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 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
'Slow Looking' through 3D and Digital Imaging for OG(H)AM and Govan Old
Dr Megan Kasten
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Image: Megan Kasten
Digital imaging methods like photogrammetry and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) are often discussed in relation to how ‘fast’ they are compared to other recording methods, or how these processes can be automated. However, in my own research practice, I find that the data capture, processing, and analysis of the final output often require a structured ‘Slow Looking’ approach (Tishman 2018). This talk will highlight how framing these technical processes as selective attention, juxtaposition, and changes in perspective have contributed to the analysis of the early medieval carved stones at Govan Old and ogham-inscribed monuments and objects. Slow Looking methods and applying digital tools creatively has been especially insightful in the study of worn and damaged monuments, which are often omitted from analysis.
​About the speaker
Dr Megan Kasten is a digital imaging specialist interested in its research applications to early medieval carved stone. She obtained her PhD in Archaeology from the University of Glasgow in 2019, in which she utilised photogrammetry and RTI to analyse the Govan Stones. She was the UK postdoctoral researcher on the recently completed AHRC-IRC funded OG(H)AM project (2021-2025) and is supporting the Heritage Visualisation postgraduate students at the Glasgow School of Art: School of Innovation and Technology as a Visiting Lecturer.
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Friday 20th March 2026
New biomolecular insights into Pictish identity
Dr Lucy Koster
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Aerial view of Croftgowan cemetery, Inverness-shire (Lucy Koster)
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The self-identity of the Picts has been a topic of debate in archaeology since the 1950s, partially as a result of the lack of historical and archaeological evidence from this period in Scotland. Considerable research has been conducted in particular over the past decade or so on the history, archaeology, and bioarchaeology of the Picts, which has provided greater insight into the nature of this archaeological group. However, because of the scarcity of human remains and the lack of Pictish written sources, the popular imagination still draws heavily on mythical narratives from contemporary historical accounts. This talk presents insights into Pictish life histories and social organisation by combining novel and published isotopic and ancient DNA analyses which show high levels of mobility over varying distances, genetic diversity, and a lack of close relatedness in cemetery populations, and discussed how we might best interpret them to better understand the Picts.
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​About the speaker
Dr Lucy Koster is an archaeological scientist who specialises in combining multiple forms of biomolecular analyses (stable isotopes, aDNA) to investigate the life histories of people in the past. She obtained her PhD in Archaeology from the University of Aberdeen (2025). Her thesis focused on investigating the life histories of Pictish individuals from two sites in Scotland, Croftgowan barrow cemetery in Inverness-shire and Lochhead Quarry in Angus. She previously undertook a BA (Hons) in Archaeology and Anthropology (2021) and an MSc in Archaeological Science (2021) at the University of Oxford, during which she specialised in human osteology and isotopic methods. She has been involved in since 2016 with the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project, where she is a human remains team supervisor and trustee/committee member. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, on the Make-Up of the Cities project, where she is using isotopic analyses to investigate early life history from five urban centres from medieval Flanders.
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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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​​Photo: David Osgarby
Pictish Symbols exhibit many of the characteristic features of a writing system: there is a fixed inventory of symbols; these symbols repeat with varying frequencies; there is both stability and systematic change over time; and they occur in contexts where known writing systems are used in nearby contemporary traditions. Given that the evidence points towards Pictish Symbols as a writing system—expressing personal names in most preserved contexts—this presentation seeks to use the study of writing systems (grapholinguistics) to explore what could be said about the likely Pictish writing system.
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​About the speaker
David Osgarby is a second year PhD Student at the University of Glasgow in the Department of Celtic & Gaelic supervised by Prof. Katherine Forsyth and Prof. Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh. His background is in linguistics and his research interests include documentary and descriptive linguistics, the comparative and theoretical study of writing systems, and decipherment methodologies.
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Past lectures in this series
Friday 21st November 2025
The lost libraries of Pictland
Professor Jane Geddes, University of Aberdeen
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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.”
About the Speaker
Jane Geddes is Professor Emerita from Aberdeen University and President of the Pictish Arts Society.
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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.
