The stone was discovered by construction workers building a new road in Perth, Scotland, in 2017. The workers noticed something etched into the stone and alerted authorities. The image on the 6-and-a-half-foot stone has now been reconstructed from thousands of images, allowing researchers to produce a 3D image of the carving. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity.
Analysis of the image suggests it is a warrior holding a “distinctive door-knob butted spear,” which would have been used by Scottish people between the third and sixth centuries, Gordon Noble, head of archaeology at the U.K.’s University of Aberdeen, said in a statement. “He also has a very distinctive hairstyle, is wearing a helmet and necklace and has a faint line around the left ankle which could suggest footwear or tight leggings,” Noble added.
This latest stone, called the Tulloch Stone, is one of only three of its kind. Its discovery helps experts better understand the role of warriors in society at this time. In other parts of the U.K., the presence of warlords and warriors in the Anglo Saxon period is well documented.
“This has not been evidenced in Scotland in the same way,” Mark Hall, from the Perth Museum and Art Gallery, U.K., said in a statement. “But here through the new Tulloch find and a reconsideration of long-known stones we can see that warrior ideology cast in stone—meaning these martial values were conveyed in a very public way to be visible in the landscape and to invoke supernatural protection.”
The Tulloch Stone was found in an area thought to have been a burial site for elite or royal members of society. It was discovered where the rivers Tay and Almond join, “a junction marked by a Roman fort and later a possible Pictish royal centre, suggesting the monolith might have been located in a cemetery of the elite,” Nobel explained. The warrior, he said, is thought to be a representation rather than a portrait of a specific person.
“Burial itself is fairly uncommon in this period—there are only a few dozen cemeteries of this type known, so the act of burial itself is an indicator that those buried were significant within society,” Noble said in an email to Newsweek.
He said the team was “very excited” to be able to add another example to the corpus. The finding, researchers say, provides an insight into the history of Scotland at this time.
“Scotland didn’t exist as a nation—the place we now know as Scotland was home to many different competing kingdoms and language groups,” he said. “The Picts were one of those groups and it is within the former territory of Pictland that the carvings were found.”
In a statement, Nobel said the Tulloch Stone gives an insight into society and the importance of warrior ideology. “We believe that the weapon-bearing individuals shown on these stones may represent a war-oriented social organization that was integral to resisting the Roman Empire and to creating the overtly hierarchical societies of the post-Roman period,” he said.
The discovery was part of an ongoing project to uncover more about the Picts, dubbed the “lost people of Europe,” according to the University of Aberdeen. The Picts are thought to have dominated northern and eastern Scotland until the end of the 11th century, yet written records of them are lacking. Researchers working on the project hope to uncover traces of the society to learn more about them.
“It is likely that there are more Pictish stones out there to be found and every new stone is a fantastic addition to the corpus,” Hall said in a statement. “This discovery of the Tulloch stone has revealed fresh details allowing the reconsideration of the existing related sculptures, fostering new insights and conclusions that are not possible when only dealing with a single example.”
