy, of Glasgow University, said “would dwarf Stonehenge” in size. The circle, the biggest Neolithic henge in Scotland, is 250 metres in diameter with timber posts that would have been up to one metre wide, with a palisade of timber enclosing it and a vast ditch measuring six metres wide and three metres deep.

Dr Brophy said: “Something, whether negative or positive, picked the individual in this cist burial out for this special treatment. This is a very significant place, which has been transformed from a place of gathering with the timber enclosure to a place of funerary activity; a place of burial rather than a place for the living.”

As well as its prehistoric story, Forteviot was a significant royal site in the eighth and ninth centuries, bounded by the impressive carved Dupplin Cross on the Gask Ridge, near the present-day A9, which is now housed at St Serf’s Church, Dunning, and another carved cross at Invermay, on a ridge on the opposite side of the River Earn valley, of which only fragments remain.

Excavators have this summer been working on a high-status medieval cemetery associated with the landscape’s royal connections, and are trying to identify a ‘palace’ of Forteviot referred to as the place where King Kenneth MacAlpin, one of the first rulers of a united Scotland, died in 858AD. “We want to find out what a ninth century ‘palace’ would look like,” explained Dr Noble. “It would probably be very different to what we imagine a palace to be today.”

They are also excavating a third site, a hillfort at Greens of Invermay.

The Strathearn Environs and Royal Forteviot (SERF) project was initially launched as a five-year study, but Dr Noble said they hope to secure funding and permission from landowners Lord Forteviot and Dupplin Estate to continue beyond that.

There is an Open Day with tours of the site this Sunday afternoon, August 16. For more information on the dig at Forteviot, click here