4 November 2010
3.00pm
Perth Museum & Art Gallery

TALK - As part of the Festival's Perth Day, Mark A Hall (History Officer, Perth Museum) will lead an exploration of the Museum's Perth 800 exhibition, with an introductory talk exploring the huge array and variety of medieval objects excavated in Perth over several decades. Visitors will then be able to explore the exhibition for themselves and Mark will be on hand to answer any questions about it.

The exhibition, Skin & Bone: Life & Death in Medieval Perth, is of course open through out the Festival (Monday-Saturday, 10am - 5pm) for additional visits. It charts the archaeology and history of Perth from the 11th to the 16th centuries, in two galleries. The Life gallery displays a wide array of material culture under the themes: Origins, Castle & Defences, Port of Trade, Streets & Vennels, Buildings & Rigs, Master Craftsmen, Everyday Pleasures & Pains, Religion and Food & Drink. The gallery is rounded-off with a look at the history of excavation in the town, including archive footage of the Perth High Street excavation 1975-77. The majority of the things on display have been recovered from excavations in the town over the past 40 years and are from Perth's Nationally Recognised collections but there are also significant loans including the 1450s Guildry or Lockit Book, the 15th century Perth Psalter, the early 16th century Perth Hammermen Book and a 14th century copy of the 1210 charter.  The Death gallery airs the themes of people and pets through a display of the skeletal materials of several individuals (children, men - including a murder victim - and a woman) and several fighting, working and pet dogs.

Saturday 30th October
2.45pm
Pitlochry Festival Theatre River Room

TALK - The Lewis chessmen are currently on the road touring Scotland in an exhibition that visits Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Lerwick and Stornoway. This is your chance to come and hear about those famous icons of Scottish archaeology as Mark Hall (Perth Museum & Art Gallery) talks about the recent research carried out on them by a team comprising Mark, David Caldwell (National Museums Scotland) and Caroline Wilkinson (Dundee University).

This paper takes a fresh look at what we know about the circumstances of their manufacture, use and loss. Two key elements of the generally accepted understanding of the Lewis chessmen have never been challenged: their supposed purely accidental loss (by a merchant) on Lewis and that they are only chessmen. An exploration of their wider archaeological and historical context suggests that their putative accidental loss by a merchant is the least plausible of explanations for the chessmen being on Lewis. The geographical, political and cultural position of Lewis in the North Sea World suggests rather that the chessmen were found on Lewis because they were used there for a substantial period of their lives; the valued possessions of a high-ranking nobleman or ecclesiastic. As gaming pieces we suggest it is more useful to think of them less in the exclusive vein of chessmen and more in the more comprehensive sense of a hoard of gaming pieces. The presence in the hoard of six tablesmen and a buckle (the latter perhaps for a bag that could have held the pieces) have long argued for this diversity but it is now tenable to suggest that the style and form of some of the abstract pawns as well as some of the figurative pieces, supports the possibility of use in the game hnefatafl, possibly interchangeably as chess pieces. We have found no evidence to contradict the likelihood of Trondheim as the place of manufacture and ‚ significantly aided by the innovative forensic-anthropological analysis of the face piece by Dr Caroline Wilkinson ‚ we suggest that the hands of at least 5 craftsmen were deployed in making the pieces. They were made over a late 12th-early 13th century time-frame and did not necessarily all arrive on Lewis at the same time.