User:SMcCandlish/Incubator/History of Highland dress

[Pargraph on attested early Gaelic dress in Scotland as being barely distinct from that of period Ireland: léine croich, brat, inar, cota mór. Draw from Irish clothing and its one good source, but epsecially McClintock and Telfer Dunbar since I have those books at-hand and they are well-researched.]

Since the late Georgian or Victorian era [WHICH IS IT?], various writers have supported an origin of tartan and the most basic elements of Highland dress – the belted plaid (breacan féile) or "great kilt" which preceded the modern kilt, and the feminine equivalent, the arisaid (earasaid) – as dating back to the Picts of what today is north-eastern Scotland, a Celtic (probably Brittonic) people who pre-dated Roman Britain and survived as a distinct culture until merging with the Gaelic Scots into the Kingdom of Alba from the 10th century. As described in the 16th century, both garments were essentially single-piece woollen blankets which could be wrapped and folded into a dress-like form, of a general baggy-covering sort that had been common throughout Eurasia back to antiquity, from the himation (ἱμάτιον) of ancient Greece and toga of Rome, to a variety of flowing garments of Vedic-era India. [CITES NEEDED: At least one of the authors I have on hand, maybe it was Archibald Campbell, made this kind of pan-Eurasian argument explicitly.] While written documentary evidence of such garments is lacking from before the 16th century in Scotland, depictions of them on Pictish-era stone monuments have been noted. [Lay out the arguments made by A. Campbell and others, including William Smith Ellis (p. 20).]

[Laying out the contrary position, of Telfer Dunbar and McClintock, that the belted plaid was simply an innovation from the brat.]

[Re-arrange and trim this material pasted in from Tartan:] The earliest documented tartan-like cloth in Britain, known as the "Falkirk tartan", dates from the 3rd century AD. It was uncovered at Falkirk in Stirlingshire, Scotland, near the Antonine Wall. The fragment, held in the National Museum of Scotland, was stuffed into the mouth of an earthenware pot containing almost 2,000 Roman coins. The Falkirk tartan has a simple "Border check" design, of undyed light and dark wool. Other evidence from this period is the surviving fragment of a statue of Roman Emperor Caracalla, once part of the triumphal arch of Volubilis completed in 217 AD. It depicts a Caledonian Pictish prisoner wearing tartan trews (represented by carving a checked design then inlaying it with bronze and silver alloys to give a variegated appearance). Based on such evidence, tartan researcher James D. Scarlett (1990) believes Scottish tartan to be "of Pictish or earlier origin", though Brown (2012) notes there is no way to prove or disprove this with the period source material that survives.