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Contents |
A Research Framework for the Archaeology of Wales
East and
North East Wales Archaeological Resource Audit
Section 1
Record Audit
In the following section a summary
of known records has been tabulated and mapped. The data are drawn from three main digital sources - the Regional Sites and Monuments Record, the
Extended National Database for Wales, and the catalogue of archaeological
collections of the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff. It is known that each of these sources is
incomplete, and there will doubtless be a number of errors and omissions (for example
a number of current field projects running in CPAT have yet to present
completed data to the SMR, much of the NMR is not yet in END), but it has not
been the purpose of this audit to address these issues. However, each data set has been checked and
obvious errors corrected. Similarly, records
which are patently nonsense or substantially incomplete have been removed
before preparing the summaries. The
amended data sets comprised 47,507 site records and 68,844 artefact records
from the SMR, 16,490 site records from END and 28,885 artefact records from
NMGW.
A comparison was made between the
SMR and END data and where possible END records cross-referenced to their SMR
equivalents. This process identified
6563 'sites' common to both data sets.
Of the 9927 END records without an equivalent in the SMR it is suspected
that at least a third again could have been similarly cross referenced had the
data quality of both records been better.
A similar compassion of the SMR
sites records with those inferred from the NMGW data showed that, while the
individual artefact records of the latter where very much more detailed than
their equivalents in the SMR, there appeared to be only 83 site locations not
represented in the former. New records
were created for these from the NMGW data and added to the SMR.
In order to break down the records
collected into more manageable sections the data have been categorised in line
with the current data standards used by END and the SMRs (derived from the
English Heritage data standard). Each
record is therefore defined according to Period and then Broad Class using the
following terms:-
Period
Palaeolithic
Mesolithic
Neolithic
Bronze Age
Iron Age
Early Medieval (further subdivided - see below)
Medieval
Post Medieval (further subdivided - see below)
Broad Class
Agriculture and Subsistence
Civil
Commemorative
Commercial
Communications
Defence
Domestic
Education
Gardens, Parks and Urban Spaces
Health and Welfare
Industrial
Maritime
Monument (by form)
Recreational
Religious, Ritual and Funerary
Transport
Unassigned
Water Supply and Drainage
The
presentation of the record audit conforms to this standard, and where possible
these divisions have been used when presenting data throughout the report. At the outset it had been hoped that
individual site types could be mapped but these are so many and various that
the exponential increase in size of what is already a large report would have
made this impractical.
In two
periods existing sub-divisions already existed in the SMR. These have been retained in the SMR data for
his audit.
In the
Early Medieval period, certain records are attributed to Saxon or Viking. Both terms occur in the English Heritage
data standard, and are used in the CPAT SMR to indicate the 'origin' of the
monuments concerned, but are not currently used in the rest of Wales.
In the
CPAT SMR Post Medieval and Modern sites are attributed (where
possible) to the appropriate century (16th - 18th for Post Medieval and 19th - 21st
for Modern). This subdivision has also been retained -
principally to ease the problems of mapping some 24,000 Post Medieval SMR
sites. The period category Post Medieval does however occur in the
SMR for those sites that cannot be dated to a particular century.
The data
structure used here, follows the traditional Bronze Age / Iron Age split and
does not reflect the earlier / later prehistory divide. It has not been possible to restructure the
data to reflect the latter chronology but it is hoped that there is sufficient
information in the data supplied to construct this. Maps broken into site types (for example) may assist this and
these can be supplied if required.
No
standard 'categorisation' existed between the SMR and NMGW artefact data so, in
order better summarise the data in tabulated and mapped form, 'best-fit'
classes were devised and imposed by the author. These are:-
Classes
Ceramic
Ceramic (building part)
Faunal
Floral
Human remains
Lithic
Lithic (building part)
Metal work
Metal work (coins)
Textile
Wooden objects
Worked faunal
Key Sites
Each period section contains a
list of key sites. These various lists
have been compiled, in the main, from the SMR (and informal discussion). The basic criteria for inclusion have been
those sites where significant, documented, archaeological work (excavation,
survey etc) has been carried out in modern times. It is appreciated that this selection might appear somewhat
arbitrary, and no doubt has lead to the exclusion of some well known (but
uninvestigated) monuments, but it was felt that this was the most even handed
approach across all periods.
Information for each period is
broken down into the Broad Classes used in section 1, and is followed by a
selective bibliography for that period.
The bibliography has been compiled directly from the SMR, with only a
minimum of editing or new research. Clearly these period bibliographies, while
long, are not complete nor has the manner of their production allowed their
formatting to comply fully with current publishing standards. However it was felt that
the process of selection from lists produced directly from the SMR database was preferable to the prospect of recompilation of the whole from scratch - which would have taken far longer than
allowed by the current project. The
various incomplete or incorrectly formatted entries have been left in the hope
that they may be useful.