THE CBANIOLOGY OF THE PEOPLE OF SCOTLAND. 249 



that the Picts so called were a mixed people, possibly comprising descendants of 

 the neolithic aborigines, the bronze-age people, and their Celtic invaders. 



The Scots, again, had originally migrated from Ireland, at that time known as 

 Scotia, and belonged to the Goidelic division of the Celtic race which had settled 

 there. They took possession of Argyll and the adjacent islands, known as Dalriada, 

 and ultimately their name was applied to the whole of Scotland and its people. 



The prehistoric Celts in Scotland should not be regarded as exclusively belonging 

 to the Goidelic division of that race. The Brythonic or Welsh division had pene- 

 trated north to the estuary and valley of the Clyde and had formed the kingdom of 

 Strathclyde, which included the south-western counties. In the early years of the 

 eleventh century the northern part of this kingdom became fused with Dalriada, and 

 with the Goidelic Celts or Picts who inhabited Galloway. At about the same time 

 Malcolm the Second defeated, at the battle of Carham, the Anglo-Northumbrian ruler 

 of the Lothians and eastern border counties, when the Sol way and Tweed, and not 

 the Forth, became the southern border of the Scottish kingdom. 



The Norse invasion covered an important chapter in the early history of 

 Scotland. The Shetland and Orkney Islands, Caithness, Sutherland, and the 

 Western Islands were conquered by the Norwegians about the end of the ninth 

 century a. d., and several Viking interments have been described in the section on the 

 Iron Age (p. 221). To these I may add an account* of two skulls by Barnard Davis. 

 One, in the museum of Dunrobin Castle, was from a stone-built grave about eight feet 

 long, exposed alongside of a second similar grave in which was the rusted iron socket 

 of a spear-head. The cephalic index of this skull was 78, mesobrachy cephalic, 

 the vertical index was 67 '2; the breadth exceeded the height, which was chamse- 

 cephalic. The occipital squama bulged behind the inion, the face was orthognathic. 

 The other skull was found at the foot of one of the erect stones of a cromlech at 

 Nisibost, isle of Harris. It was broadly ovoid, with feeble glabella and supraciliaries ; 

 vertex flattened ; post-parietal slope gradual ; occiput bulged behind a feeble inion ; 

 nose narrow and moderately projecting ; orbits rounded ; teeth much worn. The 

 cephalic index, 77 '8, was mesobrachycephalic, the breadth much greater than the 

 height, and the vertical index 65 "6. Montelius considered that in the iron age 

 in Scandinavia cremation was practised from 500 B.C. to about 1050 a.d. Up to 

 about 800 a.d. it was the rule, after which date inhumation in cists of either wood 

 or stone, or direct interment in the earth, became the practice. 



G. Retzius, from an analysis of forty-one iron-age interments in Sweden, found 

 twenty-eight to be dolichocephalic, ten with the cephalic index from 77 to 78*4, 

 mesobrachycephalic, only three were brachycephalic. In the iron age, as in the bronze 

 and stone ages, the dolichocephalic type predominated in Sweden as at present. 

 Justus Barth recognised f in a set of old Norwegian skulls a Viking type, ovoid, 



* Crania Britannica. The Dunrobin burial was described in P.S.Ant.Sc, vol. i, p- 297, 1855. 

 t Quoted by Retzius, Omnia Suecica. 



