Excerpt from "The Hebridean Iron Age" by Professor Dennis Harding

University of Edinburgh

Department of Archaeology

Occasional Papers Series No 20

UK ISSN 0144-3313

Copyright D. W. Harding, 2000

Research since 1980, notably in the Northern Isles, but also that promoted by the

University of Edinburgh in the Western Isles since 1980, has contributed to a re-appraisal of the origins and development of monumental Iron Age roundhouses in Atlantic Scotland, demonstrating that broch towers have their origins in a sequence of massive roundhouses, simple or complex, dating from the mid-first millennium BC.

To extract the developed broch towers from that context and to dismiss any structure which can be shown to pre-date the first century BC on the grounds that it is not a ‘true broch’ is to create artificial definitions and distinctions which cannot contribute to a balanced view of later prehistoric settlement. Furthermore, it divorces ‘brochs’ from other groups of stone-built roundhouses whose similarities have too frequently been overlooked or suppressed in an attempt to create distinctive structural typologies. As Parker Pearson and Sharples rightly observed, ‘the diversity of stone-built dwellings almost defeats the classification of brochs as a meaningful group’ (1999, 364).

At opposite ends of the spectrum, a simple, ungalleried roundhouse and a broch tower may justifiably be seen as poles apart; but they are just that, extremes in a spectrum in which the contrast of opposites is not the whole or only truth. In practical terms the rigid typological definition of a ‘true broch’ was of little utility to the fieldworker, who was unlikely to be able to tell from a collapsed heap of stonework whether any individual structure displayed the required repertory of architectural features anyway, so that only a handful of the hundreds of known field monuments was ever likely to qualify.