Explorer Albert Lin explores a cave burial site filled with ancient carvings

So little is known about the Picts. Searching for their lost kingdom means I must follow every lead, and there's something on the walls of this cave that's drawing me in. I'm going to start the scan.

Okay, yeah, my handheld Light Art technology allows me to scan the walls and process the data to separate the ancient markings from the modern. Right, there's so many small subtle details here. Look at that! Boom! Oh wow, look at that! And then look at that. Yeah, that's it! Wow, wow. Is that what I think it is? It looks like that crescent shape that you showed me, the symbol Stone.

That's amazing! It is a picture symbol right there. Wow, that's wonderful! It's like finding new chapters of a lost story. They're trying to tell us something. It's some kind of writing system. These intricate stone carvings tell me the Picts were far more sophisticated than the wild barbarians the Romans described. There's got to be so many of these all through this cave.

No, there's definitely more of them. Are you getting this? As we scan the walls, we discover even more ancient clues, and there's another symbol just to the left of that one. Each one a direct link to the Pictish people who touched these very walls nearly 2,000 years ago. I can almost feel the presence of the person who carved them.

It's not just an image or a piece of ancient art; it's a window into the mind of the person who made them. [Music] I found something! Look, there's something up there, and this rectangle with what is that? You know, if you think um caves as, you know, gateways between worlds, it could be a doorway from one world to the next.

If it's a gateway to the other world, what's it doing here? I think they're memorializing the dead. The dead? Yeah, when the first excavator visited the cave to have a look at the carvings in the late 1920s, she found the floor of the cave strewn with human bones.

This was a graveyard. Amongst those bones were nine vertebrae from the neck, and those nine vertebrae from the neck had evidence for cut marks—cut marks made by a bladed weapon, probably a sword. Up to nine individuals, including two teenagers, were kids, essentially children. Yes, were decapitated right here, right at the time when the activity is happening at Denare.

That must have been a family, right? Nine people—kids, adults—and that downward strike of an axe or a sword. That's a classic Roman execution style. So we know that it wasn't bodyless heads or headless bodies that were entering the cave, but it's impossible to know exactly who killed the people in this cave.

But what is clear is that these traumatizing events demonstrate the level of threat the native tribes faced. What a place to be. [Music]