What do we know about Bryn y Ffynon and Brymbo Man?

In Part 1 of this four-part series, two Late Neolithic – Early Bronze Age burial sites were introduced: Bryn y Ffynon (the grave of the so-called Brymbo Man), and Bryn yr Ellyllon (the grave in which the Mold gold cape was found).  A map of their locations was shown, the circumstances of their discovery was described, and the two graves were set in the context of similar sites in northeast Wales.

This post looks more closely at the Bryn y Ffynon, best known as the grave of Brymbo Man, one of the star exhibits in the Wrexham County Borough Museum.  Part 3 looks at Bryn yr Ellyllon, the grave that produced the Mold Cape.  I the fourth and final part, the various strands will be brought together in a conclusion, together with visiting notes.  The bibliography for all four parts can be found at present at the end of part .

Contents of Part 2:

• The grave
• The grave goods
• The skeleton
• Funerary rituals
• Dating
• What did Brymbo Man look like?
• Who was Brymbo Man? Was he important?
• How did he make a living?
• Final comments on Part 2
• (Sources are listed at the end of Part 1)

The grave

Brymbo Man was buried in a stone-built grave called Bryn y Ffynon (Well on the Hill)  on the north side of Ruabon Mountain, now the site of a housing estate in Brymbo to the northwest of Wrexham.  No burial mound, either of earth or stone, has survived, and it is not known if there ever was one.  In the northeast of England there were cemeteries of flat graves, so a burial mound might not have been essential everywhere, but in northeast Wales mounds of earth (barrows) or stone (cairns) were usual, even though not all of them remain.  Some mounds were built in complex layers using different materials, and importantly could contain secondary burials, usually cremation burials, that were added to the mound, sometimes involving the extension of the mound. The loss of a burial mound often equates to the loss of valuable data.  Stone cairns in particular were often robbed for their stone for much later building material, sometimes leaving a hidden cist unsuspected beneath the surface.  Given the upland location of the site, if the grave was covered, it probably lay under a cairn.

The cist (burial chamber) itself was made of roughly hewn slabs of local stone lining the walls and floor of the grave, and measured 96 x 79cm (38 x 31 inches).  The cist was aligned north-south.  A very large and uneven slab of stone, called a capstone, was placed over the top of the cist, sealing the burial before any burial mound was built over the top, itself measuring 5ft 6ins (167cm)  long, 3ft 3ins wide (c.1m) and 9ins (23cm) thick.

The Grave Goods

There were only two items found in the grave with Brymbo Man, which are on display with the skeleton.  One is a ceramic vessel known as a Beaker and the other is a flint tool.  This is fairly typical of Early Bronze Age graves.  Without access to the excavation report (unpublished) one assumes that the relationship between the objects and the skeleton in the cist was recorded, and that this is what has been reproduced by the museum, with a flint knife placed not far behind the skull and the Beaker placed towards at the base of what remains of the skeleton.

The Beaker

Brymbo Man was accompanied in his grave by a very distinctive ceramic form known as a “Beaker,” more precisely a short-necked Beaker.  The Beaker tradition was an import from Europe, marking one of the changes in the centuries at the end of the Neolithic and beginning of the Early Bronze Age.  Where a Beaker is buried with the individual, it may be accompanied by a variety of other goods, but is often the only object found.  This suggests that the beaker itself was pivotal in establishing the identity and purpose of the grave and its owner.  Skeletons in Beaker graves were flexed / crouched, (with their knees bent and their legs pulled up to their chests).

The process by which Beaker burial traditions arrived in Britain is still poorly understood.  Options are that the tradition was imported by visitors or immigrants; or that it was brought back from the continent by British (using the term loosely) travellers who found certain affinities with the funerary practises that they observed.  The idea of foreign people being buried with the new Beaker style burial is given some credence by beaker burials from the Stonehenge region, and in particular the Amesbury Archer, who was buried with a range of goods traditionally associated with beakers, and was subjected to isotope analysis that indicated his origins were probably in the Alps.  In addition, a multi-disciplinary DNA analysis research project in 2017 proposed that a significant percentage of the indigenous population of Britain was, by the Middle Bronze Age, replaced by those who brought the Beaker tradition with them at the end of the Neolithic:  “the genetic evidence points to a substantial amount of migration into Britain from the European mainland beginning around 2400 BCE.” (Olalde et al).  As is so often the case with this sort of DNA research, as highlighted in the study itself, there are questions remaining about the extent to which it is possible to extrapolate from the data used, including sampling issues (statistical, geographical and relating to the quality of the material).

The new burial tradition found favour, whatever it represented.  The new funerary regime could not have spread so far and and wide throughout Britain and Ireland without people in all those regions being complicit.   Whatever the mechanism of transmission, by the end of the Neolithic the continental Beaker and associated objects had become desirable, and were found extensively under round barrows, as well as occasionally in other contexts, in many parts of Britain.

Beakers were hand-made (i.e. not wheel-thrown), built up from a single ball of clay that was hollowed out and shaped before being fired.  There is a video at the end that demonstrates how Beakers may have been assembled and decorated.  A certain amount of skill went into the construction, which is a very specific shape, and the decoration must have taken considerable patience, but what is most remarkable about it is its faithful reproduction of an idea that had spread through Europe and was now perfectly at home in burials of northeast Wales.  The Beaker may have had slightly different ideas associated with it different areas, but it clearly imparted a message either about the deceased, the role or status enacted by the deceased in life, the status conferred upon the deceased after death, the place where the burial was made, as well as ideas and ideologies inherited with the Beaker tradition.

The flint knife

A flint tool was found in the grave.  It is plano-convex (flat on one side and curved on the other).  Flint was the preferred stone for tool manufacture in Britain.  In Cheshire, and less frequently in northeast Wales, it could be found locally in river beds and on beaches as pebbles, which are useful for making small tools, but for more ambitious pieces it would be imported from areas where flint was part of the geological fabric.  The reason for its popularity is the way in which it responds when it is struck in order to shape it into a tool.  The term for it is conchoidal fracturing, which means that the shock-wave of its fracture creates a slightly concave “bulb of percussion” from which concentric lines that ripple out from the point of impact.  The waste products left over from tool manufactured, undifferentiated flakes, are usually referred to as “debitage.”  Some of these could be further worked into other smaller tools, but others might be abandoned and are useful datasets about tool manufacture in their own right. Some tools are very distinctively shaped, like barbed and tanged arrowheads, but others are far more generic, like the one accompanying Brymbo Man.  Stone tools were often hafted in wood to make, for example, arrows, spears and axes.

Small plano-convex tools were common in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, particularly from the northeast, and often towards the end of the period.  When the edges are worked to form a sharp edge, they are usually termed knives, but many, including this one, were probably multi-purpose tools.  A particular industry referred to as “plano-convex” tools, formerly “slug knives,” is characterized by tools made with specialized pressure-flaking over one face of the tool, which have a very distinctive appearance and are particularly associated with the northeast and food vessels.  Nothing special went into the manufacture of this item, which is a very everyday piece, and although it is technically plano-convex, it is not characteristic of the more elaborate objects that are usually associated with the term.  I cannot find an image of the reverse side of the flint, but it looks more like a flake (a piece struck from a core piece of flint without much additional work) than a properly manufactured and shaped tool.

The Skeleton

The skeleton as it survives today is incomplete, as shown in the photograph on the left.  Even with only a partial skeleton to study it could be determined that the deceased was a male who, at the time of his death, was 5ft 8ins/173cm tall, and was strong and powerful, indicated both by the shape of his skull and by the muscle attachments to both his skull and his leg bones.

Brymbo Man is thought to have been 35 years of age at the time of his death. There are different estimates of life expectancy for this period, but it is probable that 35-40 was a good age.  His age was determined both by the degree to which the bones in his skull had fused and by the wear of his teeth.  He had once suffered a wound above hairline on his forehead, thought to have been caused by an arrowhead, but this had healed and was not the cause of his death.  No cause of death was identified.  He could, for example, have died from an injury that left no traces on what remains of his skeleton, or from illness or disease.

Isotope analysis has not been carried out on the Brymbo skeleton.  Isotopic ratio analysis has become very popular for an increasingly popular for the study of past human and livestock migrations.  The technique was used, for example, on the tooth enamel of a skeleton found near Stonehenge, known as the Amesbury Archer, and indicates that this person spent his childhood in the Alps.  It has also been used by the Beaker People Project, which has concluded that dsfsadfsd.  It also be used on livestock remains, helping to show patterns of mobility such as transhumance.  Like radiocarbon dating, isotopic analysis requires a sample of human material, which is destroyed in the process, and so far Wrexham County Borough Museum has decided not to subject the Brymbo remains to avoid harming the remaining bones.  The choice between preservation and knowledge is a difficult one to make.

Funerary Rituals

Rituals for the dead can be important for ensuring that  the living transition successfully into an afterlife, but they may also be important for the living, allowing communities to come to terms with the loss of a community member, to create ancestral links with a particular landscape, and to formalize any exchange of role from the dead person to a living replacement.  These ideas are familiar from the rituals that we engage in today when we attend a funeral.  In prehistory, it is likely that there were other reasons and meanings embedded into the ritual activities accompanying the deposition of the dead.  There was certainly an internal logic to the burials contained within the stone chambers during this period, and the Brymbo burial shares many of these features.

The presence of the Beaker puts it within a burial tradition that is quite distinctive.  The dead were buried by themselves, usually under a barrow or cairn, in a small chamber (cist) with a Beaker vessel and sometimes other objects.  This European tradition was adopted slowly throughout Britain, and Beakers were adapted by local people to conform to their own traditions.  There are numerous variants.  Quite what this tradition meant to living communities is unknown.  It may have indicated some sort of specific role in society for the deceased, and it may even indicate, in this case, that the the deceased was either involved in networks of communication and exchange with other areas, or was not native to the northeast Wales or border area.

The skull was laid on its side, with the head to the north, facing east and, if the museum display reflects how the skeleton was found, the rest of the bones were apparently laid to give the impression of a crouched burial.  Although there are exceptions, males were usually laid with their heads facing east, females with their heads facing west.

Only 13% of the Bryn y Ffynnon skeleton was interred in the grave.  This is not an accident of survival of decay, but a deliberate decision by those who buried the remains.  This is not unusual.  Analysis of the skeletal remains by osteology specialist Corinne Duhig found that  some of the bones bore cut marks that had been made by a sharp tool, which may indicate de-fleshing the bones.  The disarticulation  of the skeleton, the missing bones, and and the signs of defleshing imply that between death and interment multiple activities took place.  None of this was by any means unusual in the period, or indeed from the preceding Early Neolithic.   One explanation for this type of activity is that the person died some distance from home and that the body was prepared somewhere else for travel prior to burial;  another is that the practices were part of a set of rituals that marked the transition from life to death, possibly including a transition to an afterlife.  It is also entirely possible that the body may have been laid to rest elsewhere and moved here at a later date.

Splitting of bodies between multiple places is not as strange as it sounds and has parallels, for example, in Medieval Britain. For example, when Earl Ranulf III of Chester (1170-1232) died away from home, his body was eviscerated (internal organs removed) so that it could buried in three locations.  His entrails were buried where he died in Wallingford, his heart was buried at Dieulacrès Abbey in the Midlands and his embalmed body was then returned to Chester for burial in St Werburgh’s Abbey. This was completely consistent with the traditions of the period.

The pre-interment activity at Brymbo does beg the question of how close the association between the dead person and the objects in the grave actually was.  If there was a considerable period between death and interment, it may be that the objects had more to do with the living than the dead, and that they were simply conventional contributions in which ideas were embodied in the artefacts about the site itself, rather than statements about the deceased.

Dating

The skeleton has not been subjected to radiocarbon dating, but is thought to date to around 1900BC on the basis of artefacts that accompany the burial.  Relative dating of this sort is achieved by comparing the objects in graves with similar graves that have been subjected to radiocarbon dating.  Radiocarbon dating is a scientific method, known as absolute dating, that measures the amount of atmospheric carbon-14 remaining within organic materials such as bone or wood to obtain a date.  A brief but useful explanation can be found Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit website.  A sample of organic matter (such as skeletal or plant material) is required for the dating procedure, and this sample is destroyed in the process of obtaining a date.  Recent improvements in the technique need much smaller samples, but some curators are reluctant for even small samples to be destroyed.  Signage at the Wrexham County Borough Museum explains that the museum has decided, at the time of writing, not to have the Brymbo Man scientifically dated.  Instead, the relative (inferred) date given above has been based mainly on the Beaker.  Beakers have been studied extensively.  They appear from 2500BC, and there are multiple different styles, some of which can be charted over time.  The Brymbo Beaker, placed at around the 1900BC mark, is well into the Early Bronze Age and on the edge of the period when this style of pottery was going out of fashion.

What did Brymbo Man look like?

The Brymbo skull was used by facial reconstruction expert Dr Caroline Wilkinson at the Unit of Art in Medicine at Manchester University, to create an estimate of Brymbo Man’s appearance.   Although the skull is incomplete, what remained was enough for Dr Wilkinson to use.  The skull itself was fragile, but robust enough for a cast to be made.  The position and size of the muscle attachments helped to build a sense of the musculature in the face which, along with bone structure and overall body weight, help to determine the shape of the face.  The shape and size of all apertures in the face, such as eyes, mouth and nose, and the spatial relationship between them, also contribute to how a face would have looked.  Once the underlying structure of the face had been determined, the skin, represented by clay, was added.  There are some things that are not determined by the underlying structure, like lips and ears.  Once the model head was completed, a make-up artist was responsible for hair and the colour of eyes, complexion and hair.  This is not a definitive representation, but it is based on the available data, and it gives an excellent sense that the skeleton was once a living man.

Who was Brymbo Man?  Was he important?

Given that 1000s of people during the Bronze Age were not buried (the landscape would have been stuffed full of mounds if they had), we know that a selection process had been implemented, and this selection process put Brymbo Man in this grave.  Unfortunately we do not know the selection criteria for those who were deposited in graves.

One might wonder if he was the leader of his community, but he might equally be an elder respected for his experience and knowledge, a ritual specialist responsible for the religious well-being of the community, or a wealthy trader who conferred status on the group without necessarily having a position of hierarchical power.  Perhaps it was not his place in society that marked him out, but an action or event in which he took part.  Or was his death itself significant in some way?  Perhaps he was the first person to die after the establishment of a claim over a new territory.  Equally he might be a person or an idea regarded by the community for reasons that we might never imagine, because we can never know how people were categorized or how they related to the ideas of the community and the broader social conventions to which they were connected.

Whatever he represented, whether as a valued family member, an important representative of the community, or a symbol of something rather less conceivable, the burial itself was clearly important.  Assembling the grave was no light-hearted exercise.  Even without a barrow, cutting the stone for the the stone-lined cist, which would then have to be assembled, would have been a significant activity.  Even more impressive, the quarrying of the stone for the capstone and moving the capstone into position would have required many hands, probably some lifting technology, and a great deal of incentive and determination.

We know that Brymbo Man had sustained an injury to his skull, which he survived.  The nature of the injury suggests that it might have been made by an arrow, which could have been received in a hunting accident, or in conflict.  There are numerous reasons why people might resort to violence, including livestock raiding, disputes over territory as well as personal grievances, but there is no matching data from other burials in the area, such as evidence of similar injuries, to indicate wider scale disputes.  Although his injuries could have been connected to his role or status, and might have been a criterion by which he was selected for a round barrow burial, we simply have no way of knowing whether or not this was the case.

Beyond speculation there is little information that the presence of a burial with a single Beaker and a single stone tool can divulge about who the deceased may have been in life.  It is not even clear whether he was important in his own right or whether his burial represented a set of ideas and traditions, quite unlike our own, that led to his burial in this location.  As things stand, we cannot form an opinion about whether he was any more important to his contemporaries than the event that placed him in the grave.  What can be stated with some confidence is that the grave itself, and the dome of earth or stone that probably encased it, were significant to the people who built it, standing proud on a landscape that was inhabited by people, and to whom it would have communicated messages that we can no longer read.

What do we know about how Brymbo Man made a living?

We know something about Brymbo man’s vital statistics, and how he was treated after death, but so far we have not had the opportunity to look at how he may have lived his life.  In Britain, Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age resources potentially included cereal (wheat and barley) and legume crops, as well as livestock, primarily cattle and sheep.  In the earlier Neolithic period, after an initial burst of agrarian activity, livestock herding became dominant over cereal cultivation, possibly because of teething problems with the establishment of cereal farming in new territories by inexperienced farmers.  Cattle herding increased, and soon sheep also contributed to the subsistence mix, with dairy products rising in importance.  Before the end of the Early Bronze Age, cereal farming resumed on floodplains and other suitable land.  Although different areas had access to different types of land and both wild and domesticated resources, there is no reason to doubt that the inhabitants of northeast Wales could obtain access to subsistence assets when they required them, choosing the best combination of crops and livestock for the conditions in which they lived.  Hunting wild game probably supplemented the diet.

How much of this applies to the Brymbo area?  We know that the grave was on a hillside above the River Alyn.  The hillside is used used for sheep farming.  Given that Brymbo Man was buried in this location, it can be assumed that he lived and worked here for at least a portion of the year, but whether this was a settled or mobile life is unknown.

The point was made above that Brymbo Man was a sturdy individual with no obvious health defects, that 35 was a respectable age for the period, and that these observations suggest that he was healthy and probably had a nutritious diet.  We can state with some confidence is that Brymbo Man was once part of a family, and a larger community, made up of farmers and/or herders, as well as stone and pottery workers who exploited the fertile lowlands and highland pastures of northeast Wales, possibly on a transhumant or otherwise seasonal basis. These were the people who buried him.  There would have been many other men, women and children in the area when he was alive and making a living, each with a specific role within the community.  

It is possible that some members of the community split away from the rest on a seasonal basis, following a pattern of taking up livestock onto the hills to take advantage of summer pasture, before returning in the autumn to help with the harvest.  If the burial on the edge of Ruabon Mountain is an indication of an affiliation with this particular part of the landscape, Brymbo Man was probably involved in sheep or cattle herding, and was in easy reach of the Alyn valley for other agrarian activities.  Climatic indicators suggest that the weather was warm and relatively dry, and although lowland areas could be freed up for agriculture by the clearance of often dense woodland before they could be cultivated, upland areas were often used for both cultivation and herding.

Coming back once again to the Beaker, it is as far as one can tell from other excavated sites in the region, something of an unusual object in northeast Wales and the borders.  This one in particular seems to have affinities with other areas and it seems unlikely that it was made locally.  The presence of the copper mine on the Great Orme indicates that there was significant trading activity from there to other parts of Britain, and that the development of complex overland and seagoing trade routes were established had been established by the Early Bronze Age.  It is in not, therefore, far-fetched to suggest that this grave, overlooking the Alyn valley and only a few kilometres from the Dee valley, might have had connections further afield, and that the Beaker may not have been made by native potters, but was an import, either in trade, or in company with Brymbo Man.  This is highly speculative and more data is required.  Perhaps the beaker itself, and analysis of the clay from which it was made, could add additional data. Isotopic analysis of the skeleton might also well help to clarify some of these distance-related questions.  As noted above, however, this would involve inflicting damage on the Brymbo remains.

Final Comments on Part 2

Brymbo Man remains elusive.  One grave on its own, even containing a skeleton and grave goods, provides insufficient data for judging what the grave meant to the people that buried a man there, and covered his burial chamber with a giant capstone and, probably, a barrow or cairn.  Isotope data could probably get us a little further, but only as far as assessing whether this man was likely to have travelled.  All we can say for sure is that he had no obvious signs of ill health, that his physique, height and age suggest that he was well nourished, that he had received an injury apparently inflicted by another human, and that the hilly surroundings of his burial place might imply that he was involved in livestock herding or that this was a route he travelled in the course of another economic activity.

The real value of Brymbo Man, the objects in his grave and his burial mound is as a data source in comparative research to enable the development of a greater understanding of all these burials, the features they shared, and how they were differentiated from one another.  Once sufficient data has been accumulated, probably not until decades from now, it may be possible to return to Brymbo Man, better informed, with more knowledge to hand, to ask some of the above questions again.

Next

Bryn yr Ellyllon, the Early Bronze Age burial cairn that produced the Mold Cape, are discussed in a similar vein in Part 3.

 

This is part 1 of a four-part overview of two Early Bronze Age graves and how they contribute to an understanding of  the archaeology of the period in northeast Wales and the borders. All four parts have been written, and will be released over the next couple of weeks.

The series has been divided up as follows:

Part 1 (this post) – Introduction to the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in northeast Wales:

• Introduction
• Some Background to the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age
• A rich heritage in northeast Wales
• Discovering the graves
• Sources (bibliography) for all four parts 

Part 2 – What do we know about Bryn y Ffynnon, the grave of ‘Brymbo Man’?

Part 3 – What do we know about Bryn yr Ellyllon, where the Mold cape was found? 

Part 4 – Bringing the threads together, plus visiting details

 

Part 1: Introduction

The series is based on two burial finds in northeast Wales, Bryn yr Ellyllon, near Mold and Bryn y Ffynnon at Brymbo, Wrexham.  These two sites have been chosen 1) because excavated sites are comparatively unusual in northeast Wales, 2) the contents of both sites can be visited in museums, and 3) because of the differences between them, and the opportunity for assessing different types of knowledge about the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in northeast Wales.  In spite of the differences between them, both represent variants of the broader burial tradition, and therefore have the potential to add their own unique voices to the discussion of how this period manifests itself in the region.

Bryn yr Ellyllon (which translates as Hill of Goblins or Fairies) was discovered by labourers in 1833 a few miles to the east of Mold.  It was a round cairn (a mound of stones) that contained a badly decayed skeleton together accompanied by a number of very fine artefacts, one of which is the magnificent gold Mold Cape made of paper-thin gold and embossed with a decorative theme that emulates multiple strings of beads.  The other objects included around 300 amber beads (the exact number found remains unknown, and only one survives), other pieces of gold that appear to have belonged to a second cape, and some poorly preserved items of bronze.  These are now in the British Museum in London and are discussed further below and in part 3.  Even though the objects were pulled from the site as pieces of treasure, the location of the site is known, and the objects form a relatively coherent assemblage.  These are valuable details when understanding how objects were chosen to accompany the dead, and where burial sites were located in the landscape.

In 1958 a stone-line cist called Bryn y Ffynnon, was found 10 miles to the northwest of Wrexham at Brymbo, containing the well-preserved remains of a partial skeleton, a flint tool and a ceramic vessel known as a Beaker.  The name means Hill of the Well or Spring (with many thanks to Reginald Iain de Crawford-Griffin for the translation).  It seems to have been named for a small farm of the same name on Brymbo Hill.  The site was excavated in 1958, and the results published in an excavation report in 1959.  The man to whom the skeleton belonged, now nick-named Brymbo Man, was around 35 years old when he died some 3600 years ago.   The burial, including the skeletal remains, is now on display in the Wrexham County Borough Museum, together with a reconstruction of the skeleton’s face.  The site is discussed further below, and in detail in part 2.

Each burial offers contrasting insights into the Late Neolithic / Early Bronze Age, and they are worth looking at both individually and together to highlight how different sites may produced different types of knowledge.  Every individual site has something to say for itself, and as more sites are investigated, each feeds in turn into our knowledge about the period in which they were constructed, and during which they formed an integral part of the human landscape.  It is the  understanding of the period as a whole, rather than individual objects, that is important to archaeologists, who work to recreate past societies from the sites and objects that survive.

Some Background to the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age

The Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age are usually discussed together.  The period lasts from around 2900-1600 BC.   The division from the earlier Neolithic lies in transformations visible in the material record, which may in turn reflect revisions of ideology, social organization and/or economic activity.  These changes coincide with a period of climatic change.

The climate, cooler than in the earlier Neolithic, was still favourable for agriculture, and in particular may have supported agricultural development in hilly areas in the summer months.  Astrid Caseldine’s analysis of environmental indicators suggests that this was a period of deforestation in many parts of upland north Wales, probably indicative of agricultural expansion into these upland areas.  This is supported both by the notable increase in cereal pollen in these environments, and by the flowering of Late Neolithic – Early Bronze Age monuments across the upland landscape.  This expansion could not have lasted indefinitely; the soils were simply not of sufficiently robust quality to sustain long-term agricultural expansion.  Valleys were also popular locations for these sites, indicating that communities were adept at making the best of various different environments.  The valley of the river Alyn, along which several sites are located including Bryn yr Ellyllon and the Llong, is one example.

Foremost amongst the transformations in material culture, suggesting social as well as economic changes, is a different form of burial  practise, suggesting changes in the way that communities defined themselves and related to both others and the landscape.  Although there were a number of tomb styles prevalent in the earlier Neolithic, most burial sites contained the remains of multiple individuals, but at the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze age, smaller round barrows and cairns were favoured, usually containing a single burial in a small subterranean chamber at its centre, sometimes with a new form of pottery known as a Beaker.  Sometimes additional burials added into the mound itself at a later date.  At the same time, settlements became less substantial, more ephemeral, and much less easy to find archaeologically, the sites often consisting of little more than household debris with few, if any, signs of the circular structures that once contained them.

Pottery styles also changed at this time, with the introduction of the new Beaker form from Europe and the replacement of earlier Neolithic styles with new home-grown Grooved Ware, Food Vessels and Collared Urns.  As the name Bronze Age suggests, this was also the period during which metal-working began, first copper and gold, and later bronze itself, an alloy of copper and tin.  North Wales was well placed as a base for the exploitation of mineral sources, an industry that gained momentum during the Early Bronze Age before becoming an important centre for copper and other resources in the Middle Bronze Age.  The earliest copper tools in Wales were flat axes that had been cast in an open mould, a basic technology that improved over time.  Decorative items, such as items of jewellery also appear much more frequently.  The amber beads in Bryn yr Ellyllon and the jet and shale beads in the necklace found in a cairn at Llong, near Mold, both in the valley of the river Alyn, are both examples from northeast Wales.

Although these are the top-level identifiers of the new Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age material culture, there is considerable regional variation, and even within a region no two graves are identical.  Although inhumations (burials) are typical of barrow graves, cremation steadily gained momentum, eventually replacing inhumation as the preferred method for disposing of the dead.

A rich Early Bronze Age heritage in northeast Wales

Northeast Wales was a recipient of these new ideas, perhaps deriving them from earlier versions in south Wales, or perhaps more plausibly from similar manifestations in northern England with which the northern Welsh material appears to have certain affinities.  The Bryn y Ffynnon Beaker, for example, bears a close resemblance to examples in northeast England, and stone maceheads from northeast Wales are comparable with those from the north of England, including a remarkable example from the Maesmor Estate at Llangwm near Corwen in the Ceirw river valley, not far from the Dee (shown left).  Good quality flint pieces for more mundane stone tools are unavailable in north Wales, and this appears to have been imported from elsewhere.  Yorkshire jet appears in northeast Wales during the Late Neolithic, as does amber. The nearest source of amber was the Baltic, but it also washed up on beaches along the Yorkshire coast.  Amber was found in Bryn yr Ellyllon with the golden cape;  jet (and black stone resembling jet) appears in the necklace, found scattered in a the stones of cairn at Llong, 1.5 miles (2.4km) southeast of Mold, overlying the burial of a crouched female skeleton. Although sea routes had dominated during the earlier Neolithic, the indications are that land and river routes now assumed a new importance, transforming networks of communication.

However they arrived, the Early Neolithic and Early Bronze Age burial practices soon colonized northeast Wales, mainly round barrows (mounds of earth or turf) and cairns (mounds of stone) the majority of which, but by no means all, are thought to have been burial sites.  Here there were none of the earlier Neolithic monumental burials such as the so-called portal dolmens found in northwest Wales and on Anglesey.  There are 100s of mounds all over Wales, north and south, and there are particular concentrations in the northeast of Wales, and along the Welsh borders.  See the map right.  There are also a few other types of ceremonial monuments from the period, including stone circles and so-called henges.  Sadly, as explained above, there is a severe dearth of settlement sites.  Nearly all of the archaeological data available about the period in northeast Wales is derived from these round mounds, built of earth, turf, or stones.  Most have not been excavated, and many have become very overgrown over the millennia, making it difficult to differentiate between them.  Where they have been investigated, a number of different types have been identified, based on features like kerb stones, berms and ditches.  Some round barrows and cairns are completely empty of burials, but may perform a similar function in terms of looking like a burial site and establishing a presence in the landscape.

Of the round barrows found in northeast Wales, some have been recorded but are no longer visible.  Others are visible, either as monuments or as crop marks in aerial photographs, but have not been examined.  Some were excavated before sound archaeological techniques were developed, and just a few have been subject to modern archaeological investigation.  In all, it’s a very mixed bag of data, but it all points to a very busy Welsh heritage during the Early Bronze Age period.

When Frances Lynch discussed the survey of Bronze Age monuments in Flintshire and Wrexham in 2003, she included a table that listed 284 monuments, capturing particular concentrations of Early Bronze Age burial activity on Ruabon Mountain and in the Alyn Valley. What is interesting about her list is the sheer number of round barrows when compared to any other type of contemporary monument.  A single stone circle and a possible henge (ceremonial monuments) are recorded.  Lynch makes the point that sites located side by side may or may not be directly related to one another, but even so, a landscape stuffed full or more or less contemporary monuments is a notable phenomenon.

To understand the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, other types of site would normally be taken into consideration, a mix of domestic, funerary and ritual sites.  These include other ceremonial sites, industrial sites like kilns, quarries and mines, and settlements.   A combination of sites helps to create a sense of what the lived area was like.  The profusion of round mounds argues that northeast Wales was clearly well populated, but settlement and industrial sites remain very rare, although the copper mine at the Great Orme stands out as a notable and welcome exception.  In spite of these gaps, prehistorian Frances Lynch, who specializes in Welsh archaeology, suggests that these prolific barrow builders were far from insular, and that they were part of larger networks of communication

“Although the social character of Wales was perhaps more conservative than that of many parts of Britain, the country was not isolated.  The presence of exotic beads made of amber, faience and jet demonstrates that even quite remote communities could obtain luxuries from a distance and that fashions in clothes, as far as we can reconstruct them, changed in step with those elsewhere.” (Lynch 2000 p.138)

I will be talking more about grave distribution and how these two graves fit into the general picture in part 4.

