Atecotti

=================================================================

Atecotti, guardians of the Henges' secrets?

What actually happened at the henges? The druids whose ashes were buried at Stonehenge in the 1920'sCE with their sickles and modern trappings certainly didn't know (the outer circle at Avebury, which encompassed the even earlier North and South Circles, was erected 300 years before the first modern sickle hit the shops in the Tigris basin). Archeological evidence from the megalithic sites is unlikely to give us much idea of the practices and customs, but what of the contemporaries of the megalithic constructing cultures, the Atecotti?

The late fourth century Romans had five neighbours to the north; Picts, Scots, dun dwellers, broch dwellers and the Atecotti. The Romans described them as an incredibly ferocious nation. They came to the attention of Rome when they took part in the great combined assault in the 360'sCE. The tribal name of Atecotti is either British or Pictish (a fair guess, as the Irish lists from this period are staggering in their breadth, and don't include any mention of the Atecotti) and the translation comes out as the 'very old people'. This with the absence of physical evidence suggests to some an aboriginal culture. A mesolithic hunter/gatherer culture. A mesolithic culture which lasted until the late 6th century CE.

Would a people who saw the henge building cultures rise and evolve into their iron age cultures have any mention of their neighbours in their stories/art? Possibly a sneering, "What's all that propping up rocks and farming nonsense, when you could be out hunting beaver and deer?", type thing?

The Atecotti's ancient nomadic tent culture has as yet to produce any firm archeological evidence. I think it will be a while before anyone funds a search for such an elusive quarry. Looking for the footprints of the lightest feet to touch Albion may prove to be a difficult but worthy quest.

If there are any clues, it will be in the language remains of the Atecotti. There are references to a meeting Columba (later St.Columba) had with an old man who spoke a tongue which was neither Pictish or Irish when he was based at Skye. I've seen conradictory accounts about whether this old gentleman was buried for 12 hours and dug up or not. He was allegedly spouting all sorts of nonsense which seemed to upset Columba somewhat as he had the poor fellow buried again.

Further traces of what could be the Atecottic language are evident on some of the standing stones on the edge of the Pictish region. They differ from the regular Pictish stone monuments by their use of lettering. The regular Pictish stones are either plain or decorated with pictograms, spirals or symbols, not script. The lettering is in the style of Irish ogham characters. But as yet little progress has been made into the solving of the Atecottic language, at most we can 'decipher' a number of personal names. If the ogham characters have the same phonetic values as the Irish ogham group the stones had not been carved by anyone who spoke either Pictish, Irish or any of the other Celtic language groups.

Although we don't know that it definately wasn't the builders of the brochs or the duns who carved these stones, it is quite unlikely. Both the broch culture and that of the dun dwellers produce a great deal of archeological evidence, all of which is completely absent from the areas where the undeciphered stones are located.

Could there be an answer to the use of Stonehenge via the last carvings of the surviving aboriginal culture in Britain? Is there a trace of their linguistic culture alive in a Gaelic poem or song?

It may be possible to imagine in some way what the Atecotti lifestyle did include by examining other aboriginal cultures. Spiritually, aboriginal cultures have a pantheonic attitude to worship. Hunter gatherer lifestyles either prosper or flounder at the capricious ebb and flow of the natural world. It wouldn't harm an Atecottic hunter to pay their dues to the elements.

Aboriginal peoples have been regularly displaced through history by 'progressive' cultures who viewed their locationally static villages more territorially as a whole and often were aggressive to their nomadic neighbours. What lands the existing iron age tribes didn't expand into, the celts soon must have added pressure.

Contempory aboriginal societies share two main attitudes in common which largely define them from more pastural and 'progressive' cultures. Firstly they have no hierarchy of matter. Each rock, tree and breeze deserved equal veneration as each was as valuable as a part of the whole. Secondly, their dreams and unconcious life had equal value to their waking life.

Were the Atecotti responsible for the disappearance of the aurochs from the British Isles? The contempory northern aboriginal cultures would be hunting the great deer and moose of their indigenous lands. Could the compression of the Atecotti's hunting range be responsible for this extinction or would it be the continual afforestation that led to this large mammal's demise?

An amazing feature of the story of the Atecotti is that they maintained a hunter/gatherer lifestyle long after other cultures in similar climates took to either agriculture or some form of pasturalism. The secluded or extremely hostile environments which have been a common bond in other persistant aboriginal cultures are not present in the case study of the Atecotti. The land the Australian Aboriginal tribes lived on was singularily unsuitable for agriculture and also they did not have contact with farming neighbours. The Atecotti were in a position to change their culture if they chose, instead they continued a culture that had it's roots well before the time of the first megalithic monument.

If anyone out there has ANY information about the Atecotti I'd welcome the opportunity to add it to our database.