Origins Lunchtime Talk: Bringing the house down

About

This lecture will discuss the results from the recent excavations at the double ringwork enclosure of Meillionydd, near Rhiw, on the Llyn Peninsula.

Double ringwork enclosures are largely concentrated on the Llyn Peninsula. Yhese hilltop monuments are defined by two circular concentric banks with internal roundhouses and date to the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age.

The sites were occupied by several family groups but are likely to have been places where larger communities gathered seasonally, when specialised activities or events were carried out, such as artefact production, ceremony and feasting.

Despite their regional significance, very little is known about the chronology of these sites or the nature of their occupation.

The preliminary excavations undertaken at Meillionydd in 2010 and 2011 (by K Waddington and R Karl, Bangor University) confirmed the presence of double concentric earth and stone banks which are accompanied by quarry hollows.

Within the enclosure there is evidence of a lengthy sequence of occupation which possibly spans most of the first millennium BC, indicated by multiple sequences of timber and stone roundhouses that were built on the same locations.

The successive overlapping roundhouses reveal that people developed strong attachments to certain places.

The complex processes which surrounded the abandonment of the final phase roundhouses suggests that closing the site was an important event, and one that was marked in specific ways by the occupants.The significance of the processes of house creation and destruction at Meillionydd will be explored in this lecture.

With Dr Kate Waddington Lecturer in Archaeology, Bangor University.