SINCE they have all been brought together, it is tempting to picture the Orkney Venus throwing a barbed harpoon at a medieval football while Rabbie Burns plays violin and Captain Scott dons his snow goggles. The components for such a shamelessly asynchronous exercise come from a newly released list of 25 objects “that shaped Scotland’s history”.
Published in an e-book today, VisitScotland’s list is a contribution to this Year of History, Heritage and Archaeology, with the object of the objects being to promote the nation’s cultural inheritance, while persuading visitors to see the artefacts for themselves.
It may seem something of a gimmick, but it is nevertheless an inspiring and intriguing list that takes us from the first hunter-gatherers (a barbed harpoon point discovered in Macarthur Cave, Oban) to the first cloned sheep (Dolly of that ilk), by way of a Roman distance slab and the Dallas Dhu stencil (used to mark barrels of whisky).
It’s eclectic enough to range from the earliest known depiction of the female human form (the aforementioned Venus) to the Lewis Chessmen – appropriately enough as today is International Chess Day. It couldn’t have been easy deciding what to include on the list and what to leave out. But history is never in a hurry, and only rarely brings a harpoon point together with an old football.
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