| Archaeology provides us with a
fascinating insight into the changing rituals and belief systems of diverse
cultures. Following military service in North Africa, Field Marshall Lord
Francis Grenfell, of St. Thomas, Swansea, an amateur archaeologist, gifted
an Egyptian mummy to Swansea Museum. The mummy, a priest named Hor, has
been X-rayed and conserved and has thus yielded up its secrets of preservation
in readiness for the afterlife. Hor would have lived between 250-200B.C.
In 1823 Dean Buckland, a geology teacher at the University of Oxford, found
a headless human skeleton in Goat’s Hole, Paviland, on the Gower Peninsula.
He named the skeleton, ‘The Red Lady of Paviland’, as it was
dyed with red ochre as part of its burial rites. Radiocarbon dating revealed
the skeleton to be from c.26,000B.C. Bronze Age burial sites have also been
discovered in the Swansea area, including funerary urns from the Middle
Bronze Age when cremation became prevalent. |
