The 2023 Gwobr Archaeoleg Cambrian Archaeological Award was awarded to Sheridan Clements for their accomplished and engaging MA dissertation entitled: Prehistoric Pasts and the Iron Age Hillforts of Northwestern Wales: The Choice of Location and the Incorporation of Ancient Monuments.
Sheridan’s dissertation aimed to create a better understanding of interactions with the past during the Iron Age of northwestern Wales and to investigate the relationships between hillforts and pre-existing monumental features within the landscape. To do this, a database of 118 hillforts within the region was created. The hillforts were placed into three non-mutually exclusive groups: those with previous internal monumental activity, those with a pre-existing monument within 300m of the outer ramparts, and those with a pre-existing monument within 1km of the outer ramparts. These groups were analyzed both statistically in SPSS and spatially in GIS software and compared to the results of the entire database. Additionally, the direct interactions between hillforts and earlier monumental activity included within their ramparts is more closely described. Although there does not appear to be a direct preference for hillfort location among concentrations of earlier monuments within the study area, it is proposed that these monuments may have been treated as a resource to be exploited by Iron Age communities. Furthermore, when compared to monumental reuse in other areas, the evidence from northwestern Wales suggests the direct inclusion of earlier monuments may have been connected to concepts of ancestry and were possibly used to display and either legitimize or enforce status. Further consideration and viewshed analyses are suggested for future analysis.
Sheridan’s MA dissertation was written as part of their MA in Celtic Archaeology at Bangor; a copy of Sheridan’s dissertation can be viewed here.
Read more about Sheridan’s journey into archaeology here.