The Picts have attracted more than their share of myth. They have been imagined as mysterious, vanished, covered with tattoos, matrilineal, and savage. Theories about their origins have ranged from the plausible to the absurd - descended from Scythians, from Thracians, from a lost tribe of continental Europe. None of it holds up. Recent ancient DNA research, including work building on the Northern Picts Project based at the University of Aberdeen, has confirmed that the Picts were not mysterious incomers. They were local. They had deep roots in northern and eastern Scotland, continuous with the populations that preceded them, and their genetic profile connects them firmly to the British Isles rather than to anywhere farther afield.

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What the evidence does show is that the Picts were anything but isolated. Isotope analysis of individuals from Pictish cemeteries reveals movement - people born elsewhere buried in Pictish communities, and Pictish individuals whose diets and origins suggest connections across significant distances. Objects found in Pictish contexts include imports from continental Europe and the Mediterranean world. The Picts traded, travelled, intermarried, and exchanged ideas with communities far beyond their own territory. They participated in the wider world of early medieval Europe, and that world participated in them. The image of a remote, inward-looking people painted blue and barely held back by Hadrian's Wall belongs to fantasy, not history!