Nine perforated stone maceheads, that can with a fair degree of confidence be attributed to the late fourth or early third millennium, are known from south-east Scotland.
Fiona Roe defined and mapped the principal types of British prehistoric macehead (Roe 1968; 1979), dividing them into categories of:
- ovoid
- pestle (with two variants – the ‘Orkney pestle’, with concave sides and the ‘Thames pestle’ with straight or convex sides)
- cushion
- Maesmor
- centrally perforated
Of these, the centrally perforated examples were deemed to be of Early Bronze Age date and this is borne out by, for example, the magnificent specimen from a rich Early Bronze Age grave at Bush Barrow, Wiltshire (Roe 1979). For that reason, the centrally perforated examples from south-east Scotland – and other objects labelled as ‘maceheads’ that do not fall within the ‘ovoid’, ‘pestle’ and ‘cushion’ categories – are not listed here. Examples of all the Middle/Late Neolithic types, except the Maesmor type, are known from south-east Scotland (table 4.10):
| Findspot | Type | Current location and reg.no. (NMS = National Museums Scotland) | Comment |
| East Mains, Gordon, Scottish Borders | Ovoid | NMS X.AH 165 | |
| Chirnside, Scottish Borders | Ovoid | NMS X.AH 123 | Reddish granite |
| Oxnam parish (Oxnam Neuk), Scottish Borders | Ovoid | NMS X.AH 236 | |
| Whitfield, West Linton, Scottish Borders | Ovoid | NMS X.AH 122 | Unfinished: incomplete perforation |
| Overhowden, Scottish Borders | Pestle (Thames) | NMS X.AH 218 | Incomplete: broken across perforation. Found near henge |
| Leitholm, Scottish Borders | Pestle (Orkney) | Hunterian GLAHM: B.1914.243 | Incomplete: broken diagonally along long axis. Of banded stone. Roe archive gives findspot as ‘Printonon, Leitholm’ |
| Airhouse Farm, Oxton, Scottish Borders | Pestle (Orkney) | NMS X.BMA 49 | |
| Inveresk, East Lothian | Cushion | NMSX.AH 65 | Of calc-silicate hornfels from Creag na Caillich, Killin, Perth and Kinross |
| Hedderwick, East Lothian | Cushion or cushion-like | NMS X.AH 261 | Broken across perforation |
In common with examples from elsewhere in Britain, distinctive types of stone tend to have been used – speckled, banded, or brightly coloured. Such stone could, in some cases, have been selected from beaches or drift deposits. In one case – a cushion macehead from Inveresk (NMS X.AF 65) – the raw material comes from a known quarry site on Creag na Caillich, above Killin, which was also exploited for making axeheads.
As with carved stone balls, these maceheads are likely to have been both weapons for combat and weapons of social exclusion (that is symbols of power). Most are also likely to date to the early third millennium BC, on the basis of examples found in Orkney, although a late fourth millennium date cannot be ruled out.
Fiona Roe’s research has shown that Neolithic maceheads are widely, but unevenly, distributed in Britain, with a concentration in Orkney and another in the River Thames. Within south-east Scotland, six out of the nine examples come from the former county of Berwickshire, and those from Overhowden and Airhouse were found not far from the henge at Overhowden.
In Orkney there is evidence for both the manufacture of pestle and cushion type maceheads for example at Ness of Brodgar, and also for their deliberate destruction (Anderson-Whymark 2020). The unfinished ovoid macehead from Whitfield, Scottish Borders, shows that macehead manufacture was also occurring in south-east Scotland and it could be that the fragmentary maceheads from Overhowden, Hedderwick and Leitholm had been deliberately broken.