Heritage of Wales
Prehistory
The term ‘prehistory’ describes the time before written sources. The earliest surviving documentary descriptions of Wales date from some two thousand years ago, set down by Roman authors and shedding light on the culture of the Iron Age, albeit in its final phase. Both archaeological and written sources are available to interpret the material remains of cultures since then, each counterbalancing the biases of the other. In prehistory, however, we are reliant solely upon archaeological approaches.
The past century has seen archaeology progress from an antiquarian pursuit to a science, becoming a discipline informed by theoretical debate and the complementary ideas of anthropology, ethno-archaeology, geography and the environmental sciences. Archaeologists studying Wales, the staff of the Royal Commission among them, have achieved a great deal in discovering, surveying and interpreting field monuments, many of which had not been recognised before. In the Commission’s earliest inventories prehistoric remains were documented as poorly understood curiosities of the rural landscape, frequently regarded as inferior to monumental castles or grand buildings. However, the profile of prehistoric archaeology has grown continuously since the Second World War: there has been development in scientific methods for surveying, dating and environmental analysis, and a growing appreciation of the chronology and significance of monuments and landscapes from different prehistoric periods. Royal Commission studies of Caernarfonshire, Glamorgan and Breconshire documented prehistoric burial places, forts, fields and farms, and augmented traditional field survey with excavations. These have stood the test of time, often providing the only record of tracts of prehistoric Wales. Thematic projects, uplands surveys and aerial reconnaissance have further broadened the Commission’s recording of prehistory.
This essay summarises the prehistory of Wales, but the span of the Prehistoric Era is vast. Wales’s earliest human remains are those of early Neanderthals, excavated at Pontnewydd cave, Denbighshire, and dating to about 225,000 years ago. Prehistorians have long been dissatisfied with the standard compartmentalising of prehistoric epochs based on their prevailing tool technology – Stone Age (divided into Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic), Bronze Age and Iron Age – though this is division provides a useful chart with which to navigate the diversity of prehistory. Ways of life of the Mesolithic hunter or the Bronze Age farmer did not change overnight. Communities in every age doubtless achieved small technological advances and experienced imperceptible shifts in everyday practices, rituals and beliefs as the centuries passed. Very occasionally a visitor or migrants from distant parts may have arrived with radically different tools or knowledge, but generally change came gradually and cumulatively. Over thousands of years, usually mobile bands of hunters and gatherers gradually developed more complex social organisation, tool manufacture and artistic expression. Only with the arrival of knowledge of farming and cereal cultivation in north-western Europe at the start of the Neolithic is there evidence of permanent, settled communities, longer-term food storage, and the investment of effort to create communal monuments of wood and stone.
The environment that prehistoric people inhabited was also changing constantly, if imperceptibly to any single generation. During the timespan of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, continents and seas were reshaped by successive glaciations and the climate changed substantially. The start of the Neolithic saw sea levels around the British coast gradually stabilising several millennia after the most recent ice age, establishing new coastlines that are familiar today. In recent years archaeologists and oceanographers have recognised the research value of submerged former land surfaces, and advances in underwater prospection have allowed mapping of the Welsh land mass before the Neolithic, when land now covered by shallow seas would have been wooded plains. Changes in the prevailing regimes of temperature and precipitation were constant, and they continue today. Archaeologists have long relied on environmental data to provide a context for the study of particular sites and periods, and their findings are increasingly informing perceptions of the present environment and the susceptibility of our way of life to climate change.
Human settlement in Wales can be traced to the Palaeolithic. Discoveries of tools, animal bones and, occasionally, burials in caves tell us something about these early people, but human remains from the remotest periods are exceedingly rare. Only the durable remnants of jaws and teeth survive from the early Neanderthals of Pontnewydd cave, dating from the Lower Palaeolithic (around 225,000 years ago). The people of the Old Stone Age were not all cave-dwellers, but with successive glaciations of Wales (the most recent between about 21,000 and 14,000 years ago), caves are among the few places where tangible remains are preserved. Inhabited caves have been confirmed in the north and mid-Wales limestone regions and associated with open settlements in the south Wales limestone belt beyond the maximum limits of the glacial ice.
Finds of tools and hominin remains are more widespread from the Middle Palaeolithic (about 50,000 years ago) and the Upper Palaeolithic (about 30,000 years ago). At Coygan Cave, whose site is now a coastal promontory in Carmarthenshire but was once several miles inland, evidence for occupation by ‘classic’ Neanderthals was found. Bones of mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and hyena illustrate how distant this environment was from our own. Triangular handaxes show the mastery of stone tool technology. As well as describing Upper Palaeolithic sites and finds in the Royal Commission’s inventories for Glamorgan (1976) and Breconshire (1997), the Commission assisted in surveying Paviland Cave, an Early Upper Palaeolithic site on the spectacular limestone coast of southern Gower. The cave is famous for the burial about 29,000 years ago of a young man (misnamed ‘the Red Lady’) with offerings of pierced shells, ivory rods or wands and two ivory bracelets. Despite rich examples of cave art recorded in Europe, most famously at Lascaux in the Dordogne, Upper Palaeolithic cave art in Britain was recognised for the first time only in 2003, at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire. Portable art objects such as carved bones are more common, but the only such finds in Wales so far are those found in nineteenth-century excavations at Kendrick’s Cave on the Great Orme, Llandudno: a decorated horse jawbone with zigzag incised lines is particularly fine and has been dated to around 10,000 years BC.
