The Romans called this pre-Celtic people Pictii, or "Painted," although Claudius' words are proof that (as claimed by many historians), the ancient Picts actually tattooed their bodies with designs. To the non-Roman Celtic world of Scots and Irish and the many tribes of Belgic England and Wales they were known as "Cruithni" and for many centuries they represented the unbridled fury of a people who refused to be brought under the yoke of Rome or any foreign invader.  Aberdeenshire was their heartland.  Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, Moray and Kincardineshire are counties in North East Scotland with the highest density of prehistoric and early-historic monuments per square mile in the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland.

Nectan and Cruithne

It is interesting that with so many stone circles that pre-dated the Picts that they did not adopt these ready hoardings for endorsing with their Symbols - or did they?  The conjoined circles, zeds, and arcs have graphic and geometric discipline which seem to point a message of tribe or territory. In addition to familiar animals we have heraldic beasts - Elephantine shapes, Seals, and Dolphins morph into each other. Serpents or Adders twine around gusseted right-angles and Zeds.  Conjoined Concentric Circles, Half Zeds or Vees with arcs, Puzzle protrusions or  notches, Disks and or mirrors look like their modern replicas and the presence of combs would indicate fine skills in bone but why record such a painstaking addition to a Marker Stone.  Female vanity respected, recorded and women revered as the obvious source of life?  A new generation of Pictii are abroad in our land adorning their flesh in similar manner with familiar and ornate exotic designs that invade areas of semi exposed and ever reducing areas of unadorned skin.

The class of archaeological remains, called sculptured stones. These are of 3 kinds: 1 those with incised symbols only, 2 those with in addition Celtic ornament carved in relief, and 3 monuments with Celtic ornament in relief and no symbols. The 1st class is the only one largely represented in Aberdeenshire and a good many representatives are in existence. The symbols most commonly seen are the crescent and sceptre, the spectacles, the mirror and comb, and the so-called "elephant" symbol, a representation of a beast with long jaws, a crest and scroll feet. Another is the serpent symbol. What the symbols signify is still a mystery, but the fact that the stones with symbolism are unusually common in what was known as Northern Pictland seems to point to their being indigenous to that area. Out of 124 stones in the first class Aberdeenshire has 42.

It would seem as if the county had been the focus where the symbolism originated.  The richness of the locality round Kintore and Inverurie in symbol stones is taken to indicate that region as the centre from which they radiated.

The Picardy Stone Inch Aberdeenshire one of the oldest Stones incised with the double disc and Z-rod, serpent and Z-rod and mirror symbols. The stone formerly stood on a small cairn containing a grave which illustrates the use of such stones as burial markers.

Ploughed up stone in 1978 at a farm Barflat, Rhynie. The Gabbro stone measures 1.78m long and dates between 700 and 800AD. It has an incised figure of a man walking, an axe upon his shoulder and wearing some sort of sleeved garment extending to just above the knee and tied around the waist by cord. His shoes are pointed and he wears some sort of head dress. There are few Pictish carved figures in Scotland and this is the earliest figure carving to date found in Grampian. It now stands in the foyer of Regional Council Offices, Aberdeen.

An important, if enigmatic, type of ceremonial object which was well represented in the North-east around 2500 BC, is the carved stone ball. Of the more than 400 known, most have been found in the North East of Scotland between the Rivers Dee and the Deveron - the heartland of Aberdeenshire. The size of a tennis ball, usually with 6 protruding knobs, they are sometimes more elaborately decorated with spirals or plastic ornament which is similar to Grooved Ware, a type of late Neolithic pottery not known in the north-east but common in Orkney and Fife. They were clearly well-looked after by their owners to whom they must have conveyed status and prestige.   

The image seen here is of the stone ball found at Towie, Strathdon, which is one of the most highly decorated of the balls, with a complex pattern of spirals and concentric designs. It may be seen in the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.  the decoration used falls into 3 categories, those with spirals, those with concentric circles and those with patterns of straight incised lines and hatchings. More than one design is used on the same ball and the standard of artwork varies from the extremely crude to the highly expert which only an exceptionally skilled craftsman could have produced. Some balls have designs on the interspaces between the knobs which must be significant in the context of the speculated use of these artefacts. 26 of the 6-knobbed balls are decorated.  The Orkney examples are unusual, being either all ornamented or otherwise unusual in appearance, such as the lack, bar one example, of the frequently found 6-knobbed type.  Metal may have been used to work some of the designs.  It has already been established that many of the late Neolithic stone balls had a diameter within a millimetre of each other, which indicates that they could be used collectively in some way rather than individually. By plotting the find sites on a map it can be demonstrated that often these petrospheres were located in the vicinity of Neolithic recumbent stone circles. 

