4,000-Year-Old Burial Revealed on Britain's 'Island of Druids'
Archaeologists are excavating a 4,000-year-old burial mound on a British island linked in mythology to the mysterious order of magical priests known as the Druids.
And although the burial mound is much older than the Druids — who lived about 2,000 years ago, if they existed at all — the excavations have cast new light on the ancient inhabitants of the island of Anglesey.
Overlooking the Irish Sea from the northwest corner of Wales, Anglesey is dotted with numerous Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments. The most famous is the 5,000-year-old passage tomb of Bryn Celli Ddu (Welsh for "the mound in the dark grove"
, which has an entrance passage that aligns with the rising midsummer sun. It was archaeologically excavated in 1928 and 1929, and later reconstructed.
Modern archaeologists have turned their attention to a burial mound about 150 feet (50 meters) from the famous passage tomb, in the expectation that today's scientific techniques will reveal new details about the people who built it.
University of Cardiff archaeologist FfionReynolds has led excavations at Bryn Celli Ddu for the past four years, and her team will complete a fifth year of excavations at the site — which includes the burial mound — in early July.
Reynolds, who also works for the Welsh heritage agency Cadw, told Live Science that the excavations of the burial mound were now almost complete, and scientific tests would now help to determine the presence of any human remains there.
The excavations have shown that the burial mound was built during the Bronze Age, much later than the original Neolithic tomb, while some artifacts could be even older than the tomb, she said. "This suggests that Bryn Celli Ddu has been a special ceremonial location for thousands of years."
https://www.livescience.com/65822-burial-mound-island-of-druids.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
