The Picts

The Picts surprisingly escaped critical scrutiny at the time that the Celts were subject to deconstruction, though their status in popular mythology is even more tenuous. The explanation of the name as Roman army slang for ‘painted savages’ is probably false etymology, and it seems unlikely that any native population would call themselves by the derogatory name, equivalent to ‘Wogs’, used by their colonial oppressors. It was more probably a term, misunderstood by the Roman military, for non-Romanized north Britons, and was certainly not an ethnic term until adopted much later by the people of eastern Scotland in the face of incursions by Anglians, Gaelish Scots, and Vikings. Few if any categories of archaeological monument are typical of this eastern Scottish region, though standing stones with symbols and later cross slabs are concentrated here. The language of the Picts was Celtic, and the notion of a distinctive tradition of matrilineal descent is now widely discredited. Pit-names are mainly from a later date, and early place names are not notably coincident with any supposed ‘Pictish homeland’. Recent research has suggested that simpler forms of symbols on portable stones originated in the third or fourth century. Symbols on stones may have served as funerary markers or on land boundaries, and may have incorporated an element of language, possibly names. This was evidently an important period in the coalescence of populations in the process of state formation.