Hadrian’s Wall Follows Cultural Limit – RT DE

For a long time it was believed that Scotland was the part of Britain that the Romans could not occupy. Recent findings in archeology suggest that the areas north and south of Hadrian’s Wall were already quite different.

The common explanation for the long separate development of England and Scotland was Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Romans between 122 and 128 OC. It separated what would later become Scotland from Roman-controlled Britain, as did Lymes in Germany. A closer examination of typical buildings has now shown that Scotland and northern England were quite different from each other even before the arrival of the Romans.

Not many types of structures can be found south of Hadrian’s Wall. it’s about crannoggs, round artificial island made of wooden sticks and sand; underground, residential buildings that were dug into the ground and possibly covered with straw, but also partly with stone slabs; brooch, circular, windowless towers, and Duns, also stone round forts. Some of these types can also be found in Ireland, but not in the north of England.

Archaeologist Ronan Toolis, who published his study of these structures in the Journal of the Society of Scottish Antiquities, saidThe distribution of these structures was “the result of cultural choices made by households and communities, not environmental constraints. This suggests that Iron Age societies north and south of the Tweed-Solway zone differed markedly.”

Cranogs and basements were built in the 4th to 2nd centuries BC, that is, before the first Roman expedition to the British Isles under Caesar in 55 BC, according to the researcher, the boundary between the different cultures is not the same as the course of Hadrian’s Wall: “The wall followed the best strategic line through a wide area of ​​cultural differences.”

Archaeological evidence suggests that society in Iron Age Scotland was not centralized and consisted of several independent parishes. Further south there existed tribal states that could be more easily integrated into the political structures of the Romans.

In the fifth century AD, shortly after the Romans left Britain, there were signs of the adoption of Roman script and Latin names in southern Scotland, with signs of Christianization. “It was only when Iron Age society in Scotland became hierarchical,” Dr. Toolis.

Hill forts developed in the early Middle Ages, where the local aristocracy gathered. Excavations have shown that these forts were home to cross-border trade and the production of luxury goods such as gold and silver jewelry. “These groups of settlements belonging to the early medieval aristocracy reflect the manner in which Scottish society began a process of domestic accumulation of power and status, a process that was interrupted during the first centuries of our time or so as a result of the Roman invasion. Or from internal social unrest,” Dr. Toolis.

Even those who later became Scots saw themselves as British, Scots or Picts, shared cultural characteristics that clearly set them apart from their southern neighbours. So it was not Hadrian’s Wall that led to the formation of Scotland which was separated from England.

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