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Rhynie, A Powerful Place of Pictland: The development of a landscape of Pictish royal power from the Roman to the early medieval period
Keywords:
Rhynie Man, Craw Stane, Pictish kingdoms, Pictish society, hillforts, material assemblages, Tap o' Noth, Cairn MoreSynopsis
Rhynie, A Powerful Place of Pictland presents the results of three major excavations in the Upper Strathbogie Valley, Aberdeenshire: the Craw Stane elite complex and the hillforts of Tap o’ Noth and Cairn More. Offering a transformative reassessment of power, settlement and material culture in Late Roman Iron Age and early medieval northern Britain, this volume provides the first comprehensive analysis of a Pictish central place complex. Integrating artefactual, environmental, stratigraphic and scientific datasets, it explores themes of rulership, cult and connectivity between northern Pictland and the wider European world. It establishes Rhynie as a key locus for understanding sociopolitical formation in early medieval Scotland and suggests new models for the emergence of polity, economy and identity in Late Roman and post-Roman northern Europe.
Gordon Noble is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen. He has undertaken landscape research and fieldwork projects on sites in Scotland from the Mesolithic to medieval periods. For more than a decade, Gordon and an extensive team of archaeologists and specialists from across Scotland have been conducting award-winning research at Rhynie and a host of other Pictish era sites through the ‘Northern Picts’ and ‘Comparative Kingship’ projects at the University of Aberdeen.
Chapters
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Preface
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Powerful Places
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Background and Context
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Exploring the Historical and Place-name Evidence
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Excavation Results: Tap o' Noth
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Excavation Results: The Craw Stane Complex
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Excavation Results: Cairn More
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The Finds From the Craw Stane Complex, Tap o' Noth and Cairn More
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Environmental and Scientific Analyses
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Tap o' Noth Oblong Fort and the Prehistory of the Upper Strathbogie Valley
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Roman Iron Age and the Early Medieval Rhynie: Tap o' Noth
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Roman Iron Age and Early Medieval Rhynie II: The Craw Stane Complex, the Pictish Cemetery and Symbol Stones, and Cairn More
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A Powerful Place of Pictland: Long-term Social Dynamics in the First Millennium AD
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Coda
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Appendix 1
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Appendix 2
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Notes
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Bibliography
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Index
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With Special Thanks to Our Backers
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Published
March 23, 2026
Categories
Copyright (c) 2026 Gordon Noble (Author); Lucy Koster, Daniel MacLean, Ingrid Mainland, Fiona McGibbon, Ellen McManus, Sesilia Niehaus, Marc Oxenham, Shalen Prado, Susan Ramsay, Ermine Roshem, Alison Sheridan, Andreas Rau, Andy Hickie, Hamish Fenton, Samantha Jones, Fraser Hunter, Derek Hamilton (Contributor); Gemma Cruikshanks, Nicholas Evans, Meggen Gondek, Cathy MacIvor, Edouard Masson-MacLean, James O'Driscoll, Simon Taylor (Chapter Author); Kate Britton, Ewan Campbell, Orsolya Czére, Mary Davis, Leanne Demay, Jovita Fawcett, James Gerrard, Joana Valdez-Tullet (Contributor)
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Details about this monograph
ISBN-13 (15)
978-1-908332-39-4
