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So You Think You Know the Story of Scotland? Scarf Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Contentscontents So You Think You Know The Story Of Scotland? ScARF Society of Antiquaries of Scotland ContentsContents Introduction 1 The Atlantis of the North Sea 4 How did climate change affect the world of our ancestors? Frankenstein’s Mummies 6 How has our treatment of the dead changed over time? Musselburgh and the Mysteries of Mithras 10 How do we understand ancient religions from the artefacts left behind? Facing the Past 12 o You Think You Know The Story temple to worship at the What can new technologies reveal about Scotland’s past? Of Scotland? altar of a bull-slaying god S called Mithras. That Obscure Object of Desire 14 Eight thousand years parts preserved in peat On 6 April 1520, on the ago, after the collapse were reassembled as part snow-clad banks of the What can the life of an object tell us about the society that made it? of the Norwegian coastal of an arcane ritual. These River Fyris near the shelf known as the ‘Great would become some of Swedish town of Uppsala, Edge’, a gigantic tidal the earliest mummified an army of Scottish The Tartan Army on Tour 18 wave devastated the east remains ever found in the soldiers fought and died What was Scotland’s role in the world and how has it changed over time? coast of Scotland, the British Isles. for the cause of the Danish beginning of a process In the second century crown. Their dismembered that would see an entire AD, on the site of what bodies were discovered The Land of a Million Stories 22 landscape submerged is today a public park in five centuries later, buried How does research change our understanding of the past? beneath the North Sea. Musselburgh, the disciples in a mass grave beneath Around 1600BC, in a tiny of a mysterious Roman a cycle path. village on the Hebridean religion _ for a time as The Scottish Archaeological Research Framework 24 island of North Uist, a popular as Christianity _ Are You Sure? series of human body met in an underground ScARF Telling Scotland’s Story 1 ...TodaY, ACROSS THE LANDSCAPES OF ScotLAND, ARCHAEOLOGISTS CONTINUE to SEARCH FOR THE THREADS OF ScotLAND’S storY ... ...THEY ARE DIGGING IN REMOTE ISLAND CAVES, EXCAVATING BENEATH BUILDINGS IN OUR MODERN CITIES, AND DIVING IN he past does not stand still. And so the story of THE DARK WATERS OF OUR LOCHS... T Scotland – the real story – for ever changes. Some 14,000 years ago, as the glaciers The goal is to explore the uncharted territory of the last Ice Age melted away, people of what we do not know _ to fill in the blanks ventured northwards to hunt and explore. in the collective memory of Scotland and to These were our earliest ancestors _ nomads better understand how we lived 100, 1,000, who moved with the seasons through a wild and even 10,000 years ago. It is about ...THEY ARE ASKING land, and left only the faintest of traces asking questions, encouraging research and behind. argument, and puzzling out our past from QUESTIONS, ENCOURAGING every new fragment of evidence. RESEARCH AND ARGUMENT, But we can still find them, if we look AND PUZZLING OUT OUR hard enough. Buried beneath earth and sand, we have It is a million stories PAST FROM EVERY NEW discovered the places where those ancient FRAGMENT OF EVIDENCE... hunters first landed and set up camp. We waiting to be told, and have found flint arrowheads and barbed spear it is one story. It is the tips shaped from deer antler, millennia-old cooking pits and piles of discarded animal story of Scotland. bone. We can stand on the same ground and look the ghosts of our ancestors in the eye. We can give the story of Scotland a beginning. Today, across the landscapes of the nation, archaeologists continue to search for the many different threads of this one story. They are digging in remote island caves, excavating beneath buildings in our modern cities, and diving in the dark waters of our lochs. New technology is revolutionising the study of the past. Ground penetrating radar can detect long lost structures hidden in the earth, and laser scans can produce 3D models of entire landscapes and even reconstruct individual faces from human skulls. Now, for the first time, the Scottish Archaeological Research Framework (ScARF) is bringing together the combined knowledge of all our experts in one place. But this is just the first step. ScARF also marks the beginning of something even bigger. Spanning millennia _ from the earliest known traces of human activity to the present day _ it is attempting nothing less than the mapping out of the history