This collection of essays is a summary of the results of the Northern Picts project carried out by a team from the University of Aberdeen from 2014 under the leadership of Gordon Noble. The volume, and much of the project itself, was funded by Elizabeth and Don Cruikshank, to whom the volume is dedicated. With one exception, the essays are abridged and re-fashioned from previous publications that were issued during the course of the project with admirable promptitude. These essays cover the historical and archaeological evidence for the emergence of Pictish communities between the fourth and the seventh century, including new investigations at the forts of Burghead and Dunnicaer, a harvest of new cemeteries, mainly located from the air, new objects and a new understanding of the Gaulcross hoard and a ground-breaking review of the early Pictish monuments carrying symbols, powered by new dates and identified original contexts of use. The star of the show is certainly Rhynie, where monumental sculpture, imported Mediterranean pottery, votive cattle deposits and symbolic metalwork converge on a low-lying defensive enclosure containing a large hall building. This site, already famous for its symbol stones, was shown by excavation to be a multi-faceted assembly place, where religious and political functions interweave. The effect of this new work is to empower the early Picts with a distinctive material voice in fourth- to seventh-century Britain. Art, politics and religion, so often treated as semi-autonomous activities, are here integrated into communities of people, convincing in concept even if the appropriate vocabulary has sometimes yet to arrive.

The de novo essay written for the volume is Chapter 8 on the early church by Evans and Noble, which gathers and sifts much that could be relevant to future research.

Parc-an-caipel, with two early symbol slabs and an incised cross-slab, has potential to reveal a seventh-century transition between what we once called Class i and Class iv monuments.

An enclosure found by geophysics at Kinneddar is suggestive of a monastic vallum and indeed enclosed a later Benedictine abbey. Dating such enclosures is notoriously capricious, but first indications on the ground are that this was in use between the seventh and twelfth century. In general, the picture of a Pictish Christianisation in the seventh to eighth century is well argued, although this reviewer would like to see more investigation of the effects of the monastic movement in Northumbria, especially its rapid eighth-century emergence and outreach, something that had a major impact on the politics of Britain as a whole.

The mode of publishing adopted here is initially arresting, not least because its title is the same as a 2013 novel by Max Adams, an archaeologist and former York University student, and because pre-Christian kings are not greatly in evidence, but also owing to the innovative idea of writing an overall summary (intended for both ‘the specialist and the general reader’). However, the candid introduction and the richness of the chapters that follow soon convince the reader that this harmonious combination of an overview with published articles is a winning formula that should be emulated. The speed of the project and its fleeting visits to juicy-looking sites will probably attract criticism, as did Leslie Alcock’s campaign of sampling documented hill forts fifty years ago. But there is a positive resemblance here: both campaigns applied an ambitious agenda from a high vantage point, and so opened up the subject and provided a spur to new understanding and future exploration.

The Northern Picts project followed on from the Tarbat Discovery programme, launched in 1994 also in pursuit of the Northern Picts, but in the event focused on Easter Ross with its most significant discoveries at seventh- to sixteenth-century Portmahomack, an excavation well assessed here. Not only was the Aberdeen project an admirable continuation of that investigation, but it supported and enhanced the Tarbat Museum at an opportune moment. Indeed, the Centre is in receipt of the authors’ royalties, which might put the impartiality of the present reviewer in question. I can only say I did not know this before opening the book, and hope that my opinion that this is a very useful and skilfully assembled compilation will be regarded as sufficiently detached.