Early-Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales: Context and Function

Burial in Early Medieval Wales: Identifying Multifunctional Cemeteries

“…For instance, while Theuws (1999) has made a strong case for the creation and substantiation of land ownership through burial within farmsteads in seventh‐century Merovingian contexts, Elizabeth O’Brien (2009, 143; 2020, 66) has convincingly argued that the same process was achieved through burial at ferta , rather than cemetery settlements, in early medieval Ireland. In Wales, the location of fifth‐ to seventh‐century inscribed stones at prehistoric funerary sites may be evidence for the latter practice, but none has been found marking an in‐situ burial and there is regional variation in their context; the majority of those located on prehistoric sites are found in Gwynedd, while in Dyfed, the majority are associated with early ecclesiastical sites (Edwards 2001, 39).…”

Developing a low cost 3D imaging solution for inscribed stone surface analysis

“…Early Medieval in date, the Tristan Stone is one of many inscribed stones found all over the British Isles -predominantly South West England, Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (Edwards, 2001(Edwards, , 2007. Used as memorial stones, the now weathered granite surfaces of the examples in Cornwall have often fallen prey to unresolvable disputes and speculations as to their meaning (Petts, 2002).…”

Land, People and Power in Early Medieval Wales: The cantref of Cemais in comparative perspective

“…An example of this is the widespread assumption that mounds at conquest-period Welsh estate centres have a defensive Norman-period origin rather than an assembly function. Roman sites, and associated with barrows or prehistoric enclosures (W. Davies 2004, 204;Edwards 2001;, and to be seen in the context of the isolated stone-marked burials of heroes that 9th-and 10th-century Welsh poetry mentions (T. Jones 1967, 100;Petts 2007, 164). Edwards also notes that the inscribed stones show a complex interplay of identities of different groups, native, Irish and Roman-descended, displayed in the selective reuse of both the Roman and of the prehistoric past 'as part of a process of reinvention and the evolution of changing power structures' (Edwards 2012, 391, 403).…”