of Scotland in its entirety. Telling Scotland’s Story 3 magine you are walking on the dunes of Montrose Bay, or along the golden expanse of sand by Aberdeen ’s famous Beach Ballroom. It is a sunny summer ’s I day and families are playing by the shoreline. Perhaps you are at the water ’s edge, trousers rolled up as you dip a toe in the surf. Then, all of a sudden, the tide rushes away from you at a remarkable of all, they have worked out its human population _ calculating that thousands speed. Soon, everyone on the beach has stopped what they are doing. of people could have been living on Just like you, they are staring over the wet sands towards the Doggerland when catastrophe struck. disappearing North Sea. The wind picks up, blowing into your face from _ Marine archaeology can take us back offshore. Maybe you see it first, before you hear it a great white line to the very moment when the tidal wave on the horizon. But soon you have to shout to be heard above the roar. hit, and it can describe the aftermath A wave 30 feet high and hundreds of miles long is heading towards you as Scotland gradually became part of an at tremendous speed. It will break on the beach and then surge inland, island. Yet it can do much more devastating everything in its path. It is already too late to save yourself than that. It can tell us what happened to our ancestors during a phase or anyone near you. of intense climate change. It can This sounds like the stuff of nightmares. The tidal wave it triggered caused the reconstruct a time of rising sea levels, Surely it couldn’t happen in Scotland. Or greatest natural disaster northern Europe disappearing coastlines and extreme could it? Chillingly, archaeology tells us has ever known. Shetland was engulfed weather patterns _ a scenario that that it already has. first, before the immense wall of water may sound eerily familiar. smashed into Scotland’s east coast. But Some 8,000 years ago, Scotland the greatest casualty was the land at the Today, from Shetland and Orkney to the was a ridge of mountains marking the centre of the peninsula. When the wave western seaboard and the Outer Hebri- ...There was a morning - just like any other north-western edge of Europe. To the subsided it was never the same again. des, the sea is steadily consuming many east, a vast, low-lying plain stretched of our coastal and island landscapes. - when our ancestors made their way to the _ Instead, like a prehistoric Atlantis, much shoreline to hunt and fish from Aberdeen to Denmark an of it was lost for ever beneath the waters Vital undiscovered traces of the past are abundant heartland for hunter-gatherers. of the North Sea. sinking beneath the waves, and it is a Slowly but surely, however, this land was race against time and tide to record and disappearing. Sea levels had continued to In the last hundred years, strange understand them before they are gone. rise since the end of the last Ice Age, fragments from this drowned world have Maybe they saw it first before they heard Yet this archaeology is not just about it. A wave thirty feet high and hundreds of and with every passing year more hunting been brought back to the surface. grounds were lost beneath the water. Mammoth ivory, lions’ teeth and bones of looking backwards. While underwater miles long was heading towards them at Over time, this gradual process may well ‘woolly’ rhino have been found tangled in worlds like Doggerland give incredible tremendous speed have isolated Britain from the rest of the fishermen’s nets. Dredged lumps of peat insights into lost peoples and ancient continent. But what we now believe is that have concealed harpoons fashioned from cataclysms, they also offer a cautionary it was not just climate change that helped deer antler, fish prongs and flint tools. tale, providing us with information that to create the island we are part of today Archaeologists now call the place that may be crucial to our future. After all, if _ it was also catastrophe. these artefacts came from ‘Doggerland’ it can happen to our ancestors, who is to It was already too late _ after the famous shipping forecast say it cannot happen to us too? to save themselves All along the east coast of Scotland, region of the Dogger Bank. thick lines of sand sediment have been found layered in the earth far above sea Over the past few decades, companies level. There are deposits in Shetland, the prospecting for oil and gas have, in minute Montrose Basin and even 50 miles inland detail, surveyed, probed and bored large along the Firth of Forth. Carbon dating of tracts of the North Sea floor.
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