SLIPP Project Blog

 In addition to archaeological and ethnographic work, this season I am spending considerable time in various archives across Scotland. The purpose of this work is to locate moments at which Pictishness is defined and refined historically--and to analyze these moments carefully: Why did people care about Pictishness at a given time, or within a given project/event? To what was Pictishness being likened or with what was it being contrasted? What materials (artifacts, images, languages, etc.) were mobilized as evidence of Pictishness? While it is always exciting to work on an excavation or to carry out ethnographic interviews, archival research may be my personal favorite component of SLIPP's methodology. The archives often offer a view of social interactions unfolding across several years, available to be paged through by an interested researcher in a few hours!  Over the past few weeks, I was fortunate to be able to spend some time in the National Records of Scotland , where I ...

This project’s central research question— How have people defined and shaped Pictishness through their interactions with past materials and places?— has many dimensions to it. Later in the season, I will discuss how the Picts themselves, living in the first millennium CE, engaged with prehistoric remains in the making of new group distinctions and cosmologies. Yet, while the Picts may have disappeared at the end of the 9 th century, Pictishness remains a living concept. In the thousand years following the Pictish period, interest in the Pictish past and the Picts’ place in history has ebbed and flowed. In present-day Scotland, perceptions of the Pictish past are changing rapidly. Previously a little-known and mysterious barbarian people, new archaeological and historical research programs over the past couple of decades have shown the Picts to have been more literate, more artistically and architecturally prolific, and more connected to Eurasian continent than we had previously thou...

As of May 6th, I have begun the final and most substantial phase of my dissertation field research. If you are just now joining me, this research project (The Semiotics of Landscape and Identity in Pictland Project, or SLIPP) is my attempt at investigating how the figure of the Picts emerged in northern British late antiquity and how it continued (and continues) to be recast and redefined through practices of placemaking and engagement with the material remains of the past.  View of the Iron Age hillfort at Tap o'  Noth, whose outer rampart encloses hundreds of Pictish-period hut platforms. This is the site that inspired this research project.  The project is framed by three methodological approaches to three historical moments--as a friend recently put it, a "Pictish Triptych." Archaeological methods will allow me to explore how people in the Pictish past (ca. 300-900 CE) drew on the material remains of their past to formulate their own identity and that of their neighbo...