Pictish Arts Society - Lecture Syllabus 2025-2026
Lectures are held on Fridays at 7.30pm (UK time), on Zoom.
Lectures are for PAS members only. If you like the look of the syllabus but aren't currently a member, why not check out all of the perks of membership and join the PAS here?
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A joining link will be sent by email to all members in good time for each lecture.
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Friday 21st November 2025
The lost libraries of Pictland
Professor Jane Geddes, University of Aberdeen
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Ezra in his scriptorium, Codex Amiatinus, folio 5r
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Picts produced some of Europe’s finest sculpture between the fifth and ninth centuries and yet no contemporary manuscripts survive from Pictland. This talk reconstructs evidence for the lost libraries of Pictland whose images and ideas informed the sculpture. Behind the vivid imagery on cross slabs lie sources from a cosmopolitan visual world of manuscript illuminations.
Picts both invented their own art form, their enigmatic ‘symbols’, and were inspired by Christian liturgical manuscripts from abroad. Influences went both ways whereby the distinctive features of Pictish animal art were adapted to become Evangelist symbols in Insular manuscripts elsewhere, while Pictish sculptors scoured incoming church documents for an expanded artistic repertoire of abstract pattern, monsters and holy men. Even without illustrations, it is possible to deduce which literary sources Pictish artists were aware of.
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About the speaker
Jane Geddes is Professor Emerita from Aberdeen University and President of the Pictish Arts Society.
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Friday 16th January 2026
Medium Matters: the Pictish re-use of prehistoric standing stones
Heather Ford, PhD Researcher, University of Glasgow
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Photo: Heather Ford
The prehistoric standing stones and stone circles which furnish the Scottish landscape have borne witness to millennia, including both our time and the Picts', and they certainly have not escaped our notice. The re-use of standing stones by later communities is evident from their very erection, but the scale of it and the motivations underlying it are still nebulously understood. Nevertheless, it has captured the attention and imagination of scholars for centuries.
Even from the earliest records, the association of Late Antique and Early Medieval carved stones with prehistoric monuments has been well documented in Scotland. These associations were drawn either due to proximity, such as by Charles Cordiner (1788) who recognised stone circles in the vicinity of carved stones as ‘Druid Temples’; or through comparison, as is found in Paterson’s 1700 letter comparing the Cat Stane of Midlothian in its kerb cairn to other ‘circle[s] of stone’ Edward Lhwyd encountered on his journeys.
Today, we recognise these relationships as the re-use of prehistoric monuments and not continuity of practice, but we have not moved far past these methods of identification. We are overdue a comprehensive review of the Pictish re-use of prehistoric standing stones and my research seeks to do exactly that. This paper will present the criteria I have developed to identify cases of genuine re-use as well as possible cases of perceived re-use in the corpus of early symbol stones and examine some notable cases of re-used prehistoric standing stones. Using this updated record of Pictish re-use, I will consider early symbol stones alongside their contemporaries elsewhere in Scotland, including undressed ogham pillars, Late Antique Latin monuments, and early cross-marked stones, in order to understand the full scale of this phenomenon in Scotland and the Picts' place within it.
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​About the speaker
Heather Ford is a third-year doctoral researcher in Archaeology and Celtic Studies from the University of Glasgow. Her current project identifies and investigates the re-use and evocation of prehistoric standing stones in the 5th-7th century carved stone traditions of northern Britain, including Pictish symbols, ogham, Latin, and cross-marks on undressed rock. Her broader research interests include archaeological theory; phenomenology; the reproduction of the past; and the materiality, biography, and landscape contexts of stone monuments. Alongside her thesis, Heather works as an intern for the Centre for Scottish and Celtic studies; fundraising co-ordinator for the Scottish Archaeological Forum; and was the recipient of the 2024 Don Henson Award for the best debut paper at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in Bournemouth.
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Friday 20th February 2026
The 'Govan School' reconsidered through 3D imaging
Dr Megan Kasten
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Abstract to follow.
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Friday 20th March 2026
Migration, kinship and mobility in peri-historic Scotland using combined stable isotope and aDNA analyses
Dr Lucy Koster
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Abstract to follow.
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Friday 17th April 2026
What can a writing systems approach bring to understanding Pictish symbols?
David Osgarby, PhD Researcher, University of Glasgow
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Abstract to follow.
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Past lectures in this series
Friday 24th October 2025
Symbols of life: Pictorial prayers on Pictish stone sculpture
Michael King
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I will explore a variety of texts that could have influenced the subject-matter of incised and relief stone carvings in Pictland. I will draw on ancient tales, ecclesiastical history, hagiography, a guide to holy places, Physiologus, the bible and apocrypha, carvings and inscriptions on stones and artefacts, and pseudo-scientific treatises.
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In the process of this exploration, I shall show how ideograms carved on the stones can be interpreted as symbols of life, which, alone or in various combinations, constitute pictorial prayers for the dead, variations on the ‘commendatio animae’. In this I will be drawing together strands of insight from a whole host of scholars, and combining them with some new approaches.
I shall consider how various Pictish symbols may be interpreted as vessels for water, nourishment, rest and new life, in addition to representing books, words and numbers, that all signify ‘life’. I shall apply an aspect of conceptual metonymy from the realm of cognitive linguistics to help elucidate how ‘vessels’ were used to symbolise aspects of new life. The use of such ‘symbols of life’ on objects and stones to protect and give hope to the living will also be explored.
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I shall start by considering the possibility of the existence of oral (or even written) narratives of a secular nature in Pictland by analysing several distinctive images on a symbol-bearing cross-slab which parallel later motifs included in the Welsh tales known as the 'Mabinogi'. I shall end by considering the view of the cosmos contained in the 7th-century Irish pseudo-scientific treatises 'De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae' and the 'Liber de ordine creaturarum', and how this view appears to be manifested on one of the great 8th-century Pictish cross-slabs of Easter Ross.
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​Essentially, however, I shall explore the idea that the Picts chose their own pictorial approach when setting up stone monuments for the dead, following a widespread Late Antique tradition, but finding inspiration in their own culture, as well as in the imported culture of Christianity, to create concise, unique and highly sophisticated statements of hope and supplication in stone, generally dispensing with inscriptions, but designed (in theory) to last for eternity."
About the speaker
Mike King studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge University, Early Medieval Archaeology at Durham, and Museum Studies at Leicester, before working in Scottish museums during the 1990s. He started his career in Perth Museum in 1989, and then worked as Curator of North-East Fife Museums Service, centred on St Andrews Museum, from 1994 until 2000. At that point he exchanged St Andrew for St Patrick, when he moved to Downpatrick to become Curator of Down County Museum. His main projects there were creating new permanent exhibitions with £1m of Lottery funding in 2006, and liaising with Down Cathedral and the Historic Environment Division NI to move the early 10th century Downpatrick High Cross into a newly built £0.5m extension at the museum in 2015. He retired in 2022 and is now leading tours around different parts of Ireland, and also Hadrian’s Wall, having walked it in 2022, and documented the re-use of Roman stone in Hexham Abbey in 1988.
