A New Centre of Stone Axe Dispersal on the Welsh Border

Extract

The Council for British Archaeology put as one of its objectives the examination of stone axes by petrological methods, with a view to their more exact identification and their placing into groups of common origin. Of the various regional sub-committees set in being only the South-west Museums Group, which initiated this type of research, has published any results of its findings, its final report being published in this volume of the Proceedings, pp. 99–158 (1, 2). The West Midlands Sub-Committee (C.B.A. Group 8) has gone a long way towards its objective in the counties of Shropshire, Hereford, Worcester, Warwick and the southern half of Staffordshire, and it should not be long before a complete account of its results can be published. The most important outcome of the work, however, has been the recognition of a rock type which, as the material for axe-hammers, is characteristically West Midland in its concentrated distribution and the conclusion that the factory for these implements lay just south of Corndon Hill in Montgomeryshire, just across the Shropshire border. As this discovery has already been announced by one of us (4) to Section H of the British Association in 1950, it would seem to be advisable to publish the evidence for this part of our work without waiting for the full account of the complete regional survey.