SCOTLAND may have been the last part of Britain to be settled and relatively late to adopt agriculture compared with southern England, but a carbon-dating programme by the National Museum of Scotland shows that some subsequent innovations of settled life are known earlier there than anywhere else in these islands, writes Norman Hammond.

The oldest evidence for wheeled transport, for instance, is a wooden disc wheel from Blair Drummond, near Stirling, which the Oxford radiocarbon accelerator unit has dated to between 1200BC and 800BC, in the middle of the Bronze Age. The oldest ox yoke is from Loch Nell and dates 1940BC to 1520BC. Heavy agricultural transport was clearly widely available in early Scotland.

Dates were also obtained for logboats, used for coasting trade and fishing, and for unfinished stemposts from a suspected Viking boatyard. Wooden culinary vessels and early items of clothing were also tested, Alison Sheridan reports in The Archaeologist, as well as a Late Bronze Age yew-wood copy of a bronze sword from Orkney.

Bone and wood, so often poorly preserved, have produced evidence of Scotland’s first societies, and dates which “have transformed our understanding of Scotland’s archaeology”, Dr Sheridan says.

The Archaeologist No. 56: 38-40.

Fat friars paid for their greed

WAS fat Friar Tuck a cruel caricature, or a roly-poly reality in the Middle Ages? A study of skeletons from three of London’s medieval monasteries suggests that the plump stereotype of films and television series was an accurate one.

“Monks do not feature much in mediaeval art, though grossly obese monks are carved on a choir-stall seat in St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle,” Pip Patrick notes in Current Archaeology. A variety of textual sources complain of gluttonous feats in monasteries and criticise monks for sharing among themselves food meant for the poor.

Twenty years ago an article in the British Medical Journal noted that Dish (diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis), an obesity-related spinal pathology, was an occupational disease of medieval monasticism. But, Patrick says, this has never been calibrated against secular burials to see if it was statistically more common among monks.

He examined 376 skeletons of men aged over 45 from Merton Priory, Bermondsey Abbey and the cemetery of St Mary Graces. “Age and sex profiles were selected so that the sample groups had the same background likelihood of developing the joint diseases, the only difference being their monastic or secular status,” he notes. As well as Dish, osteoarthritis of the knees, hips and fingertips was an important clue to obesity. Patrick found that all four forms of skeletal pathology were more common in monastic burials. He concludes: “Monks were almost five times as likely to develop some form of obesity-related joint disease as their secular counterparts.”

(Current Archaeology No 198. 306-307)

Parisians and their bridges

THERE are, amazingly, 13 bridges on the two river islands in the centre of Paris, the Île de la Cité and Île Saint Louis, writes Stephen Gardiner.

A fascinating guidebook,Tales of the Paris Bridges and How the Artists saw Them, by Etrenne Lymbery, takes the form of a walkabout through the city centre. Paintings and engravings by Henri Rousseau, Maximillien Luce and others sit alongside current photographs and contemporary paintings by Ian Baker, Roland Collins and Serge Belloni, illustrating how Paris has been protected from damage by commercial developers.

Tales of the Paris Bridges is published by Crampton-Moorhouse, London (020-7622 4914) at £7 plus p&p.