THEY have been regarded as one of the lost peoples of history, enigmatic savages who were mentioned by the Romans but left few other traces.
But now a long-running project to shine a light on the Dark Age Picts of north-east Scotland has found that, far from being backward natives on Europe’s fringes, they were a sophisticated people with a developed culture whose reach stretched to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and beyond.
For six years the Northern Picts Project, which is mostly run by the University of Aberdeen, has been probing the secrets of one of Caledonia’s earliest people to expand upon their place in Scotland’s story.