SETTLEMENT EVIDENCE FOR CELTIC SOCIETY

Aim: To use settlement evidence to show that Celtic society was heroic and hierarchical.

Clearly, there is material culture to suggest that Celtic society was heroic with warfare and warriors playing a valued role in society. In such a heroic society, there would be a distinct hierarchy with warrior elites at the top of the social pyramid. Archaeologically, there is some SETTLEMENT evidence to suggest that Celtic society was heroic and hierarchical, but equally there is evidence to suggest society was made up of fragmented, settled farming groups.

We need to look at the settlement evidence in more detail; however, it is important to appreciate at the outset that there is a lot of evidence and there are many different types of Iron Age/Celtic settlements.

In terms of settlement evidence there are: ROUND HOUSES CRANNOGS BROCHS DUNS WHEELHOUSES HILLFORTS ENCLOSURES And unenclosed settlements too.

These settlements are found in different parts of the country and can be used to substantiate ideas that Celtic society was heroic and hierarchical. However, the settlement evidence serves to do more than just that…. it can also tell us about the Celtic economy, social groupings and daily life.

Clearly, settlement evidence is invaluable for giving us an understanding of the Celts.

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DIFFERENT TYPES OF SETTLEMENT

Many Celtic settlements display common features/traits from which we can make assumptions about Celtic society. For example, many Celtic settlements are DEFENDED. We will study each of these different defended settlement types. However, before looking at the defended dwellings we need to look at the one settlement types which permeates the country – the ROUND HOUSE.

1. The Round House:

What is a round house?

A round house is a distinctive British circular building which is amongst the most common prehistoric remains in the landscape. They were widely constructed in Scotland throughout the Bronze Age and Iron Age and are found in loose agglomerations (clusters) across the country.

They are built of timber with conical roofs and were often surrounded by farming land. Many hilltop forts have large numbers of round houses enclosed within them and some have been cut into the hill, sitting on what looks like a platform (hence the word platform settlements). A ring ditch surrounds most.

In theory some round houses could accommodate a family grouping whilst others may have held up to 30 cattle downstairs and humans upstairs! These huts were not just simple little huts - many were ostentatious buildings, large and elaborate. They were built to display prestige/status as well as to keep their occupants dry, warm and sheltered. Many were found in little village groupings such as at Jarlshof in Shetland. These seem to be like small farming communities who were so good at farming they managed to make produce a surplus which required storage. This surplus was stored in souterrains; underground passages with small chambers for storing agricultural produce.

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Round houses at Jarlshof, Iron Age village in Shetland

Souterrains, or earth-houses as they are sometimes known in Scotland, are long stone-lined underground passages of dry masonry which lead to chambers roofed with massive stone lintels. They were cellars built partly or wholly underground and were often entered from timber or stone roundhouses. They are characteristic of Iron Age settlement and were probably used for the storage of agricultural produce. They suggest a picture of a settled, agrarian/farming Iron Age.

Culsh Earth House, near Aberdeen.

Towards the end of the LPRIA there were fewer timber roundhouses, and certainly fewer of the big, elaborate ones. They were being replaced by stone-built round houses and by other settlement types altogether.

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Notably, the commonality of the round house is one of the few pieces of evidence which may suggest a degree of common “Celticness”.

CRANNOGS

What is a crannog?

A crannog is a defensive structure and a symbol of power, wealth and status.

Crannogs are small, man-made islands that are found throughout Scotland in lochs and other inland waters. Similar structures are also known in other parts of the British Isles, particularly Ireland.

Crannogs were places of habitation and refuge, usually fortified, raised enclosures constructed of layers of rocks shored up with stakes driven into the loch bed. Many were connected to the land by causeways (walkways), which were sometimes concealed by lying just beneath the surface of the water so that they weren't immediately evident to would-be intruders.

Reconstructed crannog at Loch Tay

Some crannogs may have been large enough to house whole farming communities; many were relatively small, and may have been important strongholds for powerful local families or elites.

The amount of work that would have been involved in their construction suggests that they were built in troubled times, when even relatively small settlements of people felt the need for a secure base to which they could retreat at times of danger. The crannogs reflect the fact that in some parts of Northern Britain, there must have been

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a need to DISPLAY STATUS and to DEFEND ONESELF. Both are integral traits of a heroic, warrior-based aristocratic society.

