Banc Ty'nddôl sun-disc

Banc Ty'nddôl sun-disc

Decorated with concentric line and dot circles and pierced by two central holes, apparently for attachment. The design was determined to belong to the Primary Bell Beaker Goldwork Tradition.
Material	Welsh alluvial gold
Created	Beaker phase (c. 2000 BC)
Discovered	16 October 2002 near Cwmystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales
Present location	Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, Cardiff, Wales

The Banc Ty'nddôl sun-disc is a small, decorated, gold ornament discovered at Cwmystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales. It most likely was part of a funerary garment and is more than 4,000 years old, which makes it the earliest gold artifact found in Wales. It was discovered on October 16, 2002 by a team of archaeologists who were investigating the site of Roman and Medieval lead smelting hearths below the Bronze Age copper mine on Copa Hill.

The area around Cwmystwyth, has been mined for lead and copper for more than 4,000 years, almost since the beginning of metalworking in Britain.

Excavation now has shown that these mining sites date to the Roman (first century AD) and Early Medieval (ninth to twelfth century AD) periods, but one of the most important finds of the excavation was the gold disc about the size of a milk-bottle top, which pre-dated these discoveries by more than 2,000 years.

At the time of its discovery, it seemed uncertain as to whether the gold object had ever been intentionally deposited; no earlier archaeological features were at that time identified, whilst its shallow find-spot suggested that it had been disturbed and re-deposited some distance downslope from its original burial context. However, the object was at that time identified and reported to HM Coroner for Ceredigion as a Treasure find on 30 October 2002, whilst further study of the find continued, and a follow-up investigation of the find spot was planned. Given concerns over the possibility of further artefacts remaining within the ground by virtue of association with the disc, also potential treasure, re-excavation of the site took place in March 2003, with funding from the National Museums and Galleries of Wales.

Samples of soil containing degraded bone fragments were collected for dating along with charcoal from in and around the grave. Insufficient collagen survived to provide any sort of reliable date from the bone, whilst the three samples of charcoal recovered from the grave fill proved to be intrusive; one suggesting Mesolithic activity associated with the pre-burial land surface (OxA-12983: 8850 ± 40 [8210–7760 CalBC]), another a Late Roman date for the ground surface covering the edge of the grave (OxA-12955: 1675 ± 28 [320–430 Cal AD]), whilst the third consisted of a single piece of oak charcoal derived from the Early Medieval smelting horizon above (OxA-12956: 1264 ± 27 [670–840 Cal AD]). Whilst not providing us with any clear answer, these results do at least support the possibility of a prehistoric burial.