The first Welshman: excavations at Pontnewydd

Abstract

Pontnewydd Cave lies in the Elwy Valley, near the western edge of the Vale of Clywd (FIG. 1), six km north-west of the modern town of Denbigh. The site first became well-known through the successive investigations of the nineteenth-century geologists Professors William Boyd Dawkins and T. H. McKenny Hughes, the latter working with the Reverend D. R. Thomas, then Vicar of Cefn. Boyd Dawkins' s excavations at the site (1874, 286–7; 1880, 192) yielded a fauna which included hippopotamus, but no artifacts were observed. The work of Hughes & Thomas (1874; Hughes, 1887) seems to have been confined principally to scouring Boyd Dawkins' s dumps, and yielded not only fauna but also evidence of the presence of man in the form both of artifacts and of a human molar tooth, since lost. This molar has long excited interest on account of its description by Busk (in Hughes & Thomas, 1874, 390) as being ‘of very large size’ and looking ‘quite as ancient as the rest [of the fauna]’. One of the many research aims of the current investigation was, therefore, to examine the possibility that the cave was a site where human remains might be found in association with an archaeological industry.