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in the contracted posture, and of various ages. In Fig. 5 one of the chambers is represented in plan and section. In them there was the same mixture of domestic and wild animals as at Perthi Chwareu, along with splinters of flint. In both the skeletons are of the same peculiar type, and indicated that this region of North Wales was inhabited, in the Neolithic Age, by herdsmen of the same race, living on their flocks and herds and also by hunting, and dwelling in caves and in huts, and burying their dead in caves and cairns.

The following Table of the discoveries at Perthi Chwareu and at Cefn,' shows that both communities belong to the same Neolithic Age:-

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Neolithic habitations and tombs, not only in Wales but throughout the British Isles and the Continent. It is probable also that the margins of the Welsh Lakes were fringed with pile-dwellings, similar to those of Ireland and Switzerland, although the sole example on record in Wales, in the lake at Llangorse, is as yet undated.

The human skeletons in these two groups of burial places belonged to a singularly uniform type.

In

41

40

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Fig. 6.-Neolithic Skull (Lent by Messrs. Macmillan.)

stature they varied from 5 ft. 6 in. to 4 ft. 10 in. ; their skulls (Figs. 4 and 6) were of good capacity and of long, oval type; their faces oval, noses aquiline, and jaws small and not projecting beyond a vertical dropped from the forehead.

Some of the leg bones present peculiarities that are only now found in tribes who freely use the muscles of their feet, uncontrolled by any stiff sole or sandal. We may, therefore, infer that their possessors either were bare-footed, or wore wore only mocassins, like the Red Indians.

This small slenderly-built race occupied the whole of Wales, Britain, and Ireland in the Neolithic Age, and has been traced through the whole of Belgium, France, Spain, and Italy. Among living peoples, as I have shown elsewhere, they are physically identical with the inhabitants of the Basque provinces of France and of Spain, who speak a non-Aryan tongue, and represent, at all events, one of the tribes that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula and South-Western France at the dawn of history. We may, therefore, infer that the Neolithic aborigines in Wales were, like the Basques, of dark complexion, and with black hair, and closely related, ethnically, to the Iberians, and that they possessed those physical characters that induced Tacitus to describe the Silures, probably on the authority of his father-in-law Agricola, as reminding him of the Iberians of Spain. In my opinion, the Silures, at the time of the Roman conquest of Wales, stood in the same relation to the other tribes that the Vascones in Gaul and in Spain stood to the neighbouring peoples when they fell under the Roman power. We may conclude that the small, dark element in the Welsh people now sporadic in Wales, as it is in the highlands of Scotland, in the west of Ireland, in England, and generally in South-Western Europe, is due to their descent from this small, dark, non-Aryan race, that were masters of Middle and South-Western Europe in the Neolithic Age, before the great invasion of the tribes speaking an Aryan tongue, which we know as Celtic. In Italy they may be recognised in the small swarthy section of the ancient Etruscans, as well as in the dark peoples now occupying the peninsula.

In Crete', in the Peloponnese, and in Asia Minor they are represented by the seafarers, the builders of Mycenae, Tiryns, and of Troy, who spread the Egean civilisation far and wide over the Mediterranean, in

1 Dawkins, Annual of British School at Athens, 1900-1, p. 150.

the Bronze Age. In Northern Africa they are closely related to the Berbers, and in ancient Egypt they will probably be brought, by the researches of Professor Elliott Smith, into racial affinity with the small swarthy Egyptians.

It matters very little whether we call them Iberian, as I proposed in 1880, or Mediterranean, as Professor Sergi termed them in 1895. They are a race clearly defined by their physical characters from all others. They form the earliest element that has yet been traced in the Welsh people, and to them are probably due many, if not all, of the non-Aryan words in the Welsh tongue. Unfortunately Basque, the sole survivor in Europe of the Iberic family of tongues, is, as Sayce points out, too modern to tell us much of the language even a thousand years ago, and still less in the remote time with which we are dealing.

When the Celtic vocabularies have been thoroughly examined, and the non-Aryan residuum ascertained, it is probable that a flood of light will be thrown on this question, by a comparison with the Basque roots extracted from the various Basque dialects. I have made the attempt and failed-I leave it in the more competent hands of the scholars who are at work on Celtic philology, Rhys, Phillimore, Morris Jones, and

the rest.

We have, therefore, in this Iberian race a welldefined starting point for the ethnology of the Welsh people, and we have ample grounds for the belief that the small, dark Welshmen of to-day are descended from the pre-Aryan tribes who were masters of Britain in the Neolithic Age. On the Continent also the Iberian is the earliest of the living races that have been clearly defined.1 It is of vast antiquity, and there is no

1 I am unable to accept the evidence brought forward by various anthropologists, and more especially by Dr. Verneau (Les Grottes de Gremaldi, 4to, Monaco, T. II, Part 1); Anthropologie, p. 161, 1906, that the Paleolithic tribes of France or Belgium are represented in the Neolithic population of Europe.

evidence as to the date of its arrival in Europe. We find it, however, in possession of the Continent and the British Isles in the Neolithic Age.

These conclusions1 have stood the test of criticism during the last thirty years, and at present hold the field.

There is nothing to differentiate the Neolithic civilisation in Wales from that of Britain or of the Continent. It was pastoral rather than agricultural. The domestic animals were the same, and the implements show that the daily life was singularly uniform throughout Europe.

IV. THE CIVILISATION OF WALES IN THE BRONZE AGE.

We must now consider the development of culture in Wales, during the time that the second pre-historic element in the Welsh population was master of the land. The knowledge of bronze was introduced into Europe, as I pointed out in 1880, by way of Asia Minor and the Dardanelles, from the South-East, and the civilisation that it connotes, spread among the tribes inhabiting Middle and Northern Europe, from the south. Of the general nature of this civilisation I need say nothing in this place, because it is well known, and especially through the work on the bronze implements of Britain, by Sir John Evans, whom we may count not only in name but in blood among the illustrious Welshmen. It passed into Britain from the adjacent parts of Gaul and spread over the whole of the British Isles. In Wales it was in no degree inferior to that in other parts of the country. The researches, for example, of Owen Stanley, on Holyhead Island, 1 For details see Dawkins, Cave-Hunting, 1874, and Early Man in Britain, 1880.

2 Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, p. 412.

3 For a detailed account of these discoveries see Arch. Camb., 1868, p. 385; Archeol. Journ., xxiv; and "Memoirs on Cyttiau'r Gwyddelod," explored in 1862 and 1868 by the Hon. William Owen Stanley, 8vo, 1871, with Supplementary Notes by Albert Way.

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