Archaeologists shocked to find 5,000-year-old battlefield in prehistoric Cardiff

Culture24 ^ | 11 August 2014 | Ben Miller

[SunkenCiv]

Archaeologists hoping to discover Roman and Iron Age finds at a Welsh hillfort were shocked to unearth pottery and arrowheads predating their predicted finds by 4,000 years at the home of a powerful Iron Age community, including flint tools and weapons from 3,600 BC.

Caerau, an Iron Age residency on the outskirts of Cardiff, would have been a battleground more than 5,000 years ago according to the arrowheads, awls, scrapers and polished stone axe fragments found during the surprising excavation.

“Quite frankly, we were amazed,” says Dr Dave Wyatt, the co-director of the dig, from Cardiff University...

“But no-one realised the site had been occupied as far back as the Neolithic – predating the construction of the Iron Age hillfort by several thousand years.”

Oliver Davis, Dr Wyatt’s colleague on the CAER project, says the ditches date from the early Neolithic period when communities first settled and farmed the landscape.

“The location and number of Neolithic finds indicate that we have discovered a causewayed enclosure – a special place where small communities gathered together at certain important times of the year to celebrate, feast, exchange things and possibly find marriage partners,” he believes.

“Such sites are very rare in Wales with only five other known examples, mostly situated in the south.

“What's fascinating is that a number of the flint arrowheads we have found have been broken as a result of impact - this suggests some form of conflict occurred at this meeting place over 5,000 years ago.”

[Beowulf9]

Just got a chance to hear it tonight. Beautiful, really beautiful.

[SunkenCiv]

This topic was posted 08/17/2014, just an update.