page_title: Scotland during the Roman Empire
section_title: Picts
hierarchical_section_title: Scotland during the Roman Empire / Picts
context_page_description: Scotland during the Roman Empire refers to the protohistorical period during which the Roman Empire interacted with the area that is now Scotland, which was known to them as "Caledonia". Roman legions arrived around AD 71, having conquered the Celtic tribes of "Britain" over the preceding three decades. Aiming to annex all of the island of "Albion", Romans under Q. Petilius Cerialis and Gn. Julius Agricola invaded the Caledonians in the 70s and 80s.
  An account by Agricola's son-in-law Tacitus mentions a Roman victory at "Mons Graupius" which became the namesake of the Grampians but has been questioned by modern scholarship. The Romans then seem to have repeated an earlier Greek circumnavigation of the island and received submission from local tribes, establishing their border of actual control first along the Gask Ridge before withdrawing to a line south of the Solway Firth. This line was fortified as Hadrian's Wall. Several Roman commanders attempted to fully conquer lands north of this line, including a brief expansion that was fortified as the Antonine Wall.
context_section_description: The intermittent Roman presence in Scotland coincided with the emergence of the Picts, a confederation of tribes who lived to the north of the Forth and Clyde from Roman times until the 10th century. They are often assumed to have been the descendants of the Caledonians though the evidence for this connection is circumstantial and the name by which the Picts called themselves is unknown. They are often said to have tattooed themselves, but evidence for this is limited. Naturalistic depictions of Pictish nobles, hunters and warriors, male and female, without obvious tattoos, are found on their monumental stones. The Gaels of Dalriada called the Picts Cruithne, and Irish poets portrayed their Pictish counterparts as very much like themselves.
  The Pictish relationship with Rome appears to have been less overtly hostile than their Caledonian predecessors, at least in the beginning. There were no more pitched battles and conflict was generally limited to raiding parties from both sides of the frontier until immediately prior to and after the Roman retreat from Britannia. Their apparent success in holding back Roman forces cannot be explained solely with reference to the remoteness of Caledonia or the difficulties of the terrain. In part it may have been due to the difficulties encountered in subjugating a population that did not conform to the strictures of local governance that Roman power usually depended on to operate through.
  The technology of everyday life is not well recorded, but archaeological evidence shows it to have been similar to that in Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England. Recently evidence has been found of watermills in Pictland and kilns were used for drying kernels of wheat or barley, not otherwise easy in the changeable, temperate climate. Although constructed in earlier times, brochs, roundhouses and crannogs remained in use into and beyond the Pictish period.
  Elsewhere in Scotland wheelhouses were constructed, probably for ritualistic purposes, in the west and north. Their geographical locations are highly restricted, which suggests that they may have been contained within a political or cultural frontier of some kind and the co-incidence of their arrival and departure being associated with the period of Roman influence in Scotland is a matter of ongoing debate. It is not known whether the culture that constructed them was "Pictish" as such although they would certainly have been known to the Picts.
  As Rome's power waned, the Picts were emboldened. War bands raided south of Hadrian's Wall in earnest in 342, 360, and 365 and they participated with the Attacotti in the Great Conspiracy of 367. Rome fought back, mounting a campaign under Count Theodosius in 369 which reëstablished a province which was renamed Valentia in honor of the emperor. Its location is unclear, but it is sometimes placed on or beyond Hadrian's Wall. Another campaign was mounted in 384, but both were short-lived successes. Rome had fully withdrawn from Britain by 410, never to return.
caption: Clach an Tiompain, a Pictish symbol stone in Strathpeffer
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