Fig. 17.-Plan of Cave with Chambered Tomb at Gop. A. Charcoal and Burnt Bones. B. Chamber. Scale 1 in. to 10 ft. not bring about the displacement, but merely the assimilation of one people by another. This conclusion is confirmed by many like discoveries in Britain and the Continent, which show that the Neolithic race was amply represented in the areas occupied by the invading tribes in the Bronze Age. V. THE INCOMING OF THE GOIDELS. 3 These Broad-heads,' so far as I know, did not find their way into Britain until they were armed with the weapons of the Bronze Age. They belong to the earlier section of the Celtic people, clearly defined by Rhys as the Goidels or Q-Celts, and formed part of the Alpine race of Ripley. They were more powerfully built than the aborigines, with fair complexions, grey eyes, and light or brown hair, and they are amply represented in the present Welsh people. They are merely a section of the Aryan-speaking tribes who invaded Britain after absorbing more or less the nonAryan population of the Continent into their mass, and impressing upon them their tongue and civilisation. We probably owe to them the introduction of the Bronze Age culture, although it is likely that bronze articles, easily carried, found their way into Britain before the actual conquest took place. To the Celtic section of these invading tribes we owe the introduction of the Goidelic tongue, Gaelic, Irish, and Manx, and the many Goidelic words shown by Rhys, Basil Jones, and others, to be present in the Welsh language. The Goidels are therefore the second element in Welsh Ethnology and, mingled in varying proportions with the Iberic aborigines, formed the population not only of Wales, but of the whole of the British Isles, in the Bronze Age. They are one of the tribes in the van of the Aryan migration, from the side of Asia into Europe, to which we owe our language and a very large part of our civilisation. 1 For the definition of the Broad-heads see Thurnam, Mem., Anthrop. Soc. Lond., i, p. 120; Dawkins, Cave-Hunting, c. v, vi; and Early Man in Britain, c. ix. 2 Rhind Lectures, Early Ethnology of the British Isles, 1891, pp. 1-20. 3 The Races of Europe, 1900, p. 121. VI. THE DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION IN THE BRONZE AGE IN WALES. We must now consider the distribution of the population in Britain. The camps, enclosures, habitations, and burial places, are numerous on the dry uplands, and are, as a rule, rare in the lower districts, then densely covered with forests and marshes. On the downs of Southern England, on the hills of Derbyshire, and the wolds and moors of Yorkshire, they stand in so close a relation to the ridgeways that there is no room for doubt that the latter are as old as the Bronze Age. In Wales, as may be seen in the one-inch Ordnance maps, the same evidence is presented. They cluster round the ridgeways and the transverse ways, linking one valley with another and marking the date of the first clearly-defined roads. Here, too, the main population was in the uplands and mountain valleys. The lowlands, such as the lower portion of the Dee, the Clwyd, and Conway, and the higher moors, such as those of Snowdonia, offered physical difficulties that were not overcome till a later time. Anglesey was probably as densely populated in the Bronze Age as at any time down to that of coaches and railways. It is, we may note, on the line of communication then opened with Ireland, along which Irish gold ornaments passed into Wales, and that in later times is familiar to us as the route of the Irish Mails by way of Holyhead. VII. THE CIVILISATION OF WALES IN THE PREHISTORIC IRON AGE. In Wales, as elsewhere, the use of iron gradually replaced that of bronze, as may be seen by the ironsocketed celt, of the usual Bronze Age type,1 found in the Berwyn Hills, Merioneth. The civilisation that 1 Arch. Camb., 1855, p. 250. |