Brit-Am Historical Reports (26 December, 2012. 13 Tevet, 5773)
Contents:
1. 'First tartan' on Roman statue [depicts Scottish Caledonian from ca. 200 CE]
2. Doggerland: [Submerged Lands off the coast of Britain and the Netherlands] by Laura Spinney
3. UiO linguist makes sensational claim: English is a Scandinavian language
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1. 'First tartan' on Roman statue [depicts Scottish Caledonian from ca. 200 CE]
Extracts:
The Caledonian [i.e. Scottish] warrior on the bronze statue appears to be wearing tartan trews
Remnants of a Roman statue in North Africa could be the "first-ever depiction of tartan", according to a BBC Scotland documentary.
A piece of a bronze statue of the Emperor Caracalla contains the small figure of a Caledonian warrior wearing what appears to be tartan trews.
The third century Roman emperor Caracalla styled himself as the conqueror of the Caledonians.
A statue marking his achievements stood in the Moroccan city of Volubilis.
It stood above a great archway in the ancient city, which lay in the south west of the Roman empire, 1,500 miles from Caledonia - modern day Scotland.
A small piece of cloak from the monument still survives at the archaeological museum in Rabat in Morocco.
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"It includes an early depiction of that great national stereotype - the long-haired Caledonian warrior," says Dr Fraser Hunter, who presents the BBC Scotland programme.
The warrior is wearing checked leggings which, according to Dr Hunter, is "the first-ever depiction of tartan".
It is thought the Celts have been weaving plaid twills for thousands of years and this is the earliest representation.
Dr Hunter adds: "The shield too is Celtic in style. You can see the warrior's head with the cloak over the shoulders. The arms are bound behind the back.
"This guy is a captive. He's a prisoner from the vicious campaigns of Severus and Caracalla."
Septimius Severus, Caracalla's father, led massive military campaigns into 3rd century Scotland.
The mighty Roman legions had conquered all before them but they stuttered to a halt when they took on the tribes of Iron Age Scotland.
Caracalla carried on his father's fight, waging a brutal campaign.
Dr Hunter says prisoners could have been force-marched for months to other parts of the empire.
"They were living trophies of the emperor's success. Some might have been traded as slaves in the great markets. Others would have been even less fortunate."
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2. Doggerland: [Submerged Lands off the coast of Britain and the Netherlands]
By Laura Spinney
Extracts:
When signs of a lost world at the bottom of the North Sea first began to appear, no one wanted to believe them. The evidence started to surface a century and a half ago, when fishermen along the Dutch coast widely adopted a technique called beam trawling. They dragged weighted nets across the seafloor and hoisted them up full of sole, plaice, and other bottom fish. But sometimes an enormous tusk would spill out and clatter onto the deck, or the remains of an aurochs, woolly rhino, or other extinct beast. The fishermen were disturbed by these hints that things were not always as they are. What they could not explain, they threw back into the sea.
The story of that vanished land begins with the waning of the ice. Eighteen thousand years ago, the seas around northern Europe were some 400 feet lower than today. Britain was not an island but the uninhabited northwest corner of Europe, and between it and the rest of the continent stretched frozen tundra. As the world warmed and the ice receded, deer, aurochs, and wild boar headed northward and westward. The hunters followed. Coming off the uplands of what is now continental Europe, they found themselves in a vast, low-lying plain.
Archaeologists call that vanished plain Doggerland, after the North Sea sandbank and occasional shipping hazard Dogger Bank. Once thought of as a largely uninhabited land bridge between modern-day continental Europe and Britain, a place on the way to somewhere else, Doggerland is now believed to have been settled by Mesolithic people, probably in large numbers, until they were forced out of it thousands of years later by the relentlessly rising sea. A period of climatic and social upheaval ensued until, by the end of the Mesolithic, Europe had lost a substantial portion of its landmass and looked much as it does today.
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3. UiO linguist makes sensational claim: English is a Scandinavian language
By Trine Nickelsen APOLLON
Contrary to popular belief, the British did not 'borrow' words and concepts from the Norwegian and Danish Vikings and their descendants. What we call English is actually a form of Scandinavian.