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The Hebrides: a Cultural Backwater

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

E. Cecil Curwen
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Extract

In our efforts to reconstruct the life of vanished peoples and cultures we often find ourselves making comparisons with the implements and customs of modern primitive peoples. This practice seems, with due safeguards, reasonably sound, for similar cultural conditions may produce similar cultural phenomena. Our comparative material is usually sought among the backward races of the tropics, less frequently in parts of Europe that are off the beaten track; but it is not generally realized that we have in Britain itself a populous region which, owing to its remoteness, did not emerge from the Iron Age until the end of last century. By ‘the Iron Age’ we mean that simple state of culture that is found in peasant communities in southern Britain between, say, 500 B.C. and A.D. 1000, extending in a variable degree into the Middle Ages. This stage of cultural development is distinguished from more advanced stages by the prevalence of selfsupporting communities which are necessitated by difficulty of communications, and in this respect the culture of the Hebrides as late as the middle of the nineteenth century was more like that of the pre-Roman Iron Age in southern England than any succeeding phase.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 12 , Issue 47 , September 1938 , pp. 261 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1938

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References

1 This is a general statement, and does not necessarily apply to the households of the chiefs and landed proprietors. Even today, of the 30,000 (odd) inhabitants of Lewis and Harris, the majority have probably never seen a train.

2 In the case of one house at Woodend, near Portree, the present occupant could The house is obviously an old account for its past occupants for200 years. one and less carefully built than most, but has been recently modified internally.

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4 I have only seen one instance of a house consisting of as many as four parallelchambers ; this is in the township of Fivepenny Borve, and is illustrated in a recent photo by Aage Roussell in his Norse Building Customs in the Scottish Islands (1934), 13,fig. 3 (‘Mealahost’).Google Scholar

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16 For a knowledge of this, andfor much other valuable information, Mr Crawford is indebted to Mrs Margaret Campbell, of Barra, whom he wishes to thank for her generous help.

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