Transcript: Dr Alison Sheridan, VFT 3: Kilmartin Glen
Question 1: How have the excavations at Upper Largie contributed to our
understanding of the ceremonial landscapes at Kilmartin Glen?
The excavations at the Upper Largie quarry have really opened up a whole new element in our
understanding of the archaeology of Kilmartin Glen and they have shown that there was a whole, what is
now invisible, element in the form of wooden, timber, monuments such as a Cursus monument and a
timber circle which nobody had dreamed of as being there.
The other really amazing thing is that the Upper Largie excavations over the years have produced evidence
for a very early Beaker grave. This dates to the Copper Age and it’s, I would argue (I have argued in print),
that it’s produced a Dutch-style grave with Dutch-style beakers, so we may well be looking at the grave of
somebody who’s come to Scotland from the continent sometime possibly as early as 2400 but certainly
between 2400 and 2200 BC.
And next to that grave is an equally spectacular grave, a later bit later than that, dating to the early Bronze
Age, sometime between 2150 and 1950 BC, and in that grave was a unique pot. So the upper part of that
pot is in the style of early Bronze Age Irish food vessels, which was the fashionable kind of pot of the time,
and then it’s got four little feet, little legs, and those little legs are absolutely typical of Yorkshire-style food
vessels. So, slap-bang beside an early important grave of an important incomer, you have another grave of
somebody who must have been important several centuries later which again gives us an insight into the
external links of Kilmartin Glen.
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