Abstract

Many problems arise when one attempts to define an ethnicity, particularly a past ethnicity with few living descendants. This is the case with the Picts, a people of Celtic descent that lived in Northern England into the European Middle Ages. One of the main problems with identifying the Picts is that they were one of at least five different nations, each with a unique language, which existed contemporaneously in the British Isles. This paper uses a multivariate approach to deal with the issue of identifying the Picts in the historical an archaeological record. In addition to archaeological and historical methods of identification, I examine the linguistic and ethnographic evidence for the existence of the Pictish nation. I conclude that, despite some problems, it is possible to identify the remains of an unique Pictish nation through these methods.