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Bone Dice and the Scottish Iron Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2016

D. V. Clarke
D. V. Clarke
Affiliation:
National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, Edinburgh
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Extract

Parallelopiped bone dice form a small but important group in the bonework of the Scottish Iron Age. The overwhelming mass of this material has been produced by excavations in which the stratigraphy has not, save in exceptional circumstances, been recorded. Moreover, the large assemblages are from sites which give every indication of being multi-period, notably the brochs and wheelhouses of the Atlantic Province (the Province is defined in Piggott, 1966, 5, 4, fig. 1). This lack of meaningful cultural or chronological groups has been an open invitation to select those objects, with parallels in the supposedly better defined and dated groups to the south, in order to draw wide-ranging inferences concerning the pre-history of Scotland. Such a procedure enables the bulk of the material to be ignored as sui generis. It is not the writer's intention to produce another study of the might-have-beens of the Scottish Iron Age, but rather to present a corpus of the dice and to consider the previous interpretations in which these dice have formed part of the evidence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society , Volume 36 , December 1970 , pp. 214 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © The Prehistoric Society 1970

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References

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