This paper reviews the evidence for later prehistoric and 1st millennium AD settlement in northern Scotland, presenting the changing forms of domestic buildings. Distributions of sites in the landscape are discussed and used to suggest aspects of landscape division and organisation.

This chapter discusses the character and structural remains of the Viking-age settlement at Kaupang.The main topics discussed are: whether the settlement was seasonal or permanent, the development of plotdivisions within the site and the different types of construction present. The evidence to illuminate these topics derives from a number of archaeological sources. The structural remains themselves, albeit often poorly preserved, are an important source of information on plot-divisions, buildings and other constructions. Earlier data from the 1956–1974 excavation is also a source. Micromorphological analysis provided valuable information on the initial seasonal settlement phase, Site Period I (SP I, c. AD 800–805/810), and on layer formation in the harbour,where the only intact deposits from the whole settlement period are preserved.Micromorphological evidence from occupation deposits inside the buildings (SP II, c. AD 805/810–840/850) also contributed significantly to the interpretation of the structural remains. Environmental archaeology provided insights into the economy and living conditions on the site, and to the question of permanence of settlement. The available evidence suggests that the laying out of plots coincided with the establishment of the settlement. In the initial phase (SP I) there was only seasonal activity on the site, but within the first decade a more permanent settlement developed (SP II) which involved the construction of buildings, more elaborate plot-divisions and the establishment of lanes. The character and structure of the settlement post AD 840/850 are more elusive as most of the structural remains have been destroyed by ploughing. Evidence from the harbour and the cemeteries suggests that the permanent settlement continued at least into the first decades of the 10th century.Artefacts point to activity at Kaupang until AD 960/980, but the character of this activity is not known. The buildings at Kaupang are poorly preserved. In general they seem to have had pairs of interior roofbearing posts. In some of the buildings there was a central aisle containing a floor area with a central hearth. Few remains of the outer walls were found. Some of the Kaupang buildings appear to be similar to the Type 1 buildings from Dublin, but the poor preservation of the buildings at Kaupang makes a closer comparison difficult. A number of large pits have been excavated at Kaupang, many of which had excellent conditions for preservation in their lower levels and therefore yielded detailed information on construction in wattle, plank and corner-timbering (Norwegian: “lafting”).However, the function of the pits remains largely undetermined. The presence of jetties at Kaupang is discussed, and it is suggested that there were no long stone jetties on the site as previously believed, but rather stone deposited to create stable ground in and just above the tidal zone. The presence of wooden jetties is indicated by posts hammered deep into the beach deposits.

This document sets out a research framework for historic rural settlement studies in Scotland and has been written on behalf of the Historic Rural Settlement Group (www.molrs.org.uk). The Historic Rural Settlement Group

The commercial development of the north-east of Scotland has resulted in a huge influx of new information on the prehistoric and Early Historic occupation of the area. A series of cropmarks investigated at Grantown Road, Forres (NGR: NJ 0263 5740) between 2002 and 2013 has confirmed the presence of an extensive Iron Age settlement and revealed new evidence for activity from the Neolithic to the Early Historic period. The Iron Age settlement is represented by a variety of building types including ring-ditch, ring-groove and post-ring structures, in association with four-post structures, a souterrain and metalworking furnaces. Although the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Early Historic periods are not so well represented they nonetheless have provided evidence for the occupation of the area. The artefactual assemblage includes Neolithic and Bronze Age ceramic and coarse stone and Iron Age material relating to metalworking.

The 5th and 6th centuries in northern Britain are a key period when historical sources increase in frequency for the societies that had lived north of the Roman frontier (Evans 2008; Fraser 2009; Woolf 2007). The literary sources suggest that this was also a transformative period with the emergence of more developed systems of rulership and social structure, with the first references to kings and kingdoms in a northern British context. Important changes can also be identified in the archaeological record in this same chronological horizon: for example, after more than a thousand years of very limited burial evidence, the dead become a more prominent part of the archaeological record (Maldonado 2013). As well as cemeteries, memorials to the dead and monumental carved stone monuments emerge and play notable roles in creating and maintaining new forms of personal and group affiliation (e.g. Forsyth 1997; Goldberg 2012, 155–159; Henderson and Henderson 2004; Samson 1992). However, one of the most significant changes visible in early medieval northern Britain was the re-emergence of fortified enclosures and settlements (Alcock 2003, 179–199): as in Ireland and western England and Wales, the hillfort formed the material manifestation of power, a northern alternative (or addition) to the hall as symbol of more developed social hierarchies in a post-Roman context. In this chapter I will outline the types of fortified sites that emerged in the early medieval period in northern Britain and explore some of the important roles they played in early medieval society, notably in terms of establishing and reinforcing new and emergent cultural identities. My case study will examine the role of fortified sites among the Picts – one of the major British societies in the North in this epoch.

Introduction This paper is based on the results of the interdisciplinary project, Settlement, shieling and landscape (Emanuelsson et al. 2003). The disciplines included are archaeology, human geography and palaeoecology, represented by the project members Marie Emanuelsson, Annie Johansson, Stefan Nilsson, Susanne Pettersson, and Eva Svensson. Working within an interdisciplinary framework has proved to be a fruitful method by which to shed light on the settlement structures of a thinly populated area of Sweden, even though it has been a subject for discussions and even jokes within the project. The human geographer and the palaeoecologist highlighted this in a comparison of the capacities of the various disciplines. The resulting value of zero (figure 1) has, however, nothing to do with the actual result. On the contrary, the results provided evidence for a diversity of settlement since prehistoric times, even though the region’s settlement history has traditionally been understood ...

Excavation of a well-preserved upstanding roundhouse revetted into a steep hillside at Navidale has revealed a structure with unusually sophisticated architectural traits dated to around 1400–1200 BC. The house was built within an agricultural landscape but its abandonment appears to have been linked to a cessation of agriculture within that landscape, possibly part of a wider environmental decline across northern Scotland.