Before the Scots
Scotland Before History. An Essay by Stuart Piggott with illustrations by Keith Henderson. (Nelson, 15s.) THE very word prehistory was invented by a Scotsman, for, according to the high authority of the Oxford English Dictionary, it was Daniel Wilson who coined the word when, in 1851, he wrote his The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland. Since his time many have essayed the difficult task of analysing the prehistoric arche- ology of Scotland : Anderson and Munro before the First World War and the late Gordon Childe, first holder of the Abercromby Professorship of Prehistoric Acheology at Edinburgh, in the climate of post-war archeology which he him- self did so much to create. Childe's first essay was The Prehistory Of Scotland, published in 1935, and the present reviewer, then an undergraduate, remembers well reading that book, when it was first published, through the long watches of the night; it was an enthralling picture not only of prehistoric Scotland but of Scotland set in a European prehistory which was meaningful and historical, and had ceased to be a catalogue of archaeological relics. Gordon Childe's second essay on the prehistory of Scotland before history was published in 1946; and called Scotland before the Scots. It was an attempt to interpret the archeological relics of Scotland in terms of the model of the past provided, in the first in- stance, by the anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, and developed by Engels and Marx. It failed, as Childe himself has freely admitted in his last writings, because it did not interpret the archeo- logical remains but arranged them into a pre- conceived system.
No one since Childe has essayed a prehistory of Scotland until this present volume, a work of close collaboration between Professor Piggott, who has written the text, and is himself Childe's successor in the Chair of Prehistoric Archeology at Edinburgh, and Keith Henderson, who has done the illustrations, and is himself a keen pre- historian. This is a small book : an essay of some 35,000 words and thirty-two scraper-board illus- trations. The illustrations are always arresting and often excellent, and are specially designed to show the surviving monuments of Scottish pre- history as well as to suggest the life and crafts- manship of their ancient builders.
We study the material remains of the past so that we can transmute them into the life of pre- historic man, and this act of transmutation is one of the most difficult tasks in prehistoric scholar- ship. Excavation, air photograph, museum analysis, the plotting of distribution maps—these basic techniques of the archeologist are easy to acquire though often painfully boring to practise. The interpretation of archeological data is not easy, and the writing of prehistory calls not only for learning but scholarship and an ability for creative writing. Professor Piggott has achieved here most successfully, as he did in his little Home University Library book British Prehistory, a synthesis which is readable while yet authoritative, imaginative while yet sober, interesting while yet accurate. This makes his book compulsory read- ing for every Scot interested in his past, and every serious-minded person interested in the past of Britain of which Scotland is the northern half. This small book sets out to do so little, and yet, in historical imagination and the creation of Scot- land before history, does so much.
GLYN DANIEL
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