Lunchtime Talk: Slippery Bodies and Changing Places: Neolithic cave burials

About

Between 2005 and 2007 a combined team from Newport University and the University of Central Lancashire excavated a group of small caves and rock-shelters in Goldsland Wood, Wenvoe, on the Vale of Glamorgan.

One of the aims of the project was to look at the use of caves in Later Prehistoric times. They uncovered human and animal bone, Neolithic pottery and flintwork.

These burials are important because they join a growing number of well documented burials from caves in Wales, and other limestone areas throughout Britain and Ireland, which date to the earlier part of the Neolithic period (around 4000-3200 BC).

Burial in caves seems to have been a varied and complicated business with all kinds of different transformations of the dead bodies being buried, and the caves they were buried in.

This talk will cover the results from the Goldsland excavations and go on to look at cave burial in other times and places to try and make sense of all these changes.

With Dr Rick Peterson, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Central Lancashire.