Pictish stone

A Pictish stone is a type of monumental stele, generally carved or incised with symbols or designs.

[1] In The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland (1903) J Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson first classified Pictish stones into three groups.

[8][9] The symbols are also sometimes found on other movable objects like small stone discs and bones mostly from the Northern Isles.

Simple or early forms of the symbols are carved on the walls of coastal caves at East Wemyss, Fife and Covesea, Moray.

It is therefore thought likely that they were represented in other more perishable forms that have not survived in the archaeological record, perhaps including clothing and tattoos.

[1] A team from Exeter University, using mathematical analysis, have concluded that the symbols in the Pictish image stones "exhibit the characteristics of written languages" (as opposed to "random or sematographic (heraldic) characters").

[10][11] The Exeter analysts' claim has been criticized by linguists Mark Liberman and Richard Sproat on the grounds that the non-uniform distribution of symbols – taken to be evidence of writing – is little different from non-linguistic non-uniform distributions (such as die rolls), and that the Exeter team are using a definition of writing broader than that used by linguists.

[14][15] Although earlier studies based on a contextual approach, postulating the identification of the pagan "pre-Christian Celtic Cult of the Archer Guardian", have suggested possible clausal meanings for symbol pairs.

Areas that show particular concentrations include Strathtay, Strathmore, coastal Angus, Fife, Strathdee, Garioch, Moray, Strathspey, Caithness, Easter Ross, the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland.