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Hillforts in Wales and the Marches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Leslie Alcock
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Extract

Wales and its March is a land of fortifications, Celtic, Roman and medieval; and an analysis of any one of these classes in microcosm may also be of value for wider studies. Certainly the student of hillforts has just been presented with an invaluable corpus of material in the completed trilogy of Royal Commission Inventories for Caernarvonshire. As it happens, though the Caernarvonshire forts are deficient in significant finds, they are particularly valuable for settlement studies because house-foundations or emplacements are often still visible within the defences. The implications of this immediately accessible evidence have already been partly explored in a seminal article by the Secretary of the Welsh Commission (Hogg, 1960), but further discussion is both possible and desirable. Moreover, the archaeological evidence for Iron Age settlements makes it possible to discuss and correct the attempts of social historians to probe behind medieval documents to the social arrangements of earlier eras (e.g. Jones, 1964). There is at present a considerable ferment of ideas about the nature of hillforts as settlements and about their place in early Welsh society, which may also be of general interest to students of Celtic archaeology and institutions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 39 , Issue 155 , September 1965 , pp. 184 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1965

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