Excavations at Longbury Bank, Dyfed, and Early Medieval Settlement in South Wales

Abstract

LONGB URY BANK, Dyfed is a native British early medieval settlement occupied in the 6th and 7th centuries A. D. The excavations in 1988-89 produced a series ojarteJacts which provide evidence ojhigh status: imported Mediterranean pottery; continental pottery and glass; fine metalworking debris; and an unusual Type G penannular brooch. The site is unusual in being undefended and it is suggested that it belongs to a newly recognized class ojundefended high status secular sites, other possible examples ojwhich are discussed. The site is placed in its historical and landscape context through the use ojpre-Norman and later documentation which appears to show a major shift in settlement in the 8th or 9th centuries.

Hillforts and Power in the British Post-Roman West: A GIS Analysis of Dinas Powys

“…The distribution of post-Roman hillforts in northern and western Britain has a strong coastal bias and sites are often located next to natural landing places or harbours (Alcock & Alcock, 1990: 120). It is often these hillforts that have the largest assemblages of imported wares and it has been argued that international trade and insular redistribution of this material was orchestrated from these sites (Campbell & Lane, 1993: 68; Campbell, 2007). Our analysis suggests that the desire to control coastal trading places was not the only factor influencing the siting of these sites.…”

Land, People and Power in Early Medieval Wales: The cantref of Cemais in comparative perspective

“…Perspectives that integrate considerations of trade and exchange (or, more generally, wealth transfer) in early medieval Wales are, as noted already, relatively rare, with extant work (principally Campbell 2007;Campbell and Lane 1993;W. Davies 1982, 50-8;Griffiths 2003b;Griffiths 2003a;Griffiths 2009;Redknap 2009b;Wooding 1996) limited by the virtual non-existence of pottery between the late 7th and late 11th centuries, and by very little use of coins -the single surviving instance of an early medieval Welsh coin, showing the 10th-century ruler Hywel Dda, was minted in Chester (W. Davies 1982, 54).…”

“…Positive identification of llysoedd in early medieval contexts is hampered by sparse documentation and limited surviving material culture, few being noted on HER records anywhere in Wales despite Welsh law's suggestion that there was a llys in every commote or cantref (Silvester 2015, 7, 12-13). Discussions of secular high status sites of the 7th to 11th centuryfor example by Dark (1994) and Longley (1997, 46-7) -tend to focus on sites where surviving fortifications are treated as proxies for high social status, though investigations at Longbury Bank suggest that some high status sites may have been unenclosed: its rich (for Wales) material culture assemblage is similar to that of the multivallate promontory enclosure at Dinas Powys (Campbell and Lane 1993;Seaman 2016). The clearest excavation of an early medieval high status site is at Llanbedrgoch, where the well-known Hiberno-Norse evidence of the 9th-and 10th-century phase is preceded by 7th-and 8th-century structures that include a roundhouse and a rectangular hall, within a 1 hectare D-shaped embanked enclosure (Redknap 2004, 148).…”