June 20th Photograph Ancient Pottery Scotland

June 20th photograph of Ancient Pottery in Perth, Perthshire, Scotland. Making the Bronze Age. Making and Firing Late Bronze Age Pottery. The first pots in Britain appear around 4000 BC with the first farmers of the Neolithic began to settle and required storage and preparation vessels for food. While pottery making methods in Britain changed little from then until the arrival of the Romans, the various styles are important indicators of date and culture to archaeologists. Pots were made by hand building, using the pinch and coil techniques, and fired in open fires, probably in the domestic hearth as one of the household chores. A new pottery style arrived in Britain, along with flat axes and inhumation burial practices, as part the Beaker culture around 2700 BC, and by the Late Bronze Age, distinctive types of burial urns had developed.

Graham Taylor is an experimental archaeologist and master potter, specialising in reproducing prehistoric, Roman and Anglo-Saxon pottery from Britain and Ireland, and has worked extensively with the public in recent years. Participants in the prehistoric pottery workshop will learned to form and decorate replica Late Bronze Age urns and food vessels based on surviving examples from Tayside and then fire them in open fires.


June 20th photograph of Ancient Pottery in Perth, Perthshire, Scotland.

All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

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June 20th Photograph Sword Casting Scotland

June 20th photograph of Sword Casting in Perth, Perthshire, Scotland. Making the Bronze Age. Bronze sword Casting. Five bronze swords found in the river Tay offer a fascinating glimpse into Bronze Age life, a warrior based society where such a weapon was a potent symbol of power and position. Intriguingly, their excellent condition suggests that they were deliberately deposited in the river as votive offerings. To cast a sword into the water speaks of a deeper meaning that we struggle to grasp with our modern understanding, but such acts may possibly have been done to venerate water Gods or honour a great chieftain in his journey through the after life.

Compared to iron, bronze is timeless, a mix of copper and tin, it has been used for nearly seventeen hundred years for all manner of things from weapons to the axes and gouges, tools that were used to make the Carpow logboat. Bronze is harder than iron and was still used for razors, body armour and shields long after the introduction of iron swords. If the Bronze Age has started when the Romans left Britain we would still be in it today!

Neil Burridge is a bronze sword smith who has opened up our understanding of ancient bronze working. In four demonstrations today he was casting replica swords of the type found in the river, and for the first time in three thousand years offered a sword back to the Gods.

All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

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June 20th Photograph Ancient Woodworking Scotland

June 20th photograph of Ancient Woodworking in Perth, Perthshire, Scotland. Making the Bronze Age. Ancient Woodworking and the Ballachulish Figure. While ritual and religion in prehistory is dominated by the study of stone circles, burial mounds and henges, a more direct human aspect to the ritual dimension can be glimpsed through the survival of a number of carved wooden human figures from across Britain and Ireland. The only one from Scotland was found in 1880 by workmen digging in a peat moss in Ballachulish. The female figure stood almost five foot high and had quartz pebbles for eyes and has been radiocarbon dated to around 600 BC, the very start of the Iron Age. Perth and Kinross Heritage Trust’s David Strachan and ancient woodworking expert Damian Goodburn making a scale replica of the carving using late Bronze Age and Iron Age replica tools, today in Riverside Park, Perth, Scotland.


June 20th photograph of Ancient Woodworking in Perth, Perthshire, Scotland.

All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

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Photograph Burial Chamber Site Forteviot Scotland

Photograph of the location of the early bronze age site just South of Forteviot, Perthshire, Scotland.


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All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

Photograph Bronze Age Cist Forteviot Scotland

Photograph of the unique Bronze Age burial chamber, or cist, which has been hailed as one of the biggest archaeological finds in Scotland for decades. Located just South of Forteviot, Perthshire, Scotland.

All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

Photograph Ancient Symbols Capstone Forteviot Scotland

Photograph of ancient symbols on the capstone which covered the royal tomb at the early bronze age site at Forteviot, Perthshire, Scotland.



All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.