A New Beaker from Wales

Extract

The beaker here illustrated is new only in the sense that it is now for the first time accessible. It was discovered some years before 1901 by a farm boy in a stone cist in the yard of Llancaiach Isaf, an old farm-house in the parish of Gellygaer, 12 miles north of Cardiff (O.S. 6 inch, Glamorgan XIX. S.E.). The cover-slab of the cist then, and until the present year, was level with the paving of the yard, and no traces of a mound survived. Within the cist were found the beaker, a skull, and, it is said, some ‘ornaments’, of which nothing is now known. The skull was seen by a local medical man, but was then, by order of the landowners, replaced with the beaker in the cist. From that time, according to the (then) tenant of the farm, the burial remained undisturbed until 25th June 1901, when a local resident, Mr. George Seaborne, who has greatly assisted my inquiries, reopened the cist and drew attention to it in the Western Mail newspaper (19th July 1901). The contents, however, were not removed, and the precise locality of the burial remained the close secret of one or two persons until the present year, when cist, beaker, and skull were removed to the National Museum of Wales.