Transcript: Professor Richard Bradley: VFT 3 Kilmartin Glen
Question 1: Why were materials from earlier monuments and rock art sites
deliberately incorporated into Bronze Age burial cairns?
My name is Richard Bradley; I’m Professor in Archaeology at Reading University. In a curious way, this [in
answer to the question] is something that happens over large parts of Europe, it’s not a particularly Scottish
thing or indeed limited to one period of time. We very frequently find that what had originally been either
standing stones of pieces of carved outcrop are reused and incorporated in burials. You can see this
sporadically the whole way from the Crimea to Italy, to Spain and Portugal, to Brittany and to the British
Isles.
It seems as if two things are happening: one is that particular places that have a special significance are
broken up as relics and reused. Now, we know very little about what happened at those places but the
excavation at Torbhlaren sheds a little light on it. And an excavation outside the Kilmartin valley on Ben
Lawers, again suggests that these are small scale, for want of a good term, shrines, and that perhaps relics
of those are used. And where they go into the stone coffins, called cists, they usually go in after quite a long
period when they are antiquities, they are references to a considerable past and normally, though the
records aren’t very good, those stones are reversed, so the pattern is facing towards the corpse, whereas
on a natural outcrop it usually faces towards an extensive view.
The other case is where you have standing stones, and they’re much more problematic. In Kilmartin it’s a
particular problem because you have Ri Cruin, where it looks as if there’s a reused upright stone
incorporated in an early Bronze-aged cist and that that stone has been decorated and redecorated over a
considerable period of time and has probably been brought from another structure entirely.
The most recent suggestion, which I like, is that the original design is Neolithic; it is re-carved and ultimately
re-carved so it has an early Bronze Age formal weapon, a halberd, on it and that the stone itself is
transported to a new location.
The same is true at Nether Largie where the very large stone in the cist, which is well known for having
carvings of both cup marks and carvings of axes, is almost certainly, originally, a standing stone. The lowest
part of the rock is un-weathered, more or less undecorated, as if it’s been standing in the ground, while all
the rest is exposed to the elements and then the whole thing has been transported and built into a burial
chamber.
This seems to happen in a number of cases and one possibility, and it’s only a possibility, and it’s a
possibility mainly suggested by work on the continent, is that standing stones are really regarded more like
statues; they refer to a particular person or a particular being, it may be a supernatural being or a being
from the past and are actually are thought of as having some form of animation maybe even a human form.
And one of the odd things with Scotland, or indeed with Britain, is that we don’t have human features put
on those stones or not in any unambiguous way; whereas once you look at Brittany, at Iberia, for instance
they are patently decorated with human features and sometimes carved precisely to look like statues. So
you may have in this case, memorials to particular people being brought into the tomb.
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Transcript: Professor Richard Bradley: VFT 3 Kilmartin Glen
07/02/13
Then at Kilmartin there’s actually a third complication and I think it may be a complication that is peculiar
to Kilmartin, I simply haven’t thought about this enough, and that is that some of the settings of standing
stones with cups and rings and cup marks, appear to have been prised off existing outcrops. And since
often they’re only decorated on one side, it may well be that the stone was decorated long before it was
removed, and so some of the settings of standing stones may consist of recycled pieces of rock art, where
the decoration is considerably older than the stone setting itself. And that would certainly be consistent
with what we’re learning about the chronology of carvings, that they start in the Neolithic period, perhaps
as early as 3000 BC but some, and I stress there’s not much evidence, some of the stone alignments we find
on the west coast may be as late as 1200 or even 1000 BC and they may consist of relics in the same way as
those that are in the tombs.
So there’s a considerable attempt I think to take things that are significant, ancient, have particular
meanings, perhaps particular associations with specific people and to incorporate them in the tomb; and
it’s possible, though we certainly can’t prove it, that the same might apply to other forms of monument.
I’ve always been suspicious of the decorated stones in the larger stone circle at Temple Wood and whether
they had been brought form some other monument or some other location. I certainly don’t think we can
prove this.
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