Editorial and TOC for Vol 23, Journal of Irish Archaeology

     Volume XXIII, 2014 Edited by Carleton Jones The Journal of the Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland CONTENTS CARLETON JONES Editorial ALISON SHERIDAN AND GABRIEL COONEY The Boyne to Brodgar initiative: understanding—and preserving, presenting and raising awareness of—Neolithic monuments and the people who built and used them in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man V 1 ANN LYNCH (with contributions by F. McCormick, E. Shee Twohig, M. McClatchie, K. Molloy, R. Schulting, E. OCarroll and F. Sternke) Newgrange revisited: new insights from excavations at the back of the mound in 1984–8 13 THOMAS KADOR, LINDA FIBIGER, GABRIEL COONEY AND PAUL FULLAGAR Movement and diet in early Irish prehistory: first evidence from multi-isotope analysis 83 ROSE M. CLEARY AND ALAN HAWKES (with a contribution by Ellen OCarroll) Munster ring-ditches, fulachtaí fia and the excavations at Carrigtohill, Co. Cork 97 KATHERINE LEONARD Birds of the Otherworld: sacral symbolism and the Dunaverney flesh-hook RICHARD WARNER The gold ornaments from Rathgall: the analytical evidence for their date and the sources of their gold MAEVE TOBIN AND FAITH BAILEY Burials and boundaries at Britonstown, Co. Wicklow PATRICK GLEESON Assembly and élite culture in Iron Age and late Antique Europe: a case-study of Óenach Clochair, Co. Limerick LINDA G. LYNCH Death and burial in the Poor Law Union workhouses in Ireland 123 143 157 171 189 REVIEW ARTICLE CARLETON JONES Bronze Age studies in Europe today 205 BOOK REVIEWS Poulnabrone: an early Neolithic portal tomb in Ireland reviewed by Phyllis Mercer Inscribing the landscape: the rock art of south Leinster reviewed by George Nash Archaeology and Celtic myth: an exploration reviewed by Katherine Leonard Woodstown: a Viking-age settlement in County Waterford reviewed by Andrew R. Woods Ireland in the medieval world AD 400–1000. Landscape, kingship and religion reviewed by Michelle Comber 210 The Journal of Irish Archaeology Volume XXIII First published in 2015 The Journal of Irish Archaeology is published by Wordwell Ltd, Unit 9, 78 Furze Road, Sandyford Industrial Estate, Dublin 18, on behalf of the Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland. www.wordwellbooks.com Copyright © The authors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or otherwise without either the prior written consent of the publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, The Writers’ Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1. Submissions: all correspondence should be addressed to the Editor. Subscriptions: €20 (individual) €50 (institutional) ISBN 978-1-905569-97-7 ISSN 0268-537X Typeset in Ireland by Wordwell Ltd Copy-editor: Emer Condit Cover design: Rachel Dunne, Nick Maxwell Printed by Turners, Longford v Editorial Carleton Jones National University of Ireland, Galway A 7,000-year-old Mesolithic man from a bog in the midlands and nameless paupers buried behind nineteenth-century workhouses; the massive Newgrange passage tomb at the Bend of the Boyne and an Early Medieval assembly landscape in the heart of Munster; an elaborately decorated Bronze Age fleshhook from Antrim and a gold bead from the hillfort at Rathgall—these are just some of the people, places and things that you will encounter in the current volume of the Journal of Irish Archaeology. The Journal of Irish Archaeology (JIA) has been publishing quality research since 1983. The operation and editorship of the journal have gone through a few different models over those years before settling on the current arrangement whereby the JIA is the journal of the Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland, has an editorial board made up of archaeologists from the private sector, civil service and academia, and has an editorship that changes every two years, rotating between NUI Galway, UC Cork, UC Dublin, Queen’s University Belfast, and now IT Sligo as well. The current model has been working well for some years now and so, to build upon this, during my tenure as editor (Volumes 23 and 24) I have decided to introduce a few changes with the goal of positioning the JIA more centrally in Irish archaeology. The first of these changes, as past readers will already have noticed, is the reintroduction of editorials. In addition to introducing the content of the volumes, it is hoped that an editorial space in the journal will provide a venue that can be used to keep readers informed about current research developments, directions and trends in Irish archaeology. The second change is to include, where appropriate, specially commissioned pieces on important research directions in Irish archaeology. In the current volume, I am very pleased to kick this off with Sheridan and Cooney’s paper on the ‘Boyne to Brodgar’ project (more of which below). The third change is to devote more space to book reviews. Book reviews have in the past been a part of the journal, but my aim is to make them a more important part of the JIA. In this volume and in the next, you will find not only more book reviews than in the past but also a range that goes beyond books with a specific focus on Ireland but which are nevertheless relevant to Irish archaeology. ‘Review articles’, where multiple books united by a common theme are reviewed together, are initiated in this volume with a look at ‘Bronze Age