King's Seat, Dunkeld: Excavations of a Royal Centre of the Southern Picts, 2017-21

It is remarkable, given Dunkeld’s importance in medieval Scotland, that so little was known of King’s Seat fort until the 1950s.While proposed as a royal Pictish ‘nuclear’ fort in the 1980s, it was so heavily overgrown as to be effectively lost to archaeology until 2015, when the local history society instigated a programme of community archaeology to explore its story.Led by Perth and Kinross Heritage Trust, working with AOC Archaeology Group, this included excavation that revealed a high-status Pictish fort complex.Like the classic sites Dundurn and Clatchard Craig, it had a high-status summit citadel surrounded by a hierarchy of connected out-works on lower terraces.LiDAR data revealed a previously unknown south enclosure, more than doubling its total footprint and raising questions about the role of such sites and the nature of Pictish settlement. Controlling important routes from the north and west into the lower Tay region, King’s Seat was a Pictish ‘royal’ stronghold, estate, an