This new edition for the New History of Scotland series, replacing Alfred Smyth's Warlords and Holy Men (1984), covers the history of Scotland in the period up to 1000 AD. A great deal has changed in the historiography of this period in the intervening three decades: an entire Pictish kingdom has moved nearly a hundred miles to the north; new archaeological finds have forced us to rethink old assumptions; and the writing of early medieval history is beginning to struggle out of the shadow of later medieval sources. Gilbert Markus brings a stimulating approach to studying this elusive period, analysing both its litter of physical evidence as well as its literary sources - what he calls'luminous debris'-as a method of shedding light on the reality of the period. In doing so, he reforms our historical perceptions of what has often been dismissed as a 'dark age'.