Nanna's Cave
The Nanna's Cave is a natural cave. It is high above sea level on the northeast coast of Caldey Island in Pembrokeshire in Wales .
The rectangular cave is about 3.0 m wide, 3.5 m high and 5.0 m deep and was probably used 10,000 years ago when what is now Caldey Island was still connected to the mainland.
The finds range from the Mesolithic to the Middle Ages . In addition to human remains, the remains of animals have long since become extinct on the island. Since most of the coastal sites were flooded in the course of the rise in sea level after the Last Ice Age, the Mesolithic finds are of great importance for research into fishermen's cultures. Their remains are very seldom found, although it was already known - for example from the Scottish site of Oronsay - that people who used the sea's food supply as Stone Age parallel societies also existed here in the Neolithic period, i.e. during the dominance of arable cultures and groups of shepherds . This was in contrast to locations in the hinterland, where the few bones showed no signs of a similar diet.
The finds may go back to the Paleolithic , but in any case dated human remains come from the Creswellia , the Mesolithic - for a long time they were even the oldest human remains in southern England - and the early Neolithic. In addition to Nanna's Cave, Potter's Cave (200 m from Nanna's Cave), Daylight Rock, Ogof-yr-Ychen and Ogof-yr-Benlog, all of which are in the northeast of the island, human remains have also been discovered at the Eel Point site, which is in the northwest. While the remains from Nanna's Cave showed practically no evidence of seafood, the at least five individuals from Ogof-yr-Ychen mostly ate from the sea. These coastal inhabitants lived in the Mesolithic, around 8500 BC. Chr., And migrations into the hinterland can be excluded, even if this is no evidence of sedentariness. In addition, it turned out that proximity to the sea was not always the same as a supply from the sea, because the people from Nanna's Cave preferred land creatures.
literature
- Rick J. Schulting, Michael P. Richards: Finding the coastal Mesolithic in southwest Britain: AMS dates and stable isotope results on human remains from Caldey Island, south Wales , in: Antiquity 76 (2002) 1011-1025 (PDF)
- Melvyn Davies: The caves of South Gower Coast. An archaeological assessment , sl 1991.
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 38 ′ 27.2 " N , 4 ° 40 ′ 51.9" W.