Pen Dinas open day sheds light on Iron Age hillfort's secrets
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00:00 roaring right back to 2,000 years ago when the Romans conquered in AD 47, 80, 80.
00:05 And we go back another 800 years to the start of the Iron Age, so two and a half
00:11 thousand years ago when Pendinas as a hillfort mayor had begun to be constructed.
00:16 And that's, you know, four or five centuries before the Romans came here.
00:20 You've got a lot of changes of family, changes of leadership, periods when the
00:24 hillfort would have been abandoned and then rebuilt. But that's the sort of
00:28 chronology we're looking at. There's no radiocarbon dates yet for Pendinas, but
00:33 this excavation over the last two years will begin to get those scientific dates in.
00:37 When we get to the late Iron Age, everything was happening. Weaponry,
00:42 chieftains, leaders, a busy landscape of hillforts, chariots. But they didn't know
00:48 really that was all coming to an end when the Romans landed on the shores of
00:52 Kent, AD 43. By AD 47, 47 years after the birth of Christ, they're moving into the
00:58 Welsh borders and begin to change the way of life forever. The Romans were here for 400 years.
01:04 In Pendinas, you know this central bit, the isthmus, you can let people in here, you can trade, buy, sell
01:09 sheep and cattle, horses, but people aren't allowed into your fort unless they're the
01:14 right sort of people. You have a public event there, but they're still prevented
01:18 from coming into your private space unless they're a VIP. So we have ways that
01:24 these forts have broken up into different areas, different areas of control as well.
01:28 And if you weren't welcoming, you'd be thrown back by weapons and slings.
01:34 The project arose because local people were constantly coming to the Royal Commission,
01:38 which is based in Aberystwyth, and asking us what we knew about the history of
01:42 their hillfort. And we didn't know very much at all, so we decided we would try
01:47 and answer their question by applying to the National Lottery Heritage Fund for
01:52 some funds to undertake an excavation. And that's essentially what we're doing
01:56 here today. We are the research questions that we've been asking, which is what is
02:00 the hillfort used for, and I think the major discovery that we've made is that
02:04 it was densely occupied. There were so many hill huts up there that they
02:09 were crowded against each other, almost like a medieval city.
02:12 Well it's wonderful to be here because we have an opportunity to bring the community and
02:16 their local heritage closer together, and it's been wonderful going up to
02:21 Penderinas, to the hillfort site itself, and see the archaeologists at work, and finding
02:26 out what they've actually discovered. And actually, there were quite a lot of
02:29 roundhouses and huts up there back in the day. Also quite nice is seeing how
02:35 children, as well as older people, have been able to go up and to understand a
02:39 bit more about our local history. And all credit to the Royal Commission and also
02:45 to the Archaeological Trust and the hub here in Pymparcau, because this has
02:49 been very much a community archaeological project at Penderinas, and I
02:53 think it's quite unique and special. You know, understanding that there have been
02:57 finds that have been discovered on Penderinas, dating to the Iron Age,
03:02 that were originated from other parts of the world, and Baltic for example, they
03:06 found an amber bead that would have been very important for trade and what have you,
03:09 discovered and located from the Baltic area, but found and unearthed in Penderinas.
03:15 Just goes to show that we had links with our ancestors here, in what is now
03:20 Aberystwyth and Pymparcau, had links with peoples from across Europe, which is quite
03:23 cool to know.