How do you go about selecting the most important buildings from the last 6000 years of Scottish history?

Three experts in archaeology, architecture and medieval history were set the challenge as Scotland celebrates the Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design in 2016.

From castles to carbuncles, John Lowrey and Dr Tanja Romankiewicz from Edinburgh University and Professor Richard Oram from Stirling University choose the buildings they believe have left a lasting impression on Scotland's landscape.

Kintore roundhouse

Dr Tanja Romankiewicz poured over 4500 years of Scottish history, from the earliest settlements up to 600AD.

Her first pick is the Middle Bronze Age innovation of the roundhouse.

"Architecture was less rigid and fitted more with their lifestyle," says the Leverhulme early career fellow in archaeology.

"At the end of the house life, it is seemingly turned into a garden because it is so rich in midden and charcoal and ashes.

"They were using the house to sustain them in a different way - not for shelter but for food production."

Rhiroy Broch

Moving into the Iron Age and you will see the beginnings of Scotland's first skyscrapers - the brochs.

"I picked this innovation of when the pre-historic people realised they wanted to build tall drystone towers," she says.

"It is the first time they are building a house and they are building it tall".

Skara Brae

The famous Neolithic village also made Tanja's cut but not for the reasons you might expect. Her interest stems from research which suggests the use of these buildings as domestic dwellings very quickly ended when midden was piled all around them.

"Most people will think of a romantic image of a village of people living together," she explains."Working and living together and huddling against the climate.

"If we do more research, the story becomes more complicated so maybe we need to rethink what we think of Skara Brae.

"The pre-historic architecture is a process, not a finished product and it still changes today. So we shouldn't think of our interpretations of them as finished either."

Dunfermline Abbey

Professor Richard Oram continues the challenge from 600AD to the union of the crowns in 1603, saying the start of the 12th century marks an enormous step change in building scale and ambition.

When the nave of Dunfermline Abbey was built, it was the largest stone structure in North West Europe.

"The nave gives this incredible sense of overpowering majesty that the church would have presented to the public," says the professor in medieval and environmental history.

"You can trace back a lot of the sudden explosion in monumental church architecture to Dunfermline."

Threave Castle

Sitting on an island in the middle of the River Dee in Dumfries and Galloway, Threave Castle was built at the end of 14th century as a status symbol by Archibald Douglas the Grim.

"He was an illegitimate son, who originally wouldn't have had any chance of inheriting the family's great titles but all his other relatives get eliminated in the Wars [of Independence] and he inherits," Richard says.

"He is making this grand statement that he is the power. It is the beginning of architecture as status symbol and political statement."

Linlithgow Palace

Linlithgow Palace was constructed in stages after 1424 by King James I of Scotland, following his 18-year detention in England.

"The majesty of kingship had been diminished so this is an attempt to rebuild prestige and authority," Richard says.

"He goes directly to source of all new architectural inspiration - Italy. This is a building that is designed as stage set."

Old Royal High School

John Lowrey picks up the baton by looking at the union of the crowns in 1603 to today, starting with Thomas Hamilton's Old Royal High School.

While its future remains a talking point, the senior lecturer in architectural history says the impact it had when first opened is just at striking.

"It captures a kind of immediate post-enlightenment period in Scotland," he says. "It is a really important building in the Greek revival.

"The trick that Hamilton did - and it was an influential trick - was to understand the way that architecture works in its landscape."

The Athenaeum

Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art building was the starting point for John's next choice, although it was John James Burnet's Athenaeum in 1886 at Nelson Mandela Place he was eventually drawn to.

"Glasgow School of Art is a really important building and also a really brilliant building," he explains.

"The reason he [JJ Burnet] is in a way arguably more important than Mackintosh at that time is that he brought to Scotland the method of the École des Beaux-Arts, which was a school in Paris that taught architecture and brought a very rigorous, formal, theoretical, academic system of architectural teaching and design.

"That, in fact, was what dominated Glasgow and dominated Scotland in that period."

Cumbernauld Town Centre

Taking the last spot is the UK's first indoor shopping centre in Cumbernauld town centre.

"It was seen as the most modern, the most cutting edge type of urban design and new town planning," John says.

"The idea was that as you travelled out of Glasgow, this new town - with a town centre sitting on a ridge of a hill - would almost be like an Italian hill-topped town with all these towers raising up out of the landscape."

As the first phase of construction was completed in 1967, the town was awarded The RS Reynolds Memorial Award for community architecture. However, this has been followe d in recent years by the Plook on the Plinth title for having Scotland's "most dismal" town centre.

"The town centre is a building that you could say has failed," he says. "But it's a building that at its time - a time of fantastic optimism - was seen as a very legitimate way to build a new town and of building a relatively small town and putting excellent services and facilities all into one place."