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Wednesday, 20 March 2024

Welcome to Archwilio




At long last the Welsh archaeology data base is up and running, and seeming to work quite well.  It's still a bit clunky when you try to zoom in and out on the satellite map, but that will no doubt improve.........Good news for all who have been frustrated in the past by the process of searching through assorted user-unfriendly sites for the info they want. Now everything seems to be in one place.

This is the link:

https://archwilio.org.uk/wp/?fbclid=IwAR2-Jw2sd5JvbYYk63iSBc6aWEP9ekg3Kwx3eVK6uRwSB8LHuej1WmsZ2wQ#intro-widgets

You can search on a parish by parish basis, zoom in and out, and click on specific sites for the database record to come up. You can also click on links to the PDFs of all the key fieldwork reports from past dacades. So congratulations to all concerned.

For example:

This is the link to the great inventory and report from Nikki Cook of funerary and ritual sites in Pembs, published by Cambria Archaeology.

http://www.walesher1974.org/herumd.php?group=DAT&level=3&docid=301360156

See also:
Hall, J and Sambrook, P , 2009 , CRYMYCH HUB HERITAGE AND NATURAL ENVIRONMENT AUDIT: PART E EGLWYSWRW COMMUNITY REPORT

I wanted to check Prof MPP's claim that the Waun Mawn area was "one of the great religious and political centres of Neolithic Britain."  It is clear that there is no basis for that claim; other parts of Pembrokeshire have greater concentrations of ritual sites, and even allowing for the destruction or dismantling of prehistoric features there is nothing that marks out Waun Mawn - Brynberian - Rhosyfelin - Carn Goedog as special in any way, or that demonstates any cultural links between those named sites.

It is clear that MPP and his colleagues have simply invented that attribution in order to make Waun Mawn more important than it ever actually was.

To a degree, the Archwilio entries are uncritical and unmodified -- so nonsense like this still appears, with respect ton Craig Rhosyfelin: "The excavation demonstrates unequivocal evidence for the prehistoric quarrying of Stonehenge-sized monoliths from a source that can be matched definitively with the ‘rhyolite with fabric’ recovered from Stonehenge."

On the other hand there is counterbalancing information too, as we see in this entry:

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