Discovering the graves

The two sites under discussion were found 125 years apart.  That 125 years accounts for how differently each site was treated by its finders. Both sites were discovered by workmen.  Bryn yr Ellyllon, which contained the Mold Cape, was found in 1833 and Bryn y Ffynnon (Brymbo) was found in 1958.  The grave at Bryn yr Ellyllon on the eastern outskirts of Mold, was discovered on the banks of the River Alyn, by accident by workmen in 1833, using stones from the cairn (stone mound) that covered the cist and its contents to fill in a disused gravel pit at the side of a road.  Similarly, Bryn y Ffynnon, was found by workmen building a new housing estate.  They were laying pipes, for which they were digging a new trench  in Cheshire View in the village of Brymbo.

Bryn yr Ellyllon (containing the Mold Cape and accompanying grave goods)

An early 19th century discovery is almost inevitably bad news for a site in terms of excavation techniques, the proper recording of archaeological finds and the finding and preservation of delicate organic remains, such as, for example, very small pieces of human skeletal material, animal bones, plant remains, foodstuffs and any fabrics or bits of basketry.  Even so, if the Bryn yr Ellyllon grave had been subjected to any form of contemporary archaeological investigation it would have fared better than it did.

When the labourers at the Bryn yr Ellyllon grave found the treasures that accompanied a decayed skeleton, they simply disposed of the bones and divided the spoils between themselves and the landowner John Longford.  No records were made of the skeleton, and any contents that could be expected within the cairn itself, such as any secondary burials or artefacts within its structure, were lost. It is possible that other more pedestrian objects like stone tools may have been in the grave but, like the skeleton, were disposed of at the time.  Had it not been for the Reverend Charles Butler Clough, the vicar of Mold, the find might never have come to academic light, and its discovery by a team of labourers would have been the kiss of death.  Fortunately, the Reverend Clough heard of the find and took great interest in it, writing a letter to John Gage, in which he described the find, referring to the cape as a corselet:

I regret to say, that the Corselet suffered considerable mutilation. Mr. Langford, upon its discovery, having no idea of its value, threw it into a hedge, and told the workmen to bring it with them when they returned home to dinner. In the mean time several persons broke small pieces off it, and after I saw it, one piece of gold, apparently a shoulder strap, which was entire (or piece passing over the shoulder from the front to the back of the arm) was taken away ; two small pieces, of what I believe to have been (from its similarity to what I had seen) the other shoulder strap, with several small pieces of copper upon which the gold was fixed, are still in Mr. Langford’s possession; several rings and breast pins have been made out of the pieces carried away.

Hair-raising stuff.  It was common for the clergy to write up this sort of discovery, as they were frequently the most scholarly and informed people around, and often had a profound interest in history.  It is because of the Reverend Clough that anything at all is known about the grave beyond the surviving grave goods. His report was published in the journal Archaeologia in 1836, three years after the discovery, and the British Museum picked up on it and went to Mold to see if they could rescue the finds.  It took over a century for enough of the pieces of the cape to be assembled for a reconstruction to be made (in the 1960s).  Some fragments are still missing presumably those that Clough said had been recycled into rings and pins.

A geophysical survey was carried out in 2013, hoping to find either the site itself or anything associated with it, but its findings were limited to the discovery of the possible original site of the cairn, estimated at 25m in diameter.

The grave contents are now in the British Museum in London and the cape itself was featured in Neil MacGregor’s radio series (and the book that followed) “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” based on objects in the British Museum.  In 2013 it was loaned to Wrexham County Borough Museum where it was put on display for five weeks, together with Llong shale and jet necklace, discovered in another burial nearby.  It is is decorated with impressed designs, and absolutely remarkable for the skill required to work something so thin.

Bryn y Ffynnon (the grave of “Brymbo Man”)

Bryn y Ffynnon was found in 1958, and was very soon the subject of professional excavation.  The workmen laying pipes for a new housing estate on the outskirts of Brymbo had stumbled across the corner of a vast slab of stone when they dug down to create a trench, about 30 cm (1ft) below the modern surface.  When they investigated further, they found that it was the roughly hewn capstone (lid) of a cist (stone-lined rectangular grave)., which contained a burial and two artefacts:  a pot and a flint tool.  They removed the long bones and the beaker, for reasons unknown, but left the rest undisturbed.

Even in 1958, archaeology had not come of age in Britain.  Radiocarbon dating had been invented but was still giving inaccurate dates, and was not calibrated (corrected) until 1967, after which many further modifications were made.  Field techniques had not yet been fully refined, although they were improving all the time.  Nor was there the same awareness that there is today of the value of leaving discoveries like this in situ, like a crime scene, so that they objects can be understood in relation to one another as they were deposited, in keeping with the intentions of those who interred the deceased and the grave goods.

The importance of relationships between objects, such as placement of finds near the head, hands or feet, help archaeologists to understand the lost language of ritual practises, just as the positioning of the skeleton itself, including its orientation (e.g. north-south) and the direction in which it was facing (e.g. east or west)  help to understand how widespread these traditions and ideas actually were.

