When investigating life beyond the frontier, it is easy to be swept up in the Roman narrative of conquests and battles against savages and barbarians. But when looking at Roman propaganda monuments, with scenes of combat, slaughter and submission, we have to consider the other players in this game – the locals. Scotland was no empty landscape waiting to be conquered, but a land full of people with their own cultures, aspirations and traditions.
In the surviving histories, ‘barbarians’ are stock characters to be conquered and enslaved – or taxed. But archaeology can provide a more rounded view of these ‘people without history’. A recent find serves as a taster: a mould for making counterfeit Roman coins. It was found on an Iron Age site at Brighouse Bay, on the north side of the Solway Firth. This site overlooked the Roman military build-up on the Cumbrian coast – a perfect market for such fakes. This simple demonstration that the locals were capable of exploiting the newcomers reveals a less one-sided relationship than Roman propaganda would have us believe. Yet the conquerors certainly projected their influence north of the border, and their meddling in local politics may even have triggered the rise of a formidable new enemy: the Picts.
Iron Age societies
Iron Age Scotland was home to many societies on the eve of Roman contact in the AD 70s. By the early 1st century AD, the age of hillforts – those great monuments that dominate our view of the Iron Age – was essentially past. There is little or no evidence for defences being constructed or maintained, although groups of houses still sheltered in the old ramparts. In the north and west, building of those other classic monuments, the brochs, was also all but over. Yet these sturdy structures were still maintained and inhabited. In some areas, such as Orkney and Caithness, villages grew up around them at about this time. These look like vivid expressions of the quintessential Iron Age social model, with a powerful chief in the broch surrounded by his or her dependents, all clustered within an enclosing wall and ditch. Yet the visibility of such a hierarchy in the settlement plan is unusual.
