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…
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.