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Archaeological science can now reveal where a person came from, even a body that's more than 1400 years old. Professor Kate Britton at the University of Aberdeen specialises in this research.
I want to know whether or not Rosemarkie Man was local or was an outsider.
Well, there's different isotope techniques we can do to explore whether or not he was raised in this area, and maybe whether he lived in the area in the days before he died to.
Kate analysed strontium isotopes in two teeth from Rosemarkie Man. One formed when he was a baby and the other in late childhood.
This is a, sort of, map of Scotland, but it's superimposed with strontium isotope data. So here we've got the area around Rosemarkie, and both teeth are consistent with being local.
Okay, he's not an outsider, he's a local boy.
Well, we can say he spent his childhood somewhere very much like the area around Rosemarkie.
Everything at the moment, all of the evidence is pointing to him, having grown up here, lived here and then being murdered here.
To investigate status, scientists can again analyse isotopes. Nitrogen and carbon in the bones, reveal the amount of protein and animal or person consumed. High protein levels in some Pictish human remains, indicate that they ate more meat and dairy, so could have been high status. Kate's findings for Rosemarkie Man are revealing.
That would be a good fit for a diet that had a lot of pork in it, or possibly wild boar, or a diet that also incorporated chicken, ducks, geese, and maybe even freshwater fish.
Is he high status?
I think that's something tricky to say. He's a meat eater that's eating some fairly high trophic level foods, we can't say too much more than that.
It is interesting, though, because, as you say, he's grouping with Picts who are normally given proper burials, such that you can find them and he's in a cave, so he really stands out in that way.
Representation: www.josarsby.com/turi-king