I have made it perfectly certain that magic stones, "witch stones,"
"charm stones," and that _churinga irula_, wooden magical slats of wood,
exist in Australia and other savage regions, and survive, as magical,
into modern British life. The point is beyond doubt, and it is beyond
doubt that, in many regions, the stones, and the slats of wood, may be
inscribed with archaic markings, or may be uninscribed. This will be
proved more fully later. Thus Pictish, like modern British civilisation,
may assuredly have been familiar with charm stones. There is no _a
priori_ objection as to the possibility.
Why should Pictish stones _not_ be inscribed with archaic patterns
familiar to the dwellers among inscribed rocks, perhaps themselves the
inscribers of the rocks? Manifestly there is no _a priori_
improbability. I have seen the archaic patterns of concentric circles
and fish spines, (or whatever we call the medial line with slanting side
lines,) neatly designed in white on the flag stones in front of cottage
doors in Galloway. The cottagers dwelt near the rocks with similar
patterns on the estate of Monreith, but are not likely to have copied
them; the patterns, I presume, were mere survivals in tradition.
The Picts, or whoever they were, might assuredly use charm stones, and
the only objection to the idea that they might engrave archaic patterns
on them is the absence of record of similarly inscribed small stones in
Britain. The custom of using magic stones was not at all incongruous
with the early Pictish civilisation, which retained a form of the Family
now long outworn by the civilisation of the Arunta. The sole objection
is that _a silentio_, silence of archaeological records as to _inscribed_
small stones. That is not a closer of discussion, nor is the silence
absolute, as I shall show.
Moreover, the appearance of an unique and previously unheard-of set of
inscribed stones, in a site of the usual broch and crannog period, is not
invariably ascribed to forgery, even by the most orthodox archaeologists.
Thus Sir Francis Terry found unheard-of things, not to mention "a number
of thin flat circular discs of various sizes" in his Caithness brochs. In
Wester broch "the most remarkable things found" were three egg-shaped
quartzite pearls "having their surface painted with spots in a blackish
or blackish-brown pigment." He also found a flattish circular disc of
sandstone, inscribed with a duck or other water-fowl, while on one side
was an attempt, apparently, to write runes, on the other an inscription
in unknown cursive characters. There was a boulder of sandstone with
nine cup marks, and there were more painted pebbles, the ornaments now
resembling ordinary cup marks, now taking the shape of a cross, and now
of lines and other patterns, one of which, on an Arunta rock, is of
unknown meaning, among many of known totemic significance.
Dr. Joseph Anderson compares these to "similar pebbles painted with a red
pigment" which M. Piette found in the cavern of Mas d'Azil, of which the
relics are, in part at least, palaeolithic, or "mesolithic," and of
dateless antiquity. In _L'Anthropologie_ (Nov. 1894), Mr. Arthur Bernard
Cook suggests that the pebbles of Mas d'Azil may correspond to the stone
churinga nanja of the Arunta; a few of which appear to be painted, not
incised. I argued, on the contrary, that things of similar appearance,
at Mas d'Azil: in Central Australia: and in Caithness, need not have had
the same meaning and purpose. {95a}
It is only certain that the pebbles of the Caithness brochs are as
absolutely unfamiliar as the inscribed stones of Dumbuck. But nobody
says that the Caithness painted pebbles are forgeries or modern
fabrications. Sauce for the Clyde goose is not sauce for the Caithness
gander. {95b}
The use of painted pebbles and of inscribed stones, may have been merely
_local_.
In Australia the stone churinga are now, since 1904, known to be _local_,
confined to the Arunta "nation," and the Kaitish, with very few sporadic
exceptions in adjacent tribes. {95c}
The purely local range of the inscribed stones in Central Australia,
makes one more anxious for further local research in the Clyde district
and south-west coast.