Tacitus’s Annals (xii.32) record Eiow in AD 48 tEie governor of Britannia, Ostorius Scapula, led tlie army against tlie Decangi {sic): the first historical reference to a Celtic tribe inhabiting Wales. Thereafter Rome was to become embroiled in protracted warfare with two other militarily powerful Welsh tribes, the Silures and Ordovices, conferring particular fame upon the former. Tacitus’s physical description of the Silures as colorati and with curly hair {Agricola xi) forms part of a precious body of documentary evidence which allows us to glimpse first-century AD Welsh communities for whose wartime behaviour we can find echoes in contemporary Britain from Kent to Caledonia, or earlier in Caesarian Gaul. The origins of these Celtic communities inhabiting the principality are to be sought not in a pattern of migration and interaction with indegenes but rather in a protracted phase of social and economic change affecting sedentary communities over at least a millennium. It is this process of adjustment and evolution, coupled with the workings of ‘cumulative Celticity’ (Hawkes 1979), which gives rise to the fully developed insular socioeconomic systems of the western British pre-Roman Iron Age (PRIA).
Wales Is topographically a mountainous area but upland is unevenly distributed; hence the dramatic contrasts between Snowdonia and offshore Anglesey, or the Cambrian range and lowlands of Glamorgan and Dyfed and the broken hill-country and fertile valleys of the Marches. Geomorphological and pedological differences are critical in comprehending the settlement base and social development of this distinctive geoclimatic region, whilst geography has fostered a strong regional and sub-regional identity which crystallized in the territorial divisions of late prehistoric and early historic times.
By the early first millennium BC the region was characterized by agricultural communities of family or extended family size which were sufficiently sedentary to require permanent settlements encompassing a variety of habitats. Some occupied classic pastoral upland typified by the flimsy huts and ‘field systems’ on the Denbigh Moors, of which Graig Felen is a good example (Manley 1990b). The majority, though, occupy lowland settings exemplified by the early to late bronze age (EBA-LBA) settlement complex at Atlantic Trading Estate, Barry (Glam.) (Price and Wardle 1987; Wardle 1988), or those built on the stable peat of the Severn foreshore at Cold Harbour (Mon.), with nearby Chapeltump i and 2 probably representing
Successive timber settlements of the seventh to ninth centuries BC (Whittle 1989). More remarkable still is the waterlogged complex at Caldicot Castle Lake (Mon.) with its worked timbers and wide artefactual range, including the remains of plank-built boats and a Wilburton chape incorporated in deposits of the eighth century BC (Parry 1988; Parry and Parkhouse 1989, 1990) (Figure 35.1). In south Pembrokeshire a middle to late bronze age (MBA-LBA) multifocus agricultural settlement at Stackpole was abandoned to sanding in the eighth century BC (Benson et al. 1990). All were apparently unenclosed. In this respect Meyllteyrn Uchaf (Caerns.), a concentric enclosure with two timber round-houses dated c. 1950-1380 BC (Kelly 1990, 1991a, 1992), is an exciting new discovery. None continued in occupation beyond the onset of the climatic deterioration of the sub-Atlantic phase.
World History
