page_title: Sculpture in Scotland
section_title: Bronze Age
hierarchical_section_title: Sculpture in Scotland / Prehistory / Bronze Age
caption_attribution_description: English: Cup-and-Ring-Marked Rock This is the most elaborately carved of the three incised surfaces in the immediate vicinity. The carvings are thought to have been made with a stone hammer some 5000 years ago, but their meaning is unknown.
context_page_description: Sculpture in Scotland includes all visual arts operating in three dimensions in the borders of modern Scotland. Durable sculptural processes traditionally include carving and modelling, in stone, metal, clay, wood and other materials. In the modern era these were joined by assembly by welding, modelling, moulding and casting. Some installation art can also be considered to be sculpture. The earliest surviving sculptures from Scotland are standing stones and circles from around 3000 BCE. The oldest portable visual art are carved-stone petrospheres and the Westray Wife is the earliest representation of a human face found in Scotland. From the Bronze Age there are extensive examples of rock art, including cup and ring marks and elaborate carved stone battle-axes. By the early Iron Age Scotland had been penetrated by the wider European La Tène culture, and a few examples of decoration survive from Scotland. There are also decorated torcs, scabbards, armlets and war trumpets. The Romans began military expeditions into what is now Scotland from about 71 CE, leaving a direct sculptural legacy of distance slabs, altars and other sculptures.
context_section_description: The Bronze Age began in Scotland about 2000 BCE as new metallurgical practices reached the region. From this period there are extensive examples of rock art. These include cup and ring marks, a central depression carved into stone, surrounded by rings, sometimes not completed. These are common elsewhere in Atlantic Europe and have been found on natural rocks and isolated stones across Scotland. The most elaborate sets of markings are in western Scotland, particularly in the Kilmartin district. The representations of an axe and a boat at the Ri Cruin Cairn in Kilmartin, and a boat pecked into Wemyss Cave, are probably the oldest two-dimensional representations of real objects that survive in Scotland. Similar carved spirals have also been found on the cover stones of burial cists in Lanarkshire and Catterline. There are also elaborate carved stone battle-axes found in East Lothian, Aberdeenshire and Lanarkshire. These show little sign of use or wear, so may be symbolic representations of power, rather than designed as weapons. 
  Elaborate metal weaponry includes bronze leaf swords and ceremonial shields of sheet bronze made in Scotland between 900 and 600 BCE. The Migdale Hoard is an early Bronze Age find at Skibo Castle that includes two bronze axes; several pairs of armlets and anklets, a necklace of forty bronze beads, ear pendants and bosses of bronze and jet buttons. There are also a number of smaller items of metalwork from the late Bronze Age found at the Sculptor's Cave, Covesea in Morayshire. 
  The "Ballachulish Figurine" is a life-sized female figure, dating from 700–500 BCE, in oak with quartz pebbles for eyes, found at Ballachulish, Argyll. It was located in a wickerwork structure in a peat bog which overlooks the entrance to a sea loch, which may have been a place of ritual significance and the figurine may be that of a goddess.
caption: Cup and ring marks at Cairnbaan, Argyll and Bute
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