Following the retreat of the last glacial ice, nomadic bands of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers recolonised the warming land between about 8,000 and 5,000 BC . Sea levels were low and Britain was joined to the continent by a land bridge until about 8,500 years ago. A thick forest of pine and oak extended many miles into Cardigan and Carmarthen bays: ancient tree stumps are regularly exposed in eroding peat along coasts and estuaries. Mesolithic people left no visible monuments but traces of their hunting camps are found in coastal areas and sometimes in inland and mountainous regions. One such settlement and tool-making site was excavated at Waun Fignen Felen, on the eastern edge of the Black Mountain in Breconshire. Environmental sampling and radiocarbon dating confirmed that there were episodes of forest clearance about 8,000 years ago, and surface collection and excavation recovered numerous microliths, left from the process of flint-knapping, and a perforated shale disc. One of the most famous Mesolithic sites to have been excavated is The Nab Head, on the west Pembrokeshire coast, where Mesolithic hunters made small flints and larger axes. Over 500 perforated shale beads were found here, as was a carved shale object that may represent a Venus figurine or a phallus, thought to be the only such carving from a Mesolithic context in Britain.
The gradual introduction of cereal farming from Europe in around 4,500 BC changed the subsistence base and helped to produce more complex societies during the Neolithic (about 4,500 BC to 2,500 BC). Cultivation of crops required some people to abandon a mobile lifestyle and establish permanent farming settlements where they could prepare the soil, tend the crop during the growing season and then harvest and store the grain and by-products. Hunters of the Mesolithic must have had some sense of territory with regard to the land over which they roamed, but the new permanence of farming consolidated ideas of territorial possession and ancestral links to those who had farmed the land before. Slack times in the farming year and the ability to store the surplus from the harvest may have released time from food production for people in settled locations to expand craft activities, for example to make fired clay pots and develop polished axes of fine-grained volcanic stone that were used for forest clearance and even ploughing. These changes also permitted communal enterprises such as the construction of chambered tombs, the most visible remains of the Neolithic in Wales .
Neolithic burial monuments took many forms, but they were generally mounds of earth or stone with a chamber or mortuary house inside or at one end . These monuments date from the Early Neolithic (roughly 4,500 BC – 3,500 BC) and are the oldest surviving standing structures in Europe. In Wales portal-dolmens are the best-known form. Mostly sited along the south-west and north-west coasts, their slim stone uprights supporting huge capstones have long captured the imagination, though these structural elements have only been exposed through erosion of the mounds that covered them when built. Excavations have shown that some were surrounded by circular mounds of stone before being absorbed in larger, more complex cairns, often with further chambers constructed. Passage graves were more elaborate burial monuments, and in central and south-east Wales long cairns of ‘Cotswold-Severn’ type were built, with long rectangular mounds and one or more chambers. Such burial chambers were not quiet repositories for bones and offerings; excavations suggest that bones were regularly removed, replaced and tidied, possibly being taken away periodically for ancestral rites in villages or at other sacred locations.
Although chambered tombs have long attracted attention, many more features of the Neolithic ritual landscape have been identified. Aerial photography has revealed monuments generally lost from view by ploughing and clearance, including cursus monuments and, from the later Neolithic, circular henges – timber circles and massive palisaded enclosures that would have dominated the land. In the lowlands of the Walton Basin in mid-Wales the largest Neolithic enclosure in Britain, at Hindwell, is matched by a concentration of other Neolithic monuments, including a cursus and a palisaded enclosure.
Ritual and burial sites are the predominant known monuments from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, and houses and domestic enclosures are rarely discovered. One confirmed occupation site is the small defended outcrop at Clegyr Boia, Pembrokeshire. Traces of timber-built Neolithic houses have been discovered through excavations at Llandegai, beneath the chambered long cairn at Gwernvale, and elsewhere. Royal Commission aerial reconnaissance has been instrumental in discovering enigmatic causewayed enclosures, dating from the Neolithic and with characteristic multiple gaps in their perimeter banks and ditches. These have been interpreted as meeting places that drew together disparate communities, perhaps for markets, ceremonies and rituals, though they may have had more complex roles. Aerial photography from the mid-1990s has added five possible causewayed enclosures in the Vale of Glamorgan, Pembrokeshire and lowland Radnorshire to the single excavated example on Anglesey. Eighty or so similar enclosures are so far known in the whole of the British Isles.
The farming communities of the Neolithic were not isolated. They produced polished axes and varied tools from outcrops and glacial erratics of fine-grained, igneous stone. Special qualities were required: the rock had to be easy to flake into a rough axe shape using a hammer-stone and bone or antler tools, but also tremendously strong and free from faults when used in heavy tasks such as tree-felling. Axes were roughed-out at source. These were then traded to surrounding communities to be polished into finished, smooth axes. Networks of exchange could extend hundreds of miles. Recent research at Carn Meini in the Preseli Hills, Pembrokeshire, has confirmed the exploitation of the crags there over many centuries, including the production of bluestone pillars used in the construction of Stonehenge.
During the Late Neolithic (about 3,500-2,500 BC) chambered tombs were deliberately blocked or fell into disrepair, indicating new ritual and burial practices. The first of a series of new types of pottery emerged: Peterborough Ware, a decorated type quite different from plainer Neolithic bowls, and then Grooved Ware, consisting of flat-bottomed vessels adorned with striking grooves and surface patterns, appearing around 2,700 BC.
An ever greater variety of changes marked the beginning of the Early Bronze Age (roughly 2,500-1,400 BC). New types of burial and ritual monuments were constructed: cairns (circular mounds of stone) and barrows (circular mounds of earth) covered single or multiple cremation burials or whole-body inhumations. Stone and timber circles continued to be built in open, level areas and may have been used for festivals, trading or religious ceremonies. Standing stones, the most enigmatic of prehistoric monuments, were erected during the Early Bronze Age. While some may have been boundary markers or waymarkers, others identified burials or formed parts of ritual complexes of timber settings and buildings. New styles of pottery originating in European traditions were introduced to Britain.
The most momentous change visible in the Bronze Age was a knowledge of metal-working. Research and excavation have identified several Bronze Age mining sites, for example at Copa Hill in Cardiganshire, at Parys Mountain on Anglesey, and on the Great Orme at Llandudno, where prehistoric underground galleries are open to the public. The miners exploited veins of copper ore, fire-setting to fracture the rock and working with hammer-stones and antler picks. Artifact analysis is needed to understand the trading role of these mining sites in tool and weapon production. The Beaker culture (roughly 2,700-1700 BC), straddling the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age, represented a cultural revolution, during which new ideas were introduced by people coming from overseas regarding burial practice, metal-working, wealth and power. The pots or beakers from which the culture takes its name were highly decorated, delicate vessels that probably took many days to make, often bearing thousands of impressions on their surface in complex patterns. They were very different from the bulky, functional vessels that preceded them, and were probably brought by migrants. The Beaker culture appears not to have been associated with any new monuments or radical changes in the economy, so the people who arrived with new beliefs may have been assimilated into British culture.
In the Middle and Late Bronze Age (around 1,400-700 BC), when the familiar stone circles, cairns and barrows ceased to be built, few visible monuments took their place. This was a time of growing population and more intensive land-use, in which farms were established with territories and boundaries. The clearance of Wales’s rich tree-cover probably began before Neolithic times, but it accelerated through the Bronze Age as the population grew. The act of burning and clearing left fragile woodland soils exposed to the elements, increasing soil moisture and starting the growth of blanket peat. Towards the end of the Late Bronze Age and at the beginning of the Iron Age it appears that the climate deteriorated markedly, becoming cooler and wetter. This is thought to have produced famine and unrest, with many upland communities apparently leaving their homelands and moving to the lowland peripheries, such as the borderlands and parts of coastal Pembrokeshire. However, there are problems in interpreting the evidence. The picture of settlement persisting in the lowlands may reflect geographical biases in the pattern of archaeological investigation. Future excavation at transitional sites in the mid-Wales hills may tell us more about how some later prehistoric communities survived the climatic deterioration.
Finds of swords, shields, axe heads and daggers, frequently in hoards, suggest greater aggression and conflict (conceivably spurred by population pressure and a desire to defend ‘homelands’), but also greater wealth. The central borderlands prospered in the
Late Bronze Age. By the ninth century BC a sizable hillfort had been constructed on the Breiddin hill, dominating the surrounding lowlands. The nearby Gaer Fawr hillfort could have equally early origins though it is more typically Iron Age in form, but it has yet to be excavated. The Late Bronze Age Guilsfield hoard, found near these two sites, shows the prosperity of the area before the Iron Age: it included 120 pieces of locally-made metalwork such as sword blades, scabbard-covers and spearheads. In other parts of Wales hilltop settlements were built with strong ramparts and gateways that were the forerunners of the explosion in hillfort construction in the age that was to follow.