In their belief in an unbroken continuum between prehistory and the (nineteenth-century) present, Scotland’s early archaeologists were influenced by wider perceptions of the Highlands and Islands as primitive and unchanging. From the eighteenth century, the historical creation of the Highlands as a romantic icon had reduced the region and its population to a number of tropes: the wild and sublime landscape; the Highlander as ‘noble savage’, anthropological subject, paragon of martialism; and Highland society as an exemplar of ancient communalism (see e.g. Withers 1992). It was this image of the Highlands which was adopted as a core component of Scottish national identity – the Highland landscape as Scotland’s true geography and the Highlander as Scotland’s contemporary ancestor, neither altered by history nor marred by modernization.