BREAKING NEWS ....more New Light on Dumyat: Capital of the Maeatae.
Even more new discoveries from Stirling's most iconic prehistoric monument.
Today’s article focuses on an update from our recent excavations at Dumyat and is a wee gloss to an earlier article on Stirling’s most impressive, important and under researched prehistoric fortification!
Dumyat (Dun Maeatae) dominates the Forth crossings at Stirling and, it was the Capitol of the Maeatae whom I have written of before and how their defiance of the Roman Empire resulted in Scotland’s only recorded genocide.
Cutting Edge Technology!
So the new results involve the worked quartz we recovered from the trench, all within the topsoil. An oddity of Stirling is that we don’t have much flint but we do have lots and lots of quartz and it outnumbers the flint 10 or 15 to 1. Quartz and flint were used before we had metal, a simple and effective way to create a tool.
Now when this stuff is found it means that someone made or used a tool on the very spot it was recovered and I tend to think its 3-4000 years old. The material is most frequently residual: it was dropped and remained in the soil as the generations piled one upon another over the millennia. This is always a mind blowing experience…. to be so tangibly linked to the far past. However, I consistently ruin the moment, I hold it aloft and remark at how old it is and then to the horror of onlookers I pop it in my mouth to clean it with my tongue as you shouldn’t brush it with a cloth. Still double yuck!
Stone Age Technology in the Iron Age?
So when we found the worked quartz at Dumyat I thought good stuff there must have been a prehistoric hunter here, perhaps venturing up in the Summer following deer or perhaps picking blaeberries. But…Scotland’s leading expert on worked quartz Dr Torben Ballin (who lives in Falkirk but shops in Stirling as Falkirk has neither a Markies nor a Waitrose…how on earth do these poor souls exist! [Editor…I take it this is what passes for a joke these days Murray…please try harder.] disagreed and he thinks that its Iron Age. Now before anyone suggests that this means our ancestors were primitive…..it simply means that they were practical and that metal was very expensive and so traditional technologies continued to be used. Anyway here is the report for you to read yourselves! This is what your subscriptions are buying…so thanks and I hope you think its worth it.
Stirling Rocks
One further little conclusion from all of this is that quartz recovery from Stirling appears to be at unique levels compared to the rest of Scotland. Every dig you and I do together (and I really do mean that) finds quartz, a situation that occurs no where else in Scotland. So does this really mean that there is something different about early people in Stirling compared to the rest of Scotland? As much as it would please me to say yes, the truth is that there can’t be any difference. So what else might explain the data? Why the answer is obvious………us and what we do. Our digs are slow because you're all volunteers, we take our time and learn and joke and have fun and so we recover more including the quartz that most other people miss. So bravo, well done all of you…take a bow.
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Another very interesting read. Thank you.