CARDIFF, WALES—The 18th Century writer Iolo Morganwg called Cardiff, the capital of Wales, "an obscure and inconsiderable place." New finds in a park near the city's famous Cardiff Castle are changing that idea. The discovery of Venetian glass and tools related to tanning, ceramics, and metal industries indicate that, by the 16th century, the city was more of a going concern than Morganwg would later choose to describe it. "We knew it was a reasonably significant early modern town," Amelia Pannet of Archaeology Wales told the BBC. "But these discoveries help to put it into some sort of context."