Could these have been a respected and widely accepted commercial weight standard for a balance, perhaps a rope or leather thong swung weapon - but then any suitably shaped beach stone would do.

A highly prized unit of exchangeable wealth?  Ceremonial Orbs?

The Celts, those mysterious denizens of the Iron Age, buried prominent people with wagons along with other goods. Wagons dating from about the 800 BC to 500 BC have been found throughout Europe in places like France, Germany, Austria and the former Yugoslavia.  Artwork of the time also featured images of wagons, which the Celts outfitted with iron tyres and pivoted axles. This includes engravings on a couch found at the burial site of a Celtic Chieftain, on which the dead reclined.  The couch, known as the Hochdorft kline, shows a 4-wheeled wagon drawn by a pair of horses. Seated on the wagon is a man carrying a shield and a sword, which leads historians to believe that wagons were used during times of war.  The Hochdorf kline is housed at the Hochdorf Celtic Museum in Germany.  Along with proving helpful in warfare, wagons during the Iron Age of the Hallstatt period (8th to 6th centuries BC) were used for transporting goods such as mined salt. Several carriages have also been found whose purpose appears to have been exclusively ceremonial. The carriages feature animals and symbolic objects rather than providing room for passengers.

Rodney's Stone

An upright cross-slab of grey sandstone was found in 1781 during excavations for foundations for Dyke Church, which was constructed behind its pre-Reformation predecessor. The stone must have been in the graveyard of the old church.  The stone was erected in Dyke village in commemoration of Rodney's victory over the Count de Grasse (Battle of the Saints - 1782) from which it received the name 'Rodney's Cross.' It was removed to the Park of Brodie a few years before 1842. (J G Callander has noted in the National Museum copy of Allen and Anderson 1903 "this stone was dug up by a gravedigger...locally known as Rotteny..and it was from this it got its name, not from Rodney's victory - authority of the late Rev. John MacEwan, Minister of Dyke.)
The stone, erected on a modern base and held upright by wrought iron struts, is rectangular in shape, 6'4" high by 3'5" wide at the bottom and 3'2" wide at the top. It is sculptured in relief, with Ogham inscriptions down each of the four angles.  The front bears a celtic cross with interlacing, and the back bears symbols including fish monsters, the elephant or dolphin, double disc and z-rod.

Rodney’s Stone is a Class II Pictish symbol stone, probably carved in the 8th century. Along 3 corners runs the longest known Scottish Ogham Inscription, extending for over 3m. Reused as a recumbent grave marker in perhaps the 16th or 17th century, it was rediscovered in 1781 during the excavation of foundations for a new parish church in the village of Dyke. Having been erected in Dyke the following year, it was subsequently moved to its present position in the 1820s/30s. Deri Jones Associates undertook a 3-D laser scan of the entire stone, with further, higher resolution scans of the ogham text/s and of strategic areas to act as a baseline for condition monitoring between March–December 2010. Data processing by Archaeoptics Ltd is ongoing; it is hoped that the high resolution data will allow a more complete transcription of the ogham to be created, elucidating some of the more heavily eroded letters.

Ogham is sometimes referred to as the Celtic Tree Language as each letter was named after a tree the people were familiar with, and used.Ogham inscriptions consist almost exclusively of personal names and marks, possibly indicating land ownership, though some appear to be memorials to the dead.  Any wood Ogham inscription have, of course, long vanished. However, there are roughly 400 Ogham inscriptions in stone found to date, of which 330 are from Ireland. The other Ogham stones have been found in England, Scotland, Wales, Isle of Man and Shetland.
 

The Irish had no other written alphabet until Christian missionaries introduced Latin. Ogham ceased to be used after the 1st few centuries of the Christian era, as the use of inscription language was reviled as a pagan practice.