Back in late 2022, I contacted the director of a local archaeological trust to raise an important issue that, you would hope, such a trust would accept without question.
That issue was language, and how Wales' heritage is, according to my thesis, being quietly undermined by non-Welsh speakers who, nevertheless, occupy positions of influence.
A position of influence can be as simple as a contractor undertaking archaeological surveys. For reasons of population density, if nothing else, one is more likely to find surveying companies based outside Wales, rather than within it. Accordingly, there is a very high and almost certain likelihood of non-Welsh speaking contractors being deployed to Wales to conduct surveys on behalf of arch. trusts, Welsh Government and others.
In the same week as this enquiry - we'll come to the astonishing response shortly - I read a Ph.D. thesis about 17th and 18th century defences of an island involved in slavery. This was the first time I'd ever seen someone write with humility such that the author plainly put forward her position as a white, western female taught by and bearing the biases of the system that she grew up within. It's a remarkable piece of writing, the author explaining to me that it was "the thesis I wanted to write", rather than of a kind she might be expected to write. It's a real credit to her supervisor and institution, too.
What the author highlighted - and something that ought to be standard practice in the industry - was her own background; we are all products of the system that we are familiar with, and we have to be very careful not to become a form of imperialist, forcing our own worldview onto places, people and archaeological sites that we may come to examine in areas not within our usual haunts and direct lived experience.
But this humility is, so far as any texts I've ever read, never seen in works about Wales, despite the regular use of archaeological contractors who do not speak Welsh. By not speaking Welsh, they will strongly tend to miss important clues from place and feature names that very often carry crucial hints or even plain statements of what those places and features were or related to.
Being non-Welsh speakers, these kinds of problems simply do not occur to practically any of the companies asked to survey and work on our archaeological heritage. The further risk that then appears is one of re-interpreting Wales through non-Welsh eyes and minds. And if you think there is no evidence for this, you're very much mistaken.
Coming back to the brief exchange with the director of the arch, trust, he asserted his belief - put forward more as just an assertion and in what would appear to be thinly-veiled pique, that the Welsh (singular) terms, 'buarth' and 'corlan', apply only to single sheepfolds and not to the complex folds the English call 'multicellular' sheepfolds.
The sheer idiocy and, more importantly, ignorance displayed in this assertion made, remember, by a director of an arch. trust, is as breathtaking as it is deeply troubling.
How can we be in this utterly unacceptable situation in Wales, and is the director of the trust simply a 'rogue' actor?
The answers are to be found in a Freedom of Information Act request I made in the autumn of 2023. It asked, simply, how many people could be considered Welsh-speaking at Welsh Government as a whole, and Cadw, as the Welsh Government's heritage body. The response was again very worrying indeed:
The figures are, to me, unbelievable, a quarter century after Welsh devolution. But the situation depicted by the numbers is even worse, once we take the starred qualification into account. Level 3 Welsh is not at all near good enough to claim proficiency and certainly a very long way indeed from understanding complex, nuanced and archaic language one will encounter when working in archaeological heritage. Worse again is that the numbers are all self-reported, so it's almost inevitably an overly-optimistic assessment.
In recent years, there has been a growing and vocal level of dissent about the anglicisation of place names, notably in relation to the mountains of Eryri, a national park that recently entirely abandoned the use of 'Snowdonia' in its official work, albeit having much earlier embraced English names for places here. This is the kind of resolute action we need to see within the archaeological industry in Wales, too.
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