The building of megalithic monuments dedicated to the dead had long ceased and from about now it was the building of structures associated with daily living that dominated.
Some types of building are mainly found in particular parts of the country: brochs (double-walled stone roundhouses with a central courtyard and a defensive wall enclosing the site), wheelhouses (stone roundhouses with inner radius elongated stone piers and a hearth at the hub) and duns (single-walled roundhouses of various sizes) in the north and west; hillforts (earthworks, sometimes with wooden or stone enclosures) mostly below the Clyde-Forth line; and crannogs (houses on artificial islands) in the wetlands along southwest coast.
Jarlshof (multi-period, 2500-00-17th century), Sumburgh, Mainland, on the eastern coast of West Voe bay is the best known prehistoric archaeological site in Shetland. The Iron Age ruins include several different types of structures, including a broch and three wheelhouses.
At the top of Kaimes Hill, southwest of Edinburgh, is an Iron Age hillfort, occupied around 400 BC. Excavation revealed three main structural phases: a single rampart timber-laced fort, a rubble-cored, stone-faced rampart, and then a rubble and turf rampart as its major structure.
The broch at Bu midway between Navershaw and Bu Point on Mainland in Orkney has a diameter of about nineteen metres (62 ft) with a solid outer wall some five metres (16 ft) thick. The area inside covers about seventy square metres (750 sq ft), dating from around 800 to 600 BC.
Cults Loch crannog, Dumfries and Galloway, is positioned on a promontory extending out into the northwest of the loch. It was originally an island connected to the shore by a timber walkway. On top of the mound there were the remains of at least four structures, which were probably in use sequentially. Dating places all the activity between 750 and 200 BC. There is a second crannog in the centre of the loch, and another located between the loch and the marshland to the west.
The Broch of Mousa, Mousa, Shetland, is the tallest broch still standing and is thought to have been constructed 100 BC. It is thirteen metres (43 ft) high and at ground level its outside diameter is about fifteen metres (49 ft) with walls tapering to an upper diameter of about twelve metres (39 ft). Over five hundred brochs have been found in Scotland.
Over sixty-two ‘wheelhouse’ sites have been found in the northwest, ranging in diameter from four to about eleven metres (13 to 36 feet) and those sites that have been dated tend to fall within the period 25-00-380. The majority are dug into the landscape and only their conical thatched roofs would have been visible above the ground. That wheelhouse sites were occupied for a few generations only is implied by three sites in the Outer Hebrides: Kneep (100-00-200) on Lewis, Sollas (third and fourth centuries AD) on North Uist and Bornais (fifth and sixth centuries AD) on South Uist.
At the Ness of Burgi, a finger of land extending southwards from the south of Mainland, Shetland, there is promontory fort, probably built around 100 BC, which lies behind a 6.4 metre thick stone rampart that has a ditch on both sides and separates the promontory from the mainland.
The remains of an Iron Age chariot burial dated to the fifth century BC were found near the Bronze Age burial mound at Huly Hill, east of the River Almond, Midlothian. It shows links with the Iron Age culture of west central Europe.
A fragment of wood interpreted as a part of a lyre and dated to the second half of the fourth century BC found at the High Pasture Cave on Skye in the Inner Hebrides, is the earliest evidence of a stringed instrument in western Europe.
Four gold Iron Age torcs, now known as the ‘Stirling Hoard’, dated to between 300 and 100 BC, were found in a field near Blair Drummond, northwest of Stirling. Later investigations found that they had been buried within a roundhouse.
Souterrains are partly or wholly underground passageways, normally connected with above-ground structures. Over four hundred have been discovered in Scotland, many of them in the southeast. Literary evidence suggests that they were places of refuge but there are indications that they were also used as underground stores. In Angus two examples, attached to a surface dwelling and dated to the first century AD, have been found northeast of Dundee. The one at Ardestie is twenty-four metres (80 ft) long; the other at Carlungie is forty-five metres (150 ft) long and the most complex.
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