Winter Words Festival 2023

Sunday 12 February

11am – 12 noon

The Picts is the first major new history of the Picts since the 1950s! The Picts have fascinated for centuries. They emerged c. ad 300 to defy the might of Rome only to disappear by 1000 ad, yet they left major legacies. They laid the foundations for the medieval Scottish kingdom and carved some of Europe’s most eye-catching yet enigmatic stone monuments.

Join  Gordon Noble and Nick Evans to hear about the Picts in detail – their archaeology and history, their kingdoms, culture, beliefs and everyday lives from origins to end. In their talk, they will include fascinating innovative research and new perspectives that will transform our understanding of this highly sophisticated society that was central to Scotland’s early history.

Professor Gordon Noble has undertaken award-winning landscape research and field projects working on projects from the Mesolithic to Medieval periods. He is author of Neolithic Scotland: Timber, Stone, Earth and Fire (Edinburgh University Press 2006); Woodland in the Neolithic of Northern Europe: The Forest As Ancestor (Cambridge University Press 2017) and co-author of King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce (Birlinn 2019). He works on two current major projects: Northern Picts and Comparative Kingship, research for both of which won the Current Archaeology Research Project of the Year 2021, a highly prestigious accolade. His research has featured on BBC 2’s Digging for Britain, Radio 4 In Our Time and in many other media outlets.

Nicholas Evans is a Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust funded Comparative Kingship: the Early Medieval Kingdoms of Northern Britain and Ireland project at the University of Aberdeen. He is a historian whose research and teaching have focused on the medieval Celtic-speaking societies of Britain and Ireland and the texts they produced. He is the author of The Present and the Past in Medieval Irish Chronicles (Boydell Press, 2010), A Historical Introduction to the Northern Picts (Aberdeen University/Tarbat Discovery Centre, 2014) and co-author of King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce (Birlinn 2019).