Welsh Journals

affinities, etc., is Late Bronze Age I, i.e. beginning as early as 1000 B.C., or at any rate 900 B.C.! That admitted, one can under- stand the association, in Ogof-yr-esgyrn Cave, Glyntawe (Breckn.), of a range of pottery of Dorset Deverel-Rimbury affinities with a bronze dirk and a Class I razor2 and the appearance at Upper Chapel, also in Brecknock, of a large rim sherd of a barrel-shaped urn which, though not of typical Deverel-Rimbury ware, is surely in the tradition of Deverel-Rimbury furrowed decoration (Fig. 5). The pottery from the Ogof-vr-esgyrn cave, Dan-yr-ogof, was found during excavations carried out immediately before and after the late war by Mr. E. J. Mason and members of the South Wales Cave Club, and it is through the kindness of Mr. E. J. Mason that I am able to publish drawings of it. The cave deposits were very much disturbed, but the finds evidently belong to at least two periods of activity, one in the Late Bronze Age, represented by pottery, the bronzes already referred to, and a gold bead, and the other Romano- British, represented by burials and hearths. While there is no stratigraphical evidence for the association of the bronzes and the prehistoric pottery, they are probably contemporary. The pottery is fragmentary, but many of the fragments belong to a large, coarse, barrel-shaped urn, with simple rim and unperforated horizontal lugs (Fig. 4, 1). The ware is gritty but fired rather harder than normal cinerary urn ware, and has a rough surface, grey in colour. The form recalls a class of Deverel-Rimbury urns found in Dorset. Other fragments of similar ware belong to a bucket-shaped vessel with internally-bevelled rim (Fig. 4, 5) further fragments (Fig. 4, 2-3) belong to bucket-shaped vessels with horizontally flattened and expanded rims, like those on some Deverel-Rimbury urns from Cranbourne Chase.4 Finally, some fragments with exceptionally 1 The recent important paper by J. J. Butler and I. F. Smith on Class I razors and the associated urns (12th Ann. Rep. London. Inst. of Archaeology, pp. 20 ff) deals mainly with other classes of urns (Abercromby's type III, groups 2 and 3, and Type IV, other than globular), many of which may indeed be Middle Bronze Age. Since this paper was in the press I find that Professor Hawkes has now come independently to a similar conclusion, in a lecture which, I understand, will soon be published. 2 Cf. the appearance of such razors in the Taunton hoard (PPS, 1946, p. 137) and with a Deverel-Rimbury barrel urn at South Lodge (Dorset) (Pitt-Rivers, Exacavations in Cranbourne Chase, IV, p. 23, Pis. 238, 240). 3 Abercromby Bronze Age Pottery, II, Nos. 419a-22, 437, 456b. 4 Pitt-Rivers, loc. cit.