THE past year may have brought its troubles, economic and otherwise, but it also saw an unprecedented wealth of archaeological revelations in Scotland, with discoveries of international importance providing new insights into the lives of our forebears of several millennia ago.

It was the Year of Homecoming in which Scotland's earliest known recorded human face re-emerged into the light of day after 5,000 years, to the astonishment of archaeologists on the island of Westray in Orkney; also in Orkney, the remains of a vast "Neolithic cathedral," a sacred site like no other in Britain, were revealed. Elsewhere, archaeologists excavated below a monumental capstone in a field at Forteviot, Perthshire, to reveal the grave of a "Bronze Age hero", replete with a bronze and gold dagger and other artefacts, while near Stirling an amateur enthusiast with a metal detector stumbled upon the most important hoard of Iron Age gold yet unearthed in Scotland.