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MYSTERIOUS, tattooed (or painted), their language obscure, their monumental stones all over the north and the east of Scotland, the beasts and rods and circles of their art perplexing, their demise at the hands of vikings then Gaels leading to Kenneth MacAlpin (or Cinaed mac Ailpín) and his forging of Rìoghachd na h-Alba, ‘the kingdom of Scotland’, in the late ninth century…

The rest, apart from some chronicles of royal names and battles, is a void. “There is no firm explanation either of their origins before the third century AD or their disappearance in the mid-ninth century”, wrote historian Michael Lynch. Don’t tell Netflix or Disney+: there’s all manner of imaginative projection possible in there.

However, this week, we have some hard facts about the Picts. We discovered that Pictish society may not quite have suffered yet another glorious defeat on this land mass, from the Vikings in particular.

There’s been some carbon dating of bone fragments found at the Buckquoy settlement on Orkney. The Aberdeen University scholars have proved that Picts were still living there, in the late eighth and early ninth centuries AD.

Previously it was assumed that, by this time, they had been violently eradicated by the Vikings. The evidence for this was largely architectural. Pictish housing has long been associated with “cellular” rooms; the Buckquoy settlement appeared to have had Viking “rectilinear” rooms imposed on it.

But the carbon dating shows that, rather than the Orcadian Picts being wiped out, they were in fact adapting to the Viking style. As reported on the LBV website: “What was once interpreted as the material trace of an invasion now appears, with high probability, to be the natural evolution of local Pictish society … far from being a sudden and traumatic event of replacement, the Scandinavian takeover was likely a long, complex, and uneven phenomenon.

“The earliest interactions, in places like Buckquoy, must have been small-scale, sporadic, and based on dynamics of exchange, imitation, or acculturation. Processes not incompatible with episodes of conflict, yet radically distant from the myth of eradication.”

Orcadians, of all people, won’t be surprised to hear ancient stories of their adaptability, their capacity to absorb change and innovate.

But this study also urges us towards breaking down our assumptions about historical change. It’s not all about armies clashing in the night, or whole ethnicities falling and rising.

The anthropologists David Wengrow and the late David Graeber, in their groundbreaking book The Dawn Of Everything, give the best lessons on how to reframe our historical archives in a different way.

Firstly, they ask us to beware of “teleological” history – where one culture “inevitably” supplants another, in a series of stepping stones that ends up at national-level bureaucracy (the Davids are both anarchists politically).

That the Orkney Picts were synthesising Norse building styles, rather than being squashed under their imposition, shows more agency and creativity than the story of a defeated and obliterated society.

That’s the Davids’ second point: major social transformations often involve negotiation and borrowing, not simply conquest and replacement. The carbon dating at Buckquoy calls a halt to the lazy notion that material culture – for example, the architecture of a settlement – is always an obvious indicator of distinct ethnic categories. That suggests another way to interpret those startling symbols that recur on the standing stones, scattered across the land mass above the Forth that is seen to comprise Pictland.

These symbols might be tools to guide the spiritual or psychological ceremony of communities, more than just the insignia of tribes or clans.

What lessons does this adaptiveness of the Picts bring to the indy-minded today? To follow the Davids’ line: what happens when a people’s deep past is not a tragedy, but a reservoir of possibilities?

THE Picts, read properly, do not actually fit the standard Scottish historical script – where we lament (ochone, ochone) the disappearance of one society and culture after another.

The Orkney evidence suggests a society capable of absorbing the shock of encounter and turning it into cultural invention. This is a culture that’s happy to be hybrid: borrowing what’s needed, experimenting with form.

Most of all, the fluidity of the Picts doesn’t support a nationalism in the mythic mode. Others may rely on it, as they search for pure origins or lost homelands. But the culture itself doesn’t support that.

The Picts remind us that sovereignty can be about our capacities, not just about what we secure or enclose.

Where’s our ability to improvise new forms in response to changing realities? How do we choose to

incorporate the “other” without abandoning one’s own trajectory? When Neal Ascherson wrote that the Picts seem to vanish from history less because they were wiped out than because later historians preferred a story of their extermination, he meant it as a lament.

But the Buckquoy data lets us reverse the polarity: perhaps they disappear from the chronicles because they were never simply one people, language or polity, as historians now broadly acknowledge. They were a meshwork – an archipelago of micro-societies, a dapting to the North Sea world, choosing from an array of political possibilities.

Relating this to Scotland, right now? For one thing: debates about independence can get caught up in macro-matters – currencies, armed forces.

The Orkney Picts remind us that indy is also about forms of living – local autonomy, ecological resilience, shared infrastructures, distributed energy, citizen assemblies, community wealth building.

The future Scotland being sketched by its most forward-looking thinkers looks less like the Westminster model and more like a network of adaptable, creative localities. A politics of communities, not empires.

In such a conversation, the Picts are not remote ancestors. There’s a glory even in the scant material culture of the Picts – stone art that is symbolic rather than heraldic, settlements that shift form rather

They are a reminder that Scotland’s deepest traditions are pluralism, synthesis, adaptation and surprise

than freeze into rigid typologies. They suggest a political imagination not yet narrowed into the later medieval structures of kingship and control.

There is also something here about identity without essentialism. One of the anxieties lurking in modern independence debates is that asserting Scottish sovereignty must mean shrinking into a fixed ethnic or cultural shape.

But the Picts, if we stop treating them as painted phantoms and start seeing them as agents, tell a different story. The lesson of Buckquoy is almost anti-ethnic. Materials, habits, and techniques move around; communities adopt what is useful; identities blur and recombine. What persists is the ability to handle the world.

An independent Scotland will need precisely this talent. It’s not about withdrawal, but about negotiating our interdependence – especially in an era of climate crisis, resource transition, and geopolitical turbulence. Perhaps this is where the Picts should sit in our contemporary imagination.

They’re not a martyred tribe. They are a reminder that Scotland’s deepest traditions are those of pluralism, synthesis, adaptation and surprise.

A country that has repeatedly reinvented itself, and may do so again – not through erasing difference, but by staying open to many futures. The Picts are still here, powerful and incomplete, thereby inspiring us.