Over the last three decades, archaeologists and amateur enthusiasts alike have been greatly expanding our understanding of how the upland areas of Glamorgan were used in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. George Nash, Kim Allen, and Dewi Bowen are our guides to a series of recent discoveries hinting at a significant and complex symbolic landscape almost 100km wide.
Llanfair-Mathafarn-Eithaf Community, Anglesey
A rare early medieval cemetery containing the remains of several women has been found near Fonmon Castle in South Wales. The remains, estimated to be of roughly 80 individuals, were buried around 1,500 years ago and are believed to have…
In last month’s ‘Sherds’ column, Chris Catling described the threat to the future of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW), so we asked him to tell us more about the work of the Commission, as well as the heritage sector in Wales more generally. Here is his report.
A large cemetery dating to the 6th-7th centuries has been discovered on the Fonmon Castle estate – a fortified castle just to the north-west of Cardiff Airport. The project, led by Dr Andy Seaman, began in 2021 when the team…
REVIEW BY HOWARD WILLIAMS A truly stupendous achievement of synthesis and evaluation, Life in Early Medieval Wales is a first for Welsh archaeology. Nancy Edwards’ concise prose draws on the experience of a lifetime spent teaching and researching early medieval…
Christopher Catling, Contributing Editor for CA, delves into the eccentricities of the heritage world.
The hillfort of Dinas Powys, located about 9km south-west of Cardiff, was first excavated by Leslie Alcock in the 1950s. While the excavation and its subsequent report were pioneering for their time and led to Dinas Powys being widely considered…
A research team from the University of Reading, led by Professor Martin Bell, has been working for the last 33 years to record eroding Mesolithic archaeology from the seabed of the Severn Estuary at Goldcliff, near Newport (see CA 331…
In 1789, an opinion column in The Times hailed Britain’s canal-building achievements as a matter of national pride – contrasting them with the revolutionary turmoil in France. Aristocrats and entrepreneurs were losing their heads across the Channel, while in Britain they were busy building and funding a canal network that would serve the rapid growth of the nation as an industrial power. In his new book on the Swansea Canal, Stephen Hughes looks in detail at the archaeology and history of one such pioneering enterprise, as Chris Catling reports.
Excavations in Beaumaris, Anglesey, have uncovered elements of the town’s medieval defences that were thought to have been demolished half a century ago, as well as providing vivid insight into the lives of the people who lived beside them for hundreds of years. Matthew Jones and Catherine Rees report.
Archaeologists and historians tend to approach the early medieval period through the lens of what was lost after the collapse of Roman rule. In her new book on life in Wales between c.AD 300 and 1050, Nancy Edwards shows us what survived from the centuries of Roman control – in particular Christianity and Latin literacy – and the ways in which these were used to create new identities in a formative period in the development of Wales, as Chris Catling discovers.
REVIEW BY IAN RALSTON This monograph on Welsh hillforts is by a man who knows them well. It builds on Driver’s innovative doctoral examination of those in Ceredigion, and his general book on Cardigan Bay, to consider the entirety of…
Located off the south coast of Ynys Môn (Anglesey), Llanddwyn Island was home to a small monastic community for more than 1,000 years. Now a decade of archaeological investigations have shed vivid light on this remote religious community, documenting the remains of a 12th-century church and its surrounding landscape. George Nash, Philip Dell, Leslie Dodd, Thomas Wellicome, and Carol James explain further the history and archaeology of one of Wales’ hidden island gems.
In CA 388 we asked, ‘what are hillforts for?’, and Toby Driver’s new book Hillforts of Iron Age Wales has some suggestions. Based on his many years spent recording these monuments on the ground and from the air, he concludes that no single explanation fits every example. Rather, like terraces of seemingly identical Victorian or Edwardian houses, external similarities disguise the many different functions, ideas, and ways of life that hillforts supported, as Chris Catling reports.
REVIEW BY KATE WADDINGTON This very readable book discusses the archaeology from a beautiful stretch of coastal north-west Wales: the Llŷn peninsula. As this volume demonstrates, it has produced a diverse range of well-preserved monuments that are of national importance.…
Based on three years of excavations at Dinas Dinlle – carried out by archaeologists from Gwynedd Archaeological Trust, CHERISH, the National Trust, and Cadw (see CA 356 and 394) – new reconstruction drawings by Wessex Archaeology are bringing the site…
Christopher Catling, Contributing Editor for CA, delves into the eccentricities of the heritage world.
An Iron Age hoard consisting of 15 gold coins known as ‘staters’ was discovered in Llangoed Community, Anglesey, by three metal-detectorists between July 2021 and March 2022. This is the first hoard of gold staters to be found in all…
REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH The two Cotswold-Severn Neolithic burial-ritual monuments of Penywyrlod and Gwernvale occupy the western hinterlands of the Black Mountains in Breconshire, Wales. Both monuments are only part of a handful of Neolithic burial-ritual monuments in Wales to…
Excavations on a farm in Talsarn, Ceredigion, have found evidence for late Mesolithic and late Neolithic activity, helping illuminate a period that has been little explored in this region of Wales. The project at Talsarn began in 2019, when a…
Also recently declared as treasure in Wales was a hoard of Roman coins, found between 2014 and 2022
REVIEW BY SIMON TIMBERLAKE This is a landmark study concerning the origins of mining and metallurgy in Britain. Alan Williams has turned his PhD thesis into a scholarly publication that provides the reader with a compelling narrative based upon thorough…
REVIEW BY ANDREW MULHOLLAND This is a provocative book which will ruffle feathers, perhaps among some MHM readers. But it is also an important one. While the heart of The Great Defiance is historic, presenting an alternative narrative of what…
Among the Welsh finds declared treasure was a 15th-century gold ring belonging to the Bronington Hoard.
This January, conservation of the roughly 2,500 timbers recovered from the wreck was completed – a process that took 14 years
Your views on issues raised in Current Archaeology.
the programme dramatised one of the essential differences between detectorists and archaeologists: the first are interested in objects (preferably ones that are worth a bob or two), the latter in knowledge.
Other Welsh finds declared treasure include several medieval gold rings and silver annular brooches.
The title of The First Stones, a newly published book edited by William Britnell and Alasdair Whittle, proclaims a bold new thesis: that the Neolithic long cairn at Penywyrlod, in the Black Mountains of south-east Wales, is one of the earliest of its kind. With the benefit of 50 new radiocarbon dates, and new ways of modelling those dates using Bayesian analysis, its authors revisit excavations that first took place in the 1970s – and argue that this distinctive monument represents the birth of a new tomb-building tradition, as Chris Catling discovers.
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The study suggests that two Palaeolithic individuals - one from Kendrick’s Cave in Wales, and the other from Gough’s Cave in Somerset - came from two completely separate populations.
Review by Al McCluskey The Roman Frontiers in Wales is one of the latest tranche of publications in the ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’ series. Co-authored by David Breeze and Peter Guest, this neat, informative, and accessible volume brings a…
A round-up of some of the latest archaeology news from around the UK.
Findings show that there were at least two genetically distinct Late Upper Palaeolithic populations present in Britain after the last Ice Age, around 15,000 years ago.
New research seems to suggest that two ‘lost’ islands depicted on a medieval map of the Welsh coastline did once exist.