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Fig. 10.-Bronze Implements, Amber Beads, Ty Mawr (Arch. Camb., 1868)

cooking, and cups and jars of coarse hand-made pottery at their meals. In addition to beef, mutton, and pork, they ate shellfish, such as limpets and periwinkles. They were spinners and weavers, and workers in bronze. This latter fact is proved by the hoard of broken and worn out bronze implements found within the precincts of the village, consisting of beads, spears, and javelins, plain and socketed celts, and rings and armlets of various sizes (Fig. 10). All these had been collected to be cast into new implements in one or other of the hearths that bear the characteristic stain of bronze. In this connection we may note that a stone mould has been found in Anglesey, for casting spear-heads and celts, of the same type as those of the hoard. Along with these bronze articles there were a great many amber beads, and in a neighbouring cairn, at Pen y Bonc, belonging to the Bronze Age, a portion of a necklace, made of jet or cannel coal, was found, along with armlets of bronze, and two urns. We may therefore infer that the dwellers in Holyhead at this time used personal ornaments, made from materials that could not have been obtained from any districts nearer than the east coast of Britain for the amber, or than that of Mold for the cannel coal, or North Yorkshire for the jet.

These habitations of the Bronze Age are superior to those of the Neolithic in their larger size, more solid construction, and in the sub-division of the interior into chambers.

The settlement at Ty Mawr, as well as that close by at Pen y Bonc, stands in close relation to Gaer y Twr. the stronghold on the top of Holyhead Mountain,1 which, from its position, must in all times have been the key to Holyhead Island. The rude stone walls, forming the existing ramparts, occupy the natural lines of defence, and may go back as far as the Neolithic Age. They are identical in structure with

Six-Inch Ordnance Map, Anglesey, x, N. E. and xi, N. W.

the rude walling to the south of the Ty Mawr settlement, as well as with that of Tre Ceiri and other fortresses of the Pre-historic Iron Age. I, therefore, accept the conclusion of Albert Way and Owen Stanley, that it was the citadel to the inhabitants of the island in the Bronze Age, although there is clear proof that it was occupied in later times, and especially during the Roman dominion. Many of the other

Fig. 11.-Gold Lunule, Llanllyfni

strongholds in Wales, as yet undated, have probably had a similar history.

We have noted the evidence that bronze was smelted in the settlement of Ty Mawr. The numerous hoards of broken and imperfect implements and weapons, collected for the purpose of casting, prove that bronze was worked throughout Wales, as well as in the rest of Britain. That, for example, found at Guildsfield, Montgomeryshire, and now in Powis Castle,

1 Barnwell, Arch. Camb., 1864.

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A hoard of broken and imperfectly cast implements has also been met with at Rhosnesney,' and of horse trappings close to an ancient fort on the Kinmel estate, near Abergele, called, strangely enough, Parc y Meirch or Horse Park, both in Denbighshire; and from South Wales Barnwell has recorded the discovery of leaf-shaped swords, ferrules still holding wooden shafts, spear heads, lance heads and rings, broken or folded so as to be portable.3

These finds not only show that the bronze industry was carried on on throughout Wales, with material obtained elsewhere, but also the fact that at this time weapons were as necessary for the community as the implements of daily life.

The bronze was undoubtedly imported into Wales. The gold, however, used mostly for personal adornment in Wales in the Age of Bronze, was probably in part derived from the stream workings in the Valley of the Mawddach near Dolgelly, and in the tributaries of the Towy to the west of Llandovery. It was, however, also imported from Ireland-the Eldorado of North-Western Europe in the Ages of Bronze and Pre-historic Iron. This important conclusion is proved by several finds of ornaments of Irish design, such as the characteristic gold lunule (Fig. 11) found at Llan1 Arch. Camb,, 1875, p. 70. 2 Archæologia, xliii, p. 556. 3 Arch. Camb., 1864, p. 224.

6TH SER. VOL. XII.

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llyfni,1 in Carnarvonshire, and others at Gaerwen in Anglesey. The beads of amber imply intercourse with the tribes of East Anglia, or of the amber coast, and the general correspondence of the implements and weapons with those in the rest of Britain implies that the inhabitants of Wales were in close touch with the tribes of the rest of the island.

I turn now to the consideration of the tombs of the Bronze Age in Wales. Here, as in the rest of the British Isles, the practice of inhumation, universal in the Bronze Age, began, at the beginning of the Age of Bronze, to yield place to that of cremation, the ashes of the dead being collected, and very generally placed in a large urn, sometimes inverted, and sometimes protected by a stone chamber, and covered with a tumulus or barrow of earth, or a cairn of stones. These burial places abound in Wales, and are amply described in our Archæologia. In the chambered cairn at Plas Heaton, near Denbigh, both inhumation and cremation had been practised, four bodies had been buried in the crouching posture, and there was a funeral urn, with ashes, of the usual type of the Bronze Age. Hilton Price describes the contents of a barrow called Twmpath, in the parish of Colwinston, Glamorgan, that yielded numerous hand-made urns, containing human ashes, and bones proving that pork was used in the funereal feast, along with various articles, a bone pen, a broken saddle-quern, a bronze pricker, and the fragments of a bronze knife or razor. It was obviously a family or tribal burial place, and was based on a floor of stone flags, instead of on the prepared surface of the ground, as is usually the case.

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We may also quote the discovery of similar funeral

1 British Museum. Guide to the Antiquities of the Bronze Age, p. 145, Fig. 137.

2 Arch. Journ., xiii, p. 295.

3 Arch. Camb., 1851, 274.

4 Arch. Camb., 1888, p. 83.

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