studies in Europe today’. We are lucky enough to be living in interesting times for Irish archaeology. The vast amount of excavated information produced during the boom years, and generally published more recently, is there to be tapped into and, for more ambitious researchers, organised and synthesised. The impact of the large quantities of data produced in pre-development projects (along with data resulting from research-led projects) is definitely being seen in recent PhD theses and publications. The ‘. . . in the light of recent archaeological excavations’ monograph series, more properly known as ‘Research Papers in Irish Archaeology’, edited by Corlett and Potterton and published through the auspices of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and the Discovery Programme, certainly comes to mind in this regard. In the current volume of the JIA, Cleary and Hawkes’s article on the excavations of a ring-ditch and fulacht fia at Carrigtohill in County Cork provides not only a thorough account of their own excavations but also an up-to-date catalogue of published ring-ditch and barrow excavations in Munster (the vast majority of which were pre-development excavations published between 2007 and 2015), and an analysis that interprets the Carrigtohill evidence within this wider body of newly excavated sites. In the coming years we will no doubt see even more studies that utilise, contextualise and synthesise the data now available. Where this is done within wider research frameworks, the impact of the results will be amplified. One such wider research framework that is being developed at present is the ‘Boyne to Brodgar’ initiative, which is bringing together researchers on both sides of the Irish Sea with a focus on the connections between Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man as evidenced in the monuments of the Neolithic. Monuments, as any archaeologist will tell anyone willing to listen, are endlessly fascinating. We can study sequences of development; we can explore the ways in which they focus attention or the ways in which they transform space and perceptions of time.We can look at common vi origins, regional trajectories and contrasts between periods of intensive monument-building and ‘quieter’ periods. We can try to explain aspects of the monuments with economic theories or with social theories, or perhaps by applying models derived from ethnographic observations. In short, there are a myriad of ways to investigate monuments; consequently, when probed with enough questions, monuments are an excellent source of information about all sorts of aspects of human life in the past. In the current volume we include a specially commissioned piece from two of the principal investigators on the ‘Boyne to Brodgar’ project, Alison Sheridan of the National Museum of Scotland and Gabriel Cooney from UCD. In their contribution, they provide us with an account of the aims, objectives and methodology of this ambitious new project, which will be focusing on the beginnings of Neolithic monumentality on both sides of the Irish Sea, regional trajectories, long-distance contacts, the appearance of novel practices, and the social, environmental and cosmological contexts of the monuments. I am sure that all Irish prehistorians will be looking forward to seeing how this project develops in the coming years. Although not written as part of the ‘Boyne to Brodgar’ project, the paper by Ann Lynch brings us timely new information from the Bend of the Boyne monument complex that will be of interest to prehistorians on both sides of the Irish Sea and farther afield as well. In this article, Lynch provides details of excavations carried out at the rear of the Newgrange passage tomb mound in the 1980s. Several interesting new findings are presented. There is new dating evidence for the turf mound encased in the back of the great mound which was first discovered by O’Kelly over 30 years ago and which has remained an enigma ever since. Also significant are additional AMS radiocarbon dates relating to the construction of the main mound and further evidence for the dating of the deposition of quartz outside the kerbstones, a matter which has caused much debate ever since O’Kelly’s excavations. The publication of additional decorated stones at the back of the mound, some of which were found to be decorated on the hidden backs of the stones as well as on their fronts, will also be of widespread interest. New scientific techniques, such as isotope analyses, are also adding greatly to our interpretations of the Irish past. The founding of the Irish Isotope Research Group (https://iirg.wordpress.com/) in 2013 is a very welcome development in this field. The IIRG has already increased the sharing of information across disciplinary divides and it will no doubt continue to accelerate the incorporation of isotope studies into a wide range of Irish archaeological projects. In this volume of the JIA, the contribution by Kador, Fibiger, Cooney and Fullagar presents the results of a pilot study focused on later Mesolithic and early to middle Neolithic individuals, in which strontium, carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses are used to shed light on dietary and mobility patterns in these early periods of Irish prehistory. The results are very interesting and the next step, as the authors point out, is to refine our interpretations even further through