Welsh Journals

Review article- An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments in Glamorgan D. AUSTIN and I. S. FARRINGTON Respectively Lecturer in Archaeology and Lecturer in Geography, St. David's University College, Lampeter An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments in Glamorgan, Volume I, Pre-Norman. Part I: The Stone and Bronze Ages (Price: £ 9.50). Part II: The Iron Age and Roman Occupation (Price: £ 9.50). Part III: The Early Christian Period (Price: £ 7.00). Cardiff, H.M.S.O. 1976. Part I: The Stone and Bronze Ages The object of the work carried out by the R.C.A.H.M. (Wales) is to produce a catalogued inventory of archaeological sites and historical buildings within the Principality for the benefit of the populace at large and to recommend to Her Majesty the Queen "monuments as most worthy of preservation" (p. xii-xiii). This mammoth task, divided for the sake of convenience into counties, is such a slow and laborious process for such a short-staffed institution that the appearance of this, the first part of the first volume of the Glamorgan Inventory is most welcome. Welcome indeed given the fact that this is its first major publication since Volume 3 of the Caernarvonshire Inventory appeared. The Inventory forms a marked departure from the standard practice of data presentation of the previous Welsh volumes. In this, the data are catalogued by period of occupation and by type of monument rather than by parish. Whilst I welcome the publication of the volume by period (for it makes chronological synthesis easier), I find it most irritating that the volumes have not been published simultaneously to allow the field worker the opportunity to visit all sites within a restricted area. The change in policy seems to me to be a result of stimuli from the British archaeological world at large, which itself is reacting to paradigmatic and ideological changes which have occurred in North America. The Inventory tries to present its data in a similar style to the archaeological settlement pattern surveys which have been carried out in the New World. These, not only catalogue sites, but classify them by both type and period to such an extent that socio-political and even economic statements can be made about the region at a particular period (see