ABSTRACT
Tacitus’s Annals (xii.32) record how in Ad 48 the governor of Britannia, Ostorius Scapula, led the army against the Decangi (sic): the first historical reference to a Celtic tribe inhabiting Wales. Thereafter Rome was to become embroiled in protracted warfare with two other militarily powerful Welsh tribes, the Silures and Ordovices, conferring particular fame upon the former. Tacitus’s physical description of the Silures as colorati and with curly hair (Agricola xi) forms part of a precious body of documentary evidence which allows us to glimpse first-century Ad Welsh communities for whose wartime behaviour we can find echoes in contemporary Britain from Kent to Caledonia, or earlier in Caesarian Gaul. The origins of these Celtic communities inhabiting the principality are to be sought not in a pattern of migration and interaction with indegenes but rather in a protracted phase of social and economic change affecting sedentary communities over at least a millennium. It is this process of adjustment and evolution, coupled with the workings of ‘cumulative Celticity’ (Hawkes 1979), which gives rise to the fully developed insular socioeconomic systems of the western British pre-Roman Iron Age (PRIA).
