No abstract

The first account of the Scottish Iron Age which attempted to set its monuments and material cultures in their British and North European context was that published by V. G. Childe in 1935. Childe suggested that the brochs, which had hitherto been at best discussed in a purely local context, might be understood better if regarded as only one aspect of the more widespread phenomenon of the hundreds of tiny stone fortlets, or duns, of the highlands and islands, termed by him the Castle Complex to distinguish them from the larger forts of the lowlands. He also suggested that parallels between the bone weaving equipment found on broch sites and in the Glastonbury lake village provided a clue to the origins of their immigrant builders.Eighteen years ago Sir Lindsay Scott, following Childe's lead, published in these Proceedings two long papers on the brochs and wheelhouses of the Scottish Atlantic Iron Age and the fact that subsequent discoveries have disproved some of his ideas does not detract from the great service that he rendered with them to British archaeology. He was the first to undertake a comprehensive and detailed survey of the available evidence—both excavated and from surface fieldwork—about two classes of drystone structures which had previously all too frequently been treated as a peculiarly Scottish phenomenon having few clear relationships with Iron Age cultures further south.

No abstract

Since 1980 a new view about the nature and development of the Scottish iron age broch towers has emerged among younger prehistorians in the north -one which emphasizes their purely local origin and development, wider range of architectural ftatures and long period of construction and use, over half a millennium or more. This contrasts with the author's earlier views which supposed these hollow-walled drystone towers to have been built over a .fairly limited time span in the middle Iron Age, as being structurally homogeneous and as having enough exotic elements among their associated finds to justify the belief that influential immigrants had a hand in the emergence of important elements of the 'broch cultures'. Crucial to the new view is a reinterpretation of the Orkney broch of Gurness which in effect links its architecture to the late bronze age roundhouse site at Bu and supports the theory of local evolution. The evidence reviewed here shows that this view can be sustained neither at Gurness nor at the very similar Midhowe broch nearby. A significant part of the 'new wave' hypothesis about brochs-which has been endorsed by several senior colleagues-is therefore based on doubifitl evidence and a new synthesis is urgently required. This episode seems to be another example of the instability which can a.fftict some modern British prehistoric archaeology, which tends to embrace new ideas too easily and to ignore existing evidence which is inconvenient. BACKGROUND