It is particularly nice, therefore, that in spite of the fact that the burial was found in the middle of a construction site, the details were passed over to the Grosvenor Museum in Chester, who in turn passed the news over to the National Museum of Wales to enable them to send a team and excavate the site as a rescue dig.  The aim of rescue archaeology is to recover as much data and material as possible at a site in the allotted time before the halted construction or other activity must resume.  Many rescue digs were carried out in the countryside during the 1950s due to the expansion of housing on formerly rural land.  Without a cairn or barrow to signal its presence, the cist was only found whilst work was already underway, and work had to stop to allow the site to be excavated.

When they arrived on site, the National Museum of Wales archaeologist H.N. Savory and his team were able to replace the bones in their original position and went on to record the entire grave in situ before removing the grave, slabs and all, to enable the pipe-laying to proceed.

The following year Savory published a short but comprehensive excavation report with illustrations in 1959 in the Transactions of Denbighshire Historical Society, not yet digitized but available today in the public library in Wrexham.  The plan and elevation of the grave is taken from that publication.

The grave and its contents were initially sent to Cardiff, where they were put on display in the National Museum of Wales, but are now in the Wrexham County Borough Museum.  The grave is excellently displayed.  The skeleton has been nick-named Brymbo Man.  A reconstruction of the head, based on the remains of the skull, gives Brymbo Man a possible face, also on display in the museum.

In Part 2, both Savory’s excavation, together with the later post-excavation work that took place, will be discussed.

Final Comments on Part 1

Northeast Wales is home to 100s of round barrows.  There are even two in Wrexham itself, miracle survivors of urban development.  Not enough sites have been excavated to be able to talk in terms of a typical site, but both both sites stand out for the quality of their artefacts.  Although the Beaker in Bryn yr Ffynon is not a rare piece, it is certainly unusual in this area, at least in the context of our current knowledge, and the Mold cape is acknowledged as a national treasure.

Neither site was found under ideal circumstances, but Bryn y Ffynnon fared much better than Bryn yr Ellyllon, due almost entirely to the 125 years between the two discovery dates, and the much greater awareness of the value of archaeological sites, and their protection by law.  In a field where funding is always an uphill battle, it is often due to accidental findings during construction work that result in excavations.  Ironically, given that it signals the destruction of a site, rescue archaeology is enormously helpful in filling out the picture of archaeological periods, but it is relatively rare that such rescue work is required in rural areas.  It was only because of the expansion of Brymbo into the surrounding countryside that Bryn y Ffynnon was discovered and rescued.  What this means, in practical terms, is that the recovery of the archaeology of northeast Wales will inevitably remain piecemeal, as funding for excavation (and post-excavation analysis) is secured on a case by case basis, or as other rescue opportunities arise.

Each burial and its accompanying objects will be discussed in much greater depth in the next two posts, Bryn yr Ffynon (Brymbo) posted in part 2 and Bryn yr Ellyllon (Mold), posted in part 3.  In part 4 all the strands are brought together to talk about how the two sites contribute to what is known of the archaeology of northeast Wales and the borders.

 

Sources:

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Websites:

Advanced Amber Kretaceous Zoologia (AAKZ)
British Amber
http://www.aakz.com/British-and-Irish-amber.html

ARCHAEO-death by Howard Williams
Questions for Brymbo Man
https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2015/08/05/questions-for-brymbo-man/

Archwilio
CPAT Regional Historic Environment Record Mold: Bryn-yr-ellyllon, Geophysical survey, 2013
https://archwilio.org.uk/her/chi3/report/page.php?watprn=CPAT166880&dbname=cpat&tbname=event&sessid=CHI39bx3hf5&queryid=Q883547001681323677

BBC News
Great Orme: Rare Bronze Age axe mould declared treasure, June 1st 2022
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-61663012

British Museum
Cape
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1836-0902-1

Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust
Mold Gold!
CPAT Newsletter, Autumn 2007, p.6-8
https://cpat.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CPAT-Autumn-2007-1.pdf

Current Archaeology
December 1st 2016
The Cist on Whitehorse Hill
https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/features/cist-whitehorse-hill.htm
October 1st 2018
Spinning the tale of prehistoric textiles
https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/news/spinning-the-tale-of-prehistoric-textiles.htm

Dartmoor National Park
Whitehorse Hill
https://www.dartmoor.gov.uk/wildlife-and-heritage/heritage/bronze-age/whitehorse-hill

The Fire on the Hill
Index of Brymbo Placenames
https://thefireonthehill.wordpress.com/index-of-places/

Getty Museum
The Properties of Amber
https://www.getty.edu/publications/ambers/intro/6/

The Independent
Discovery of vast treasure trove of fine textiles shows importance of fashion to Bronze Age Britons by David Keys, 14th July 2016
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/vast-treasure-trove-of-fine-textiles-shows-importance-of-fashion-to-bronze-age-britons-a7135786.html 

Mellor Archaeological Trust
Necklace of Amber Beads
https://www.mellorarchaeology-2000-2010.org.uk/archaeology/finds/amberbeads.htm

PBS Time Team America
Isotope Analysis
http://timeteam.lunchbox.pbs.org/time-team/experience-archaeology/isotope-analysis/

Wrexham County Borough Museums and Archives
Brymbo Man Revealed
https://www.wrexhamheritage.wales/brymbo-man/