Ethnography at the Tarbat Discovery Centre

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 9th 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 thought.

Heritage organizations like the Tarbat Discovery Centre are some of the main sites where this new scholarship is conveyed to the public. The Tarbat Discovery Centre, which occupies the historic St Colman’s Church, is a museum in Portmahomack, Easter Ross, conserving and displaying the history of the Tarbat Peninsula. It was also the site of University of York excavations in the 1990s and 2000s which revealed the area around the church to have been a major Pictish monastic settlement. Importantly for our understanding of the period, the excavations uncovered extensive evidence for parchment manufacture. No longer brutish barbarians, the Picts could now be seen as skilled, literate monks and craftsmen.

St Colman's Church, today housing the Tarbat Discovery Centre


In the Tarbat Discovery Centre’s museum space, visitors bringing their own preconceptions about the Picts are confronted with this new information, viewing and interacting directly with Pictish stone carving, replica manuscript work, and host of other materials—all of which intermingles with items from Tarbat’s extensive non-Pictish history.

The museum space, viewed from the west end of the church building.

To better understand how people are positioning the Picts within historical narrative, I will be interviewing visitors and volunteers at the Tarbat Discovery Centre for one week per month over the course of this field season. As the Centre’s first Scholar in Residence, I will be sharing my findings with the organization to help them improve their visitor experience and outreach.

This week is my first stint of residency, and I have had many delightful and intriguing conversations with visitors and volunteers alike. Stay tuned for more updates from my time at the Centre! 



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