John Davies - A History of Wales

Once upon a time, the Welsh knew when their history began. It began about 1170 BC .That was when the Ark of the Covenant was captured by the Philistines and when Brutus, a descendant of the Trojans, landed on the shores of Britain. Apart from a few giants, the island had no inhabitants. Brutus and his companions were the first of the Britons and the ancestors of the Welsh. This was Geoffrey of Monmouths account of the early history of Britain, written c. AD 1136, an account which would be central to the consciousness of the Welsh for many centuries.

Such precision about the beginnings of Wales and the Welsh has long ceased to be tenable. It is possible to suggest a number of dates as the starting-point of the history of Wales: it appears that Wales as a territory having a coast-line similar to that of today came into existence around 6000 BC ; Wales, or part of it, tiptoes into the historical record for the first time with Tacituss description of the Roman attack in AD 48 upon the Deceangli, a tribe living between the rivers Clwyd and Dee; the royal houses of Wales traced their origins to the generation before AD 400; it is likely that the name Cymry was adopted around AD 580; the territory of Wales was defined with some exactness about AD 790 with the building of Offas Dyke. There are valid arguments for beginning the story with any one of these dates. Yet it would be better to begin in the beginning with the earliest evidence of the presence of human beings in that part of the world which was eventually to be known as Wales. But what kind of evidence? If it is assumed that the task of the historian is to offer an interpretation of the past based upon written evidence, then the story must begin in AD 48. But if history is a study of the past based upon the widest possible variety of sources, then the story begins not two thousand but more than two hundred thousand years ago.

Although the techniques of the archaeologist are very different from those of the historian, both are involved in the same task that of analysing change and development in human society. To begin with history and to ignore prehistory is to lose sight of the basic fact that, when the people of Wales first appeared upon the stage of history, almost every development of importance had already taken place. That people could create and control fire, cook food, cultivate the land, rear stock, build dwellings, make metal, brew beer, theorize about the world to come, produce fine art, cure sickness, practise literature, maintain political structures and kill and oppress their fellow-creatures. That is, they had all the cultural, spiritual and social attributes of humanity. Furthermore, the technical knowledge which would maintain the economic foundations of society, at least for the following eighteen centuries, was almost all already known to them. The main difference between them and the people of the centuries to come was the inability of anyone among them to produce written material, and that was hardly a great difference when it is considered how scarce and fragmentary such material would be for at least another thousand years.