Themes

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    Hearth and home

    Very little evidence has been found so far in South Wales for where people lived throughout most of prehistory.

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    Down in the Flood

    Around the coast of South Wales a whole series of prehistoric landscape drowned by rising sea levels are now only visible at low tide.

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    Every path tells a tale

    Prehistoric people, much like varying cultural groups all over the world today, understood the world in different ways. Spirituality and the inanimate world were intertwined in their daily life.

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    The importance of things

    Throughout prehistory, artefacts and the technology that created them, have figured prominently in explanations of culture process and culture change.

Introduction

From the time when people first started to colonise the British Isles to the coming of the Romans is over 10,000 years. Huge changes happened over that time, both to the land and to the people living their lives here. This was all prehistory ie ‘before history’: writing only appeared in north-western Europe during the last few centuries (and even then we have little more than a few travellers’ tales repeated second-hand), so the only way we can find out what happened is through archaeology.
Since the 1980s, GGAT has received grant aid from Cadw to carry out a series of projects looking at the prehistoric archaeology of Glamorgan and Gwent. On these pages you can find information about
During successive Ice Ages, so much water was locked up in glaciers and the ice cap that the sea level dropped massively. When the ice melted, two things started to happen to the relative levels of land and sea. One is that the sea level rose due to the amount of liquid water that now became available. The other is that the land itself readjusted: the northern half of the British Isles had been weighed down under all the ice began to rise, causing the southern half, including South Wales, to sink. This is a very slow process, and is still going on today. Ice Age in South Wales were so inhospitable that for some periods at least the humans who had been living there were forced out. When the climate started to warm again, immigration from further south and east brought them back again.
Prehistory is divided into a number of different periods reflecting changes in lifestyle and technology
Arfordir

Mesolithic: This period extends from the end of the last Ice Age (about 8,500BC) to the introduction of farming in the British Isles (c4400BC). People continued with a hunter-gatherer way of life using stone tools, but they are smaller, perhaps because their makers only seem to have had limited supplies of flint and other suitable stone. We have enough evidence to suggest that groups moved round different habitats over the course of a year to take advantage of seasonal sources of foodstuffs.

First World War

Neolithic: This period extends from the introduction of farming in the British Isles (c4400BC) to the introduction of metal technology in the British Isles (c2200BC). The farming culture of western Eurasia began in the Near East with the domestication of wheat and barley, cattle, sheep and goats and seems to have made its way outwards from that centre. As it spread, it caused fundamental changes to the way in which people lived their lives, although archaeological opinion is still divided as to the extent to which they were still reliant on wild foods alongside the new agricultural produce.

3D Models

Bronze Age: This period extends from the introduction of bronze-working technology in the British Isles (c2200BC) to the beginning of iron-working technology (c700BC). There was however a fundamental difference between society at the beginning and end of the Bronze Age. In the Early Bronze Age, we are again unable to identify most of the sites where people lived although we know of hundreds of the cairns and barrows where they were buried. By the Late Bronze Age, we are no longer able to locate where people were being buried, but we know that they were living in the type of enclosure which used to be thought of as specifically Iron Age.

Gower Landscape project

Iron Age: This period extends from the beginning of iron-working technology (c700BC) to the invasion of Britain by Rome in AD43. It seems to have been largely a change in technology rather than involving the sort of lifestyle changes that happened at the beginning of the Neolithic and Bronze Age. At the other end of the period, although the Romans had completed the conquest of South Wales by the 70s of the 1st century AD, most of the ordinary farmers probably continued living for centuries after in much the same way as they had in the Iron Age.

More about our projects

Since the 1980s, we have received grant aid from Cadw to carry out a series of projects looking at the prehistoric archaeology of Glamorgan and Gwent. Some of them were survey projects, looking at the information available on a wide range of different monument types as part of a pan-Wales study aimed at improving protection. Others were locally focussed, and took place in response to a specific threat to a site or group of sites. Before new Planning Guidance was published 1990 (PPG16), these excavations included sites that were under threat from development, but if such project are carried out today, it would be the developer who would be liable for the costs. Cadw still grant-aids rescue excavation of sites that are being destroyed by natural processes, such as coastal erosion.

Please see here to find out more about us, our activities and our forward strategy