Abstract
Two Bronze Age Cairns in Wales THE report on the excavation by Sir Cyril Fox of the Simondston and Pond Cairns, Coity Higher Parish, Bridgend, Vale of Glamorgan, which appeared originally in Archœologia (87, 129–180, 1938), has now been issued in reprint as a publication of the National Museum of Wales (Cardiff: 1939, pp. 51, 2s. 6d.). Of the two cairns, that at Simondston is the earlier, its primary deposits in ‘enlarged food vessels’ indicating a date in Middle Bronze Age A, about 1500 B.C.; while the Pond cairn is definitely later, the deep collar of its well-wrought cremation urn belonging to Middle Bronze Age B, say 150 years later, or about 1300 B.C. Both cairns being situated on Lias limestone, the economic basis of their makers was similar, depending on a forest growth, mainly ash and other trees demanding calcareous soil, such as was widely occupied in neolithic and bronze age times in the Vale. The differences between the culture of the Simondston cairn and that of the Pond cairn are so profound that the latter must be regarded as intrusive in the district, while the former represents an ancient cultural tradition, the megalithic. The Pond cairn culture seems to be that of settlers from the other side of the Severn sea. Co-operation with workers in other fields of science (of which the results are here printed in appendixes) have produced results which indicate that the suggestion that the time had come to intermit for a period field-research on ‘round barrows’ was premature. Thus the present investigation has produced the first scientifically controlled record of wheat in the bronze age of Britain, the earliest record of barley, the identification of the charcoals of the fuels used for pyres and other purposes, and evidences of the use of coal in the bronze age in South Wales.
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Research Items. Nature 144, 518–519 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144518a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144518a0