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Few people have made such a profound impact on the understanding of Scotland’s prehistoric and early medieval past as Anna Ritchie. In 2022, the Scottish Society for Northern Studies and the Pictish Arts Society jointly hosted a conference to celebrate Anna’s career, and this book comprises a wide-ranging variety of the contributions to this event.
Anna’s impressive career is thoroughly recounted in Ian Ralston’s introductory chapter, before Alison Sheridan, Susanna Harris, and Lilja Husmo jointly provide an illuminating chapter on the unique late Bronze Age Kirtomy horse-hair hat from Sutherland: not only its cultural context, but the fascinating circumstances of its discovery and the story of the slow realisation of its significance. This is followed by Val Turner’s examination of Pictish settlement sites in Shetland, which forms an invaluable reference paper on this aspect of Shetland’s past and consciously builds on Anna Ritchie’s own contribution to Pictish studies. So, too, does Gordon Noble and James O’Driscoll’s preliminary analysis of their fieldwork searching for an elite Pictish centre around Aberlemno in Angus, during the course of which they made the extraordinary find of a hitherto-unknown buried Pictish symbol stone reused as paving in the elaborate entranceway of a later building dated to the 10th-12th centuries AD, uncommon in itself. Kelly Kilpatrick presents the story of the discovery, acquisition, and subsequent obscurity of three inscribed stones from Burghead, Greenloaning, and Kilmadock, as well as a reanalysis of their inscriptions, while Christina Cowart-Smith examines the early medieval high-cross fragments from Abercorn and its Northumbrian and Pictish sculptural context. The book closes with Alan Macniven’s examination of the roles of feasting and reciprocal gift exchange in the economy of Norse Scotland and later medieval Gaelic culture, via a variety of historical and archaeological evidence.
The eclectic aspects of Scottish archaeology covered in this book aptly reflect the extensive range of Anna Ritchie’s interests and provide fascinating insights into the prehistory and early medieval archaeology of northern Scotland.
REVIEW BY RONAN TOOLIS
Common Ground in Scottish Archaeology: contributions in honour of Anna Ritchie
Kelly Kilpatrick (ed.)
The Scottish Society for Northern Studies, £19.95
ISBN 978-1036934125
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