The series on Scottish antiquities published by Batsford and sponsored by Historic Scotland aims to present authoritative scholarship in a style and format which the general reader can understand. It has now covered most periods of Scottish history and prehistory, but the title given to this book may raise false expectations, since its coverage stops in ad 500, just as the eminently Celtic Scots, who were to give the country its name, arrived from Ireland. As the author points out, our Iron Age ancestors in all probability did not conceive themselves as being Celtic; it was nineteenth‐century philologists who made that deduction. The book was originally to have been called Iron Age Scotland, which would have been a more descriptive title but for the fact that it starts with the later Bronze Age (about 1000 bc). In this period ‐ as long as that which separates us from the original Scots ‐ it is not surprising that the sites excavated by archaeologists have widely differing characteristics, or that their interpretation may be a maker of controversy requiring much hypothetical reconstruction. Those illustrated in this way range from a broch provided with an overall roof and a crannog (or lake dwelling) with its own little harbour attached, rather as we would build a garage on to a house, to the large two‐storey hut which the Iron Age Celts would have regarded as the pinnacle of advanced architecture at about the same time as the Athenians were constructing the Parthenon.
Sometimes it is possible for the archaeologist to suggest economic, sociological or even cultural trends; for instance, that farmers were moving on to less productive land, presumably as a result of overpopulation, as early as 1000 bc, or that many hill‐forts are not as defensible as they ought to have been and may therefore have been built to emphasise the social status of the owners. But, even with the aid of written sources, which begin to be useful towards the end of the period, both archaeologists and historians still have to rely on speculation when it comes to Celtic religion. One would like to know by what warrant the illustrator depicted Celtic priests (if that is what they are) in bizarre straw hats!
The narrative account of this remote period of Scottish archaeology, which, we are assured, has not had a book devoted to it since 1883, is, as usual, copiously illustrated and provided with a list of relevant sites, a short bibliography and glossary, and an index. Like the rest of this moderately priced series, it ought to be in all libraries with serious pretensions to a coverage of Scottish history.
