Transcript: Professor Richard Bradley: VFT 3 Kilmartin Glen
Question 2: What do the rock art motifs found at Kilmartin tell us about links with Late Neolithic societies elsewhere in Scotland and the wider European Atlantic world?
I think the first thing to say is that we have to put the rock carvings into the correct period, otherwise obviously we can’t make comparisons, and the tendency these days is to backdate rock art so that it is largely a Neolithic phenomenon but retains its significance in the early Metal Age, Copper Age and the early Bronze Age. Formerly, people dated it much later because they were concerned with those pieces in burials and as I’ve just said they were often recycled fragments that were already old; so there’s a problem there.
The other problem which is worth introducing is the old noticeboards at Kilmartin, those I remember from the 1990s, actually talked about that part of Scotland being colonised by people from Spain, where the rock art was very similar. That’s now been dropped but there are similarities. The problem there is that the Spanish themselves do not agree on the chronology of their own rock art and there are very many varied versions. The view that I share with a number of colleagues is that they are broadly contemporary with the rock art in Britain and Ireland.
So, cups and rings; open air rock art, I think does correspond between Kilmartin, a number of parts of the British Isles and most particularly northwest Spain and the north of Portugal. And the more I see the continental examples, the harder I find it to see them as a totally coincidental and independent phenomenon. That’s not a particularly extreme view because we know very well that there are direct contacts between those regions particularly to do with the spread of the fine pottery called Bell Beakers from Portugal, perhaps the spread of metal as well. So, the open air rock art is probably part of a much broader phenomenon with, if you like, one major northern focus in Scotland, and another major southern focus in Galicia, which is one of the independent countries of Spain.
There’s then a second aspect, and that’s what’s called megalithic art. It’s called megalithic art because it’s essentially the decoration applied to the interiors, and occasionally the curves of chambered tombs. Now, the great majority of megalithic art locally, if we can say that, is in Ireland and the Boyne Valley; that’s north of Dublin. But the practice of decorating tombs extends right down the Atlantic, through Brittany, through into Spain and Portugal and even into the west Mediterranean. Interestingly, similar tombs in Scandinavia are undecorated, so it’s an Atlantic phenomenon.
More locally, there are clear similarities between some designs in Ireland and some in Scotland but they are relatively rare and the links if anything are probably with Orkney. Now, in terms of Kilmartin itself there’s a lot of references to Irish megalithic art among the rock carvings. I have to say that that’s only partly correct. It’s correct almost certainly in terms of the chronology, using style to date individual images, but the most distinctive single motif is the horned spiral, the double spiral, which we find at Achnabreach on a rock sheet, which we also find in Temple Wood stone circle. I have to say that though there’s been a lot of talk about it as a spiral and thus somehow Irish, the best parallels are not Irish, they extend form Orkney to; well I think the most southern is Oxfordshire. They’re essentially as west coast British phenomenon and there are few examples of this exact same motif in Ireland. I don’t think that matters, they are very closely related but I think we are so prone to think of the fairly limited sea crossing to Ireland that we should not forget the importance of Orkney where, certainly at the Ness of Brodgar, [we are] finding so many previously unrecorded motifs that the pattern is changing very fast.
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