The peoples of Scotland and England were culturally divergent long before Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman invasion of Britain, research has revealed.
A wide range of archaeological features, including the distinctive roundhouses known as brochs, are widely distributed in Scotland but are almost non-existent south of the border.
Despite the clear evidence that various types of Iron Age settlement do not breach the modern Anglo-Scottish border the disparity has not previously been examined in detail.
Features such as duns (Atlantic roundhouses), crannogs (artificial islands) and souterrains (subterranean dwellings) are also found widely across Scotland but not in England.
“The underlying implication of the settlement distribution patterns is that Iron Age societies across Scotland were open to the building and occupation of brochs, crannogs, duns and souterrains but that Iron Age societies further south were not,’ said Ronan Toolis, the archaeologist who conducted the research.
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“This was the result of cultural choices taken by households and communities, not environmental constraints, and suggests that Iron Age societies north and south of the Tweed–Solway zone were perceptibly dissimilar.”
Toolis, of GUARD Archaeology, a spin-off from Glasgow University, said that the distinctive differences were significant because the construction of crannogs and souterrains during the 4th-2nd centuries BC showed a split occurred long before the Roman frontier zone may have severed societies.
“The archaeological divergence does not equate with the line of Hadrian’s Wall but rather more closely with the Anglo-Scottish border,” Toolis added. “The wall instead follows probably the best strategic course through a broader zone of cultural divergence.”
Work began on Hadrian’s Wall in AD122. As well as being a defensive military structure it may also have been a customs post.
One theory for the differences between ancient England and Scotland is that the Romans failed to absorb Scotland into the empire because Iron Age society in Scotland was anarchic and made up of communities lacking institutionalised leadership.
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The tribal kingdoms in what is now England were more structured and therefore more easily absorbed into the Roman world. Clear evidence for the adoption of Roman culture does not occur in Scotland until the 5th century AD, after the Romans had actually abandoned Britain.
Only then do secular as well as ecclesiastical monuments and stones inscribed in Latin begin to appear in southern Scotland.
The GUARD Archaeology evidence suggests that Hadrian’s Wall was not a cause but an effect of existing cultural differences between the peoples of what became Scotland and England.
