Posted on 05/24/2014 11:48:29 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
A Neolithic home which is south-west Scotland’s earliest known house, two cemeteries carrying 20 Bronze Age cremations, a pair of rare jet necklaces and thousands of flint tools used in Mesolithic coastal industries have been discovered during the creation of a bypass in Dumfries and Galloway.
Work on the new Dunragit intersection has uncovered a huge variety of artefacts from 7,000 years of Scottish history. Criss-crossing palaeochannels on the edge of a former estuary obscured a house which is thought to date from 6000 BC, accompanied by a perforated stone adze used to work wood...
No bone survived in either of the cists the necklaces were found in, although archaeologists are planning chemical tests to deduce whether the bodies had been removed from graves or ritually deposited during the late third and second millennia BC.
They say the necklaces are of “exceptional” quality, originating from Yorkshire in the first examples of their kind to be found in Scotland during recent times.
Of the 20 cremations, the remains of an adult were carried by one wholly intact urn...
Six Iron Age roundhouses point to only the second Iron Age village ever found in Galloway, dating from around 2,000 years ago and containing evidence of metalworking and a Romano-British Iron Age brooch. Experts observed uncertainty over the impact the Romans had on the community, having used a Roman road which passes close to the site.
In other discoveries, knapping waste and more than 13,500 flint microliths were attributed to a “core focus” of Mesolithic activity by occupants likely to have exploited the nearby resources of fish, shellfish and hunting grounds. Beaker pottery could also be linked to European immigration.
The new bypass route, the A75, was chosen to avoid disturbing archaeology and cropmarks. The remains were discovered during the removal of topsoil.
(Excerpt) Read more at culture24.org.uk ...
The Beaker People antedate the Picts. It’s weird, the British Isles were a big destination for mass migrations, and in historical times, for invasion, right up until the late 17th c (subsequent attempts have failed).
Or maybe the streetwalkers.
That history is pretty sparsely understood though, am I correct in that?
I plan someday to read about the Picts. Those people made the most beautiful artworks in stone and metal, just lovely.
They left almost nothing in writing, which is a common problem among known vanished cultures, including those which are known to have been literate (like the Etruscans).
http://www.lib.umt.edu/lang/celtich.htm#Pictish
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picts
Making the Picts mysterious, which is perhaps why I find them interesting.
Although I do wish always for some big find, like a ‘Pict’etta Stone.
It’s not unlikely that there was quite a lot written about them in monasteries later burned by those happy-go-lucky Viking raiders.
Uh uh. Match-happy monks, grr.
Oops, make that vault-burning Vikings, grr.
:’D
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