the establishment of a more detailed baseline model of biologically available strontium across the Irish landscape, similar to baseline studies that have already been completed in other regions. These baseline studies are perhaps less glamorous, but they are essential for the fullest interpretation possible of the strontium data derived from archaeological remains. They are therefore an activity well worthy of the support of funding bodies. Two articles in this volume focus on the close study of specific artefacts: Kate Leonard’s study of the Late Bronze Age Dunaverney flesh-hook from County Antrim, and Richard Warner’s X-ray fluorescence spectrometry analysis of Bronze Age gold ornaments from the Rathgall hillfort in County Wicklow. These two studies are very different but both show that the close and careful study of individual artefacts can lead to insights with much wider implications. The Dunaverny flesh-hook examined by Leonard is a remarkable object. It is the most elaborate Bronze Age flesh-hook found in Ireland, being decorated with three-dimensional birds of different species which, as Leonard says, ‘perch and swim along its length’. Leonard’s insightful analysis weaves together the natural habits and mythological associations of different birds, Bronze Age feasting and Bronze Age ritual practices. Ultimately, Leonard argues that the iconography on the Dunaverney flesh-hook may reflect elements of a panEuropean Bronze Age cosmology which also sees expression in other, more distant objects, such as the famous Trundholm sun-chariot from Denmark. Richard Warner also looks at high-status Bronze Age artefacts but from a completely different perspective. Rathgall hillfort was excavated by Barry Raftery in the 1970s. Within the ramparts of this large, multivallate hillfort Raftery found evidence for highstatus habitation, weapon and ornament manufacture, ritual, cremation and burial.The inhabitants of Rathgall were without doubt powerful and wealthy individuals, probably a ruling chiefly family. The sources of power and wealth in the Bronze Age are a subject of much discussion. Some high-status sites may have been positioned to control agricultural resources, some may have been positioned to control routeways, and others may have been positioned to control mineral resources. Warner’s paper in this volume uses X-ray fluorescence spectrometry analysis of six gold ornaments from vii Rathgall to better understand their date and the sources of the gold used to make them. Without giving away his results prematurely, I can say that the likely source of the gold in the Rathgall artefacts adds an interesting new aspect to debates about sources of wealth and power in the Bronze Age. The Early Medieval period has been the focus of much recent research (see, for example, the Russell and Hurley volume on the Woodstown excavations in County Waterford, and the more wide-ranging volume by Bhreathnach in the book reviews section of the present volume). In this volume of the JIA we have two contributions to the study of the Early Medieval archaeology of Ireland:Tobin and Bailey’s article on the burials at Britonstown in County Wicklow, and Gleeson’s article on the assembly landscape of Óenach Clochair in County Limerick. One of the most significant changes in Irish society during this period was, of course, the shift to Christianity and the subsequent increase in the church’s influence over the succeeding centuries. Archaeologically, this is evidenced by a shift during the seventh and eighth centuries AD towards burial at church sites. Interestingly, as Tobin and Bailey discuss, the Britonstown burials appear to be part of a familial ‘cemetery settlement’ not directly associated with a church site and dating from the sixth– seventh century AD, a time before the widespread shift to burial at church sites. Tobin and Bailey argue that, rather than proximity to a church, the prominent location of the Britonstown site on a hill overlooking the nearby territorial boundary formed by the River Liffey, as well as proximity to an ancient routeway, may have been the influential factors in the siting of the burials. It may also be the case that the Britonstown site was used as a local, túath-level assembly place, an interpretation which Gleeson puts forward as an explanation for familial ‘cemetery settlements’ in the next paper in the volume (winner of the 2014 JIA Postgraduate Prize). All Irish archaeologists are familiar with the major royal sites of Emain Macha, Rathcroghan, Tara and Dún Ailinne, which are convincingly linked to inauguration ceremonies through mythology and archaeology (for an expert indepth analysis of the evidence see John Waddell’s new book Archaeology and Celtic myth: an exploration in the book review section). As Gleeson argues, however, rather than being associated with inauguration, many assemblies in the past had legal and judicial functions, and these non-inauguration assemblies seem to have been convened at locations separate from those associated with inauguration. In his contribution to the present volume, Gleeson sets out his arguments for the identification of one of these other assembly landscapes—Óenach Clochair in County Limerick. The Great Famine in the mid-nineteenth century was of course a defining event in recent Irish history, but it has not been a subject attracting a great deal of archaeological enquiry. The reasons for this are