Shadowland

Wales 3000-1500 BC

Stephen Burrow

• Editorial: Oxbow Books
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781842176818
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Arqueología

This is the story of life in Wales over a period of 1, 500 years, as gleaned from the remains its inhabitants left behind. These people had no writing so they have left us no names and no records of their deeds. Instead we have the possessions they treasured in life, the broken remains of their bodies and the marks they left on the landscape. The people of these 15 centuries have remained essentially anonymous, in the shadows of prehistory. In part, these shadows have fallen by choice: from 3000 to 2200 BC, people built few monuments and buried very few of the worldly goods which they must certainly have possessed while, for the period 2200 until 1500 BC, monuments were built in profusion and the dead were buried in great numbers. The lives revealed seem filled with rituals that defy easy comprehension and the motivations of those who lived them are difficult to grasp. While thousands of burials are known and dozens of meeting places and ceremonial centres have been uncovered, hardly any settlements or houses are known. But the legacy of these people can even be seen far beyond their own lands: they provided stones for Stonehenge and began carving copper ore from the hills, in a process that would eventually create the largest mine in prehistoric Europe. In this beautifully illustrated book, Steve Burrows coaxes these shadowy figues back into the light.

Part 1

3000 – 2200 BC

Location of sites in Wales mentioned in this chapter.

1 Abercynafon

2 Barclodiad y Gawres

3 Bryn Celli Ddu

4 Brynderwen

5 Capel Garmon

6 Castell Bryn Gwyn

7 Corntown

8 Daylight Rock

9 Four Crosses

10 Goldcliff

11 Gop

12 Graig Lwyd

13 Gwaenysgor

14 Gwernvale

15 Lavan Sands

16 Llanafan Fawr

17 Llanbedr

18 Llanbedr Dyffryn Clwyd

19 Llanbedrgoch

20 Llandegai

21 Lower Luggy

22 Maesmor

23 Meusydd

24 Nant Helen

25 Ogmore-by-Sea

26 Penmachno

27 Preseli Hills

28 Sarn-y-bryn-caled

29 Sker House

30 Thornwell Farm

31 Trefignath

32 Trelystan

33 Ty-Isaf

34 Upper Ninepence

35 Waun Fignen Felen

36 Ysceifiog

© The National Museum of Wales (Jackie Chadwick, Tony Daly).

The years around 3000 BC

The last of the tomb builders

At some time in the decades around 3000 BC a community marked out a plot of land on Anglesey as the site of their ancestral tomb. It is not known why they picked the location they did – possibly it was because it was close to an enclosure that had been abandoned a few centuries before, less likely they noticed the postholes of a building which had occupied this place some three thousand years earlier.

The planning of the tomb was carefully done. A post was set upright, and then the builders waited for a clear midsummer morning when they could mark out a line to fix the point where the sun rose on the horizon. An arc of standing stones was then positioned around the post to highlight both this alignment and the orientation which the tomb chamber and passage walls would occupy. Fragments of cremated bone were placed beneath some of these standing stones and in pits within the area they defined.

Great slabs of stone were then dragged into position, probably from beside a rock outcrop about 150m away, and the chamber took shape. Then the passage was built, carefully following the lines that had been marked out previously. While work progressed a large slab carved with swirling patterns was dragged to its position behind the chamber and the whole monument was encased in a mound, the earth for which was dug from a ditch which encircled the whole. But the building was not yet finished. Another year passed and the alignment of the passage was checked to ensure that the rising sun would fall on the rear wall of the tomb's chamber. The alignment was a success and a window of light illuminated the chamber as anticipated, but still more could be done to highlight the drama of the effect. Further additions were made to the passage, narrowing and extending it, increasing the precision with which the tomb caught the rising midsummer sun – warming the cremated bones of the community's dead forever.

This tomb which is now known as Bryn Celli Ddu, ‘the Mound of the Dark Grove’, was excavated in the 1920s by one of Wales's great archaeologists, W J Hemp. So meticulous are his records of his work that it allowed the author to return to his archive almost eighty years later, to study his site notebooks and to radiocarbon date some of the charcoal and human bones which he had carefully preserved. This, in turn, allowed the history of the site to be understood, but the most important development in the story of Wales's last tomb builders has come as a result of excavation at sites in other countries. These have served to identify the builders of Bryn Celli Ddu as adherents of a specific millennia-old burial tradition found along the shores of Atlantic Europe from Portugal to Brittany, and from Ireland to Orkney. The people who adopted this tradition, which probably has its origin in the southern part of this 2,500km long distribution, were united in the construction of round mounds, pierced by passages leading to concealed chambers, hence the name ‘passage tombs’.

Bryn Celli Ddu (Anglesey).

© The National Museum of Wales (Steve Burrow).

Sunrise on the midsummer solstice, viewed from the chamber

© National Museum of Wales (Steve Burrow).

The construction of Bryn Celli Ddu.

The tomb was probably begun as a short monument broadly aligned on the midsummer sunrise, subsequent enlargement lengthened and narrowed its passage, refining the alignment still further. Ditch and mound shown as dark and light tones. Stones are marked in black.

© The National Museum of Wales (Tony Daly).

The passage tomb tradition reached its apogee in the massive tombs of Ireland, some of which were probably built a century or two before Bryn Celli Ddu and which are profusely decorated with swirling and jagged carvings. The carvings at Bryn Celli Ddu are confined to just two stones, but in Wales the finest surviving examples of this art are to be found at Barclodiad y Gawres, ‘the Apronful of the Giantess’, a cliff-top tomb on the west coast of Anglesey. Excavation began here in 1952, led by Terence Powell of Liverpool University and Glyn Daniel from Cambridge; both were key figures in the study of megalithic tombs and were well-placed to interpret their findings. Their work revealed a passage leading to a central chamber from which opened three side chambers. The capstones of these structures had already been removed, and the contents of the chambers pillaged, but the designs on the wall survived. Powell and Daniel recognised carvings on three stones at the entrance to the main chamber and on the rear wall of two of the side chambers, and since their work George Nash has led a project which has identified one more example. The most dramatic of these carvings takes the form of a stylised figure, positioned at the opening of passage to chamber. The shape of the stone suggests the figure's outline, with the torso picked out with zigzagged lines and chevron...