Drawing on contributions to the field investigation and record by Fred Geddes, Jill Harden, Madeleine Hummler, Martin Jones, Annette Roe and Nicky Toop; and to the post-excavation analysis from Steve Allen, Steve Ashby, Mark Blackburn, Lawrence Butler, Ewan Campbell, Shirley Curtis-Summers, Claire Ellis, Ian Freestone, Allan Hall, Derek Hall, Mark Hall, Derek Hamilton, Mhairi Hastie, Andy Heald, George Haggarty, Tim Holden, Matilda Holmes, Nick Holmes, Fraser Hunter, Richard Jackson, Harry Kenward, Sarah King, Monica Maleszka-Ritchie, Kellie Meyer, Janet Montgomery, Catherine Mortimer, Anthony Newton, James Peake, Nigel Ruckley, Krish Seetah, Clare Thomas, Nicky Toop, Lauren Walther, Becca Walters, Penelope Walton Rogers and Hugh Willmott.
Portmahomack on the Tarbat peninsula overlooking the Dornoch Firth is a fishing village with a 1,500-year-old history. In the sixth and seventh century it was a high-ranking centre with monumental cist burials and links to the equestrian class in England. In the eighth century it was a monastery, creating manuscripts and making church vessels and a stunning repertoire of carved stone monuments, its monks looking to Ireland, western Scotland and Northern England for their intellectual alliances. Around 800 AD the monastery came to an end following a Viking raid, but swiftly revived as a manufacturing and trading centre, now serving the protagonists of the Norse-Scottish wars. By the eleventh century the site was abandoned, but was remembered again in the early twelfth century when it became the parish church of St Colman. In the later middle ages it experienced an upsurge of activity with fishermen and metalsmiths settling beside an enlarged community church. When the Reformation arrived at Portmahomack about 1600, the village moved to the harbour and the old church of St Colman remained on its own, acting for another four hundred years as a weathervane of local society and its beliefs. Rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1980s, from 1994 to 2007 the site at Portmahomack saw one of the largest research excavations to have taken place in Scotland.
Author(s): Martin Carver, Justin Garner-Lahire, Cecily Spall
Publisher: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: 554
City: Edinburgh
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
List of illustrations in the Digest of Evidence
List of Tables
Summary
Guide to the archaeological terms and abbreviations
Chapter 1
Introduction
Research incentives
Research procedure
Opportunity: The Tarbat Discovery Programme
Results of the fieldwork
Publication strategy
Changes from earlier publications
Overview
Chapter 2
Principles
Reconnaissance stage
Evaluation stage
Project design
Implementation of the programme
Investigations on the peninsula
Exploration of the Firthlands
Design for analysis and publication
Chapter 3
Introduction
Chronology
Excavation sequences by sector
Assemblage
Survey on the Peninsula (Illus 3.27)
Chronological concordance between sectors
Chapter 4
Introduction
Period 0 to the sixth century AD
Period 1 mid-sixth to later seventh century
The cemetery
The settlement
Assemblage from the settlement
Cultivation and settlement in Sector 1
The end of the Period 1 settlement
The Peninsula and the Firthlands in Prehistory
Chapter 5
Introduction and Summary
The Monastic Cemetery
Early Medieval Memorials
Repertoire of Ornament
Reassembling the Portmahomack monuments
Some conclusions
Evidence for a Stone Church
Infrastructure
The Northern Workshops
The Southern Workshops
Economy
Architecture of the Bag-shaped Buildings
The Peninsula
The Raid
Chapter 6
Introduction
Redevelopment in Sector 2
Metal- and glassworkers
Redevelopment in Sector 1: the farmers
Archaeological story: ninth to eleventh century
Context: the peninsula and the Firthlands
Chapter 7
Introduction
The church from the twelfth to the sixteenth century
Medieval people: the burials
The village (thirteenth to fourteenth century)
The township and its industries, fifteenth to sixteenth century
Discussion – a context for Medieval Tarbat
Post-Medieval Tarbat: St Colman’s Church from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century
Chapter 8
Introduction
Mobility
Prehistoric to Pictish transitions
From family estate to monastery
Monastic origins
The politics of monasticism in Europe
The return of commercial imperatives
Reformation and after
Envoi
References
Digest of Evidence
Contents of the Digest of Evidence
ARCHAEOLOGICAL INTERVENTIONS AT PORTMAHOMACK
INDEX OF PERIODS, STRUCTURES AND CHURCHES
RADIOCARBON DATES
BURIALS
CATALOGUE OF SCULPTURE
CATALOGUE OF DIAGNOSTIC ARTEFACTS
ECOLOGY
MONUMENTS AND PLACENAMES ON THE TARBAT PENINSULA
TABLE OF CONTENTS OF ONLINE ARCHIVE
INDEX