Source 1A crannog is a timber house built on an artificial, or partly artificial, island, and it represents a form of defended homestead that was apparently first adopted in the latter half of the first millennium BC and continued to be built into late historical times. These small islands were built close to the shores of lochs, sometimes linked to the shore by causeways, and they consist of layers of timbers and brushwood, consolidated by stones and vertical wooden piles driven down through the layers.pp110 , Scotland: Archaeology and early history by Graham and Anna Ritchie 1981 Thames and Hudson Ltd, 30 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QP

Source 2 recreation of a crannog (p34 Armit).

Crannogs are not found throughout Scotland. They tend to be found in the Highlands and in the south-west of Scotland. This is partly due to the natural geography and partly through choice. It may also suggest local preferences for different settlement types, reflecting the tribal nature of Celtic society.

However, the key point to remember is that Crannogs further suggest that CELTIC SOCIETY was HIERARCHICAL with a warrior elite living on specially

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constructed islands/crannogs in order to DISPLAY THEIR STATUS and GAIN PRESTIGE.

BROCHS

What is a Broch?Brochs were fortified dwelling houses, massive strong dry-stone built towers clearly built to accommodate extended families, their stores and some of their livestock. There are about 500 brochs in North Britain and most of these are found in the far north and west, in mainland areas such as Caithness and in the islands. They have intra-mural cells inside. This means that there are cells for storage built within the walls. There are two main types – ground galleried and solid based. The ground galleried brochs have these cells on the ground level whilst solid based ones have cells from the first floor upwards.

Mousa on Shetland, best surviving broch

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Dun Telve Broch in the Highlands.Shows the tapering shape and galleries in the thick wall.

Radio carbon dating suggests brochs were built and in use from the first century BC, in the late pre-Roman Iron Age, and were occupied for several hundreds of years. They tend to be near the sea.

They were complex structures which required immense skill to build, needing internal scaffolding. They also took advantage of ideas of insulation, showing a high degree of architectural sophistication.

Why were they built?To some extent they were built to provide security since there is only ever one entrance, which is long and narrow and would have only admitted one person at a time. The entrance was barred by a massive wooden door and there were no windows or other openings to the outside. There was also a walkway to the highest point of the broch, making it easy to see and repel attackers. The fact that brochs are close to the sea arguably suggests that they may have been a response to sea-borne invaders.

However, the main reason they were built would be for PRESTIGE. Brochs were meant to impress and were probably houses for tribal chiefs or important farmers. These massive buildings dominated the landscape and demonstrated power, wealth and authority. They were like crannogs in this respect. To even get the broch built suggests some degree of local authority since they would have needed a huge amount of labour to build – again suggesting the existence of a powerful elite which could commission their construction. To coerce or pay people to do the work suggests some type of social hierarchy. Also, it is worth noting that the uniformity of design suggests

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that there may have been itinerant ‘broch builders’ going around building the brochs, suggesting that Celtic society was sufficiently economically sophisticated to support a class of highly-skilled, full-time craftsmen.

Some brochs have villages huddling around them. Places like Gurness in Orkney look like a laird’s house with associated workers around them. This also suggests some type of hierarchical society. Fragments of pottery found at Gurness show the owners even enjoyed a lifestyle of imported wines and olives from the Mediterranean, at a time before the Romans invaded.

About AD 100 the fashion for broch building declined, however, the communities and settlements around them continued to flourish.

Source 3Some 500 brochs have survived, mostly in the north and west, and they are a uniquely Scottish phenomenon; many are now little more than mounds of tumbled stone, but some are still awesome memorials to the determination of their builders.

As an architectural fashion, they were relatively short-lived. They seem to have developed by about 100BC out of combined traditions of thick walled roundhouses, and small stone-built forts, and the need for them seems to have passed by about AD 100, although of course many continued in use for a century or more thereafter.

Essentially the broch is a massively built roundhouse grown tall. Not all were as tall as the most famous of broch on the Shetland island of Mousa (still 13 m high and originally at least 15m), but they were all circular towers, with no windows and normally a single entrance, built with walls exceedingly thick at the base and tapering as they rose. In the far north the wall-base is commonly solid stonework, but elsewhere it contains cells and galleries; common to all brochs is the characteristic hollow-wall construction of the upper part of the tower, for this reduced the weight of the dry stone masonry and thus allowed greater height to be achieved safely.

Horizontal slabs across the hollow wall-core bonded the inner and outer faces together and allowed a stairway to be created within the wall, leading up to a lookout gallery at the top of the broch. The cells and galleries were probably used for storage, apart from the guard cells sometimes opening off the entrance passage, behind the door.

The ground floor of the broch acted as living room, furnished with a slab-built hearth and storage tanks, water-cistern or well, and sleeping accommodation was on a timber gallery lining the upper part of the broch. These have long since rotted away, but excavation has revealed postholes in the floors of several brochs.

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pp67-9 Scotland BC by Anna Ritchie, Crown Copyright 1988, First Published 1988, Historic Buildings and Monuments, Scottish Development Departments, Edinburgh(Historic Scotland)

Source 4These thick-walled and sometimes double-walled structures (brochs), often with towers between forty and fifty feet in height, which were built to defend a homestead rather than a natural promontory or the court of a king or chieftain, flourished in the first century AD, the age of Agricola (Roman general and governor of Britain) but had a much shorter useful life than other forms of fortification.p5;Scotland: A New History by Michael Lynch; Michael Lynch 1991,1992 published by Pimlico, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW 1V 2SA

Source 5In the past it was thought that brochs were built solely to protect the occupants. They were imposing stone structures with no windows and only a single entrance. However, they do not make very much sense in terms of formal warfare, because they could not withstand any form of prolonged siege. Although some brochs have wells, many are without a source of fresh water. Even if fresh water was available within the broch, attackers could have driven off some of the livestock remaining outside, since it is unlikely that all the cattle of a family or community could have been brought inside the broch for protection. Attackers could have burnt the crop belonging to the broch family, who would then have been likely to die of starvation in the winter. In a similar way to the late medieval Scottish towerhouses, brochs were probably intended to impress others, although they would also have served to protect their occupants from small-scale raids. They are often built on low hills, which would have served to have made them even more impressive.pp30-1; ‘Settlement and Sacrifice: The Later Prehistoric People of Scotland’ by Richard Hingley; Richard Hingley, first published in Great Britain in 1998 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, E11 1TB

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Source 6 shows the Broch at Mousa, Shetland, which has survived virtually intact

Broch, Mousa, Shetland; ground plan and section, After The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, Inventory of Orkney and Shetland, Edinburgh, 1946, vol. 3, pp 49 and 52. figs. 531 and 534

SO, BROCHS SUGGEST A HIERARCHICAL CELTIC SOCIETY IN THE NORTH AND THE WEST OF SCOTLAND.DUNS

Source 7 The other major category of stone-built forts are the ‘duns’. ‘Dun’ is an all-encompassing term which can include anything from small thick-walled homesteads to

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large sites closer to the size of hillforts. ‘Dun’ means ‘a fortified place’ and this is why many brochs have the ‘dun’ element in their names.

The distribution of brochs and duns are largely complementary. Most duns are in Argyll and adjacent regions including the Western Isles. Their numbers decrease towards the North where the concentration of brochs is greatest.

p48 Prehistoric Scotland by Ann MacSween and Mick Sharp, B T Batsford, 1989

Source 8In Argyll, Galloway and across parts of Central Scotland, the remains of substantial circular stone-built houses are often called ‘duns’. Many of these are large house circles which are not quite as complex as the brochs. They are often placed on the tops of hills, helping make them more imposing. When excavated … duns turn out to have been substantial and complex roundhouses built of stone and timber, with wooden roofs covered in thatch. They often do not contain the staircases that occur in brochs and many may only have been of one storey.

p32; ‘Settlement and Sacrifice: The Later Prehistoric People of Scotland’ by Richard Hingley; Richard Hingley, first published in Great Britain in 1998 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, E11 1TB

Source 9The term ‘dun’ is used in Scotland to distinguish a class of small fort enclosing an area up to about 375 sq. m, usually approximately circular or oval, and characterized by a thick dry-stone wall. Duns have a wide distribution in western and southern Scotland, but most are to be found in Argyll; their distribution overlaps with that of brochs in the west, but the two types of structures are essentially complementary in their geographical location.

pp108 , Scotland: Archaeology and early history by Graham and Anna Ritchie 1981 Thames and Hudson Ltd, 30 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QP

WHEELHOUSES

Source 10Wheelhouses are so called because of their distinctive ground plan in which a series of regularly spaced stone piers radiates from the centre like the spokes of a wheel. These buildings are extremely common in the Western Isles and are also found in

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Shetland, where a particularly fine series of wheelhouses was built around the abandoned ‘complex’ roundhouse at Jarlshof.

p41, Celtic Scotland by Ian Armit, Ian Armit 1997, published by B. T. Batsford Ltd, 583 Fulham Road, London, SW6 5BY

Source 11Plan of an excavated wheelhouse at Kilphedir, South Uist

So, settlements such as crannogs, brochs, duns and wheelhouses all offer insights into the nature of Celtic society during the LPRIA.

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