SLIPP Project Blog

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...