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National Projects
The Royal Commission is in a unique position to take a national overview of the archaeology and historic architecture of Wales. The Commission is able to survey and record buildings and monuments in any area of Wales within structured nationwide projects and to assess their importance in national and international contexts.
The Welsh Nonconformist Chapels Project is the main area of work in the field of historic architecture, dealing with a class of buildings central to the Welsh identity and landscape. Over 6,200 chapels have been recorded in partnership with volunteers from Capel: the Welsh Chapels Heritage Society, and site descriptions have been made available on the online database, Coflein. Most of these buildings have been photographed externally, and a programme of recording key buildings internally continues. A project database analysing the style of these buildings and identifying key architects, such as Thomas Thomas, who designed almost a thousand chapels, is being completed to enable an interpretive volume on Welsh chapel architecture to be finalised. The relationship of churches and chapels within industrial communities has been examined in the publication Copperopolis. A pilot study recording the buildings of other denominations and faiths is under way.
The Uplands Archaeology Initiative is the main area of work within field archaeology and has been prompted by the fact that in the unimproved uplands over 244 metres (800 feet) above sea level there exists what is in effect a fossilised landscape rich in remains of all periods. The Uplands account for 40% of the land area of Wales, and some 60% of the Welsh countryside can be described as of Upland character. The project is due to be completed in the second decade of this century, and each year the Royal Commission awards grants to enable teams of archaeologists to record monuments and features in some 150 square kilometres of landscape. Before work on the ground proceeds an archaeologist within the Royal Commission examines all vertical aerial photographs held at the Commission and uses a computer to produce maps of all archaeological features. This aerial mapping both guides archaeologists walking in parallel intervals 40 metres apart across the landscape and helps them understand long linear features such as trackways, artificial watercourses or defunct field-boundaries. Conversely, archaeologists on the ground can identify small features such as stone-built cairns or prehistoric standing-stones that are often too small to be identified from the air. Fieldwork also allows lines on aerial photographs to be interpreted securely and an integrated understanding of upland landscapes to emerge. Field archaeologists from the Royal Commission also survey and interpret in detail some of the more interesting structures and landscapes discovered to improve our understanding of them, and information about the more outstanding sites is passed onto Cadw so that they can be considered for protection as Scheduled Ancient Monuments.
The Dendrochronology or Tree-ring Dating Project uses Royal Commission expertise in the study of traditional or vernacular buildings to identify structures suitable for this type of dating. Sampling does the minimum damage to the timbers by using a thin bore. The level of success from the samples taken is very high and in the last two years of work three successively older ‘oldest houses of Wales’ have been identified, so that the earliest identified house in Wales, at present, is of 1402.
The Workers’ Houses of Wales Project is carried forward on behalf of the Royal Commission by an internationally recognised authority in this field of study, Jeremy Lowe, formerly a lecturer at the Welsh School of Architecture. Jeremy carried out an extensive programme of pioneering recording from the 1960s before wide-spread ‘slum’ clearance in the towns of the Industrial Revolution's largest ironworks.