The Origin and Development of the Broch and Wheelhouse Building Cultures of the Scottish Iron Age

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.

THE BROCH CULTURES OF ATLANTIC SCOTLAND. PART 2. THE MIDDLE IRON AGE: HIGH NOON AND DECLINEc.200 BC–AD 550

“…Firstly, the massive‐walled broch tower – which obviously varied in height (MacKie 1965a, fig. 7, lower) – is not just a stone building but a complex wooden roundhouse with two or more storeys protected by a high stone wall.…”

“…The first part of this essay (MacKie 2008) offered an approach to tracing the origin and development of the broch‐ and wheelhouse‐building cultures of the Scottish Atlantic Iron Age which differs from other current approaches and tries to build on the four‐pronged research programme advocated more than 40 years ago – namely architectural analysis, the study of related material cultures and of the setting of the sites in the landscape, and of course accurate dating, both relative and absolute (MacKie 1965a). Current ideas, most recently articulated by Romankiewicz (2009), tend not to consider material culture and to concentrate instead on the supposedly related but diverse group of stone ‘Atlantic roundhouses’; sequences of these are built going back to Bronze Age and even earlier times, culminating in the standardized broch tower in the Middle Iron Age with its unique high hollow or galleried wall.…”

The integration of chronological and archaeological information to date building construction: an example from Shetland, Scotland, UK

“…This paper presents a methodology for dating the construction of a building, using the case study of the broch tower at Old Scatness, Shetland (OS Grid reference HU 390 111). Dating the broch tower is particularly important as such towers represent a well defined structural form (Mackie, 1965;Armit, 2003) and theories regarding the origins, and therefore the date that these structures appeared, has been a hotly debated topic for over 70 years (Childe, 1935;Scott, 1948;Mackie, 1965;Armit, 2003).…”

Palaeoenvironments, the archaeological record and cereal pollen detection at Clickimin, Shetland, Scotland

“…The timeframe for Hamilton's study was based on his estimates [37, p. 8], as no radiocarbon dates were obtained from the excavations: Hamilton's sequence of events and the conclusions associated with them have been challenged on stratigraphic, constructional and artefactual grounds by Fojut ([33,23ff]; see also [43,44,54] Critical differences between the two assessments include an Iron rather than Bronze Age date for the 'farmstead' and the 'flooding' episode, if it occurred at all, is now said to have happened after the broch was under construction or in use.…”