Author Lisa Lagaly

Stories abound online about the fighting abilities of the Picts.  They went on raids, stole slaves, and wouldn’t stand and fight like normal people (likely the reason they held off the Romans) (https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2017/05/31/pictish-warfare/).  Clearly, they had weapons.  I found one site that has some computer-drawn images of Scottish weapons, including those from the Picts (http://sites.scran.ac.uk/weapon/Content/Carnyx/Content.html).  The site shows a square-head ax, sword, scabbard, H-shield, buckler (round shield), helmet, mangonel (type of catapult), and carnyx (long horn).  A quick survey of Pictish stones gives us even more:round shields (images 1, 2, 5), square shields (6, 8), rectangular shields (9), H-shield (10), spears (1, 5, 6, 7, 8), bows (3), helmets (1), axes (11, 13), carnyx (2), and swords (1, 4, 5, 7, 10).  The man in the bottom left of (1) looks like he has a lasso or a whip.  The images also tell us they rode horses with bridles and saddles or at least saddle cloths.  Image 12 is a pin or pendant in the shape of an ax found in Rhynie, the same place from which image 11 hails.  There is some speculation that the Rhynie man (11) depicts a Celtic god and the ax he wields was used for sacrifices, but based on image 13, axes were used to fight too (https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/aberdeen/rhynieman/index.html, https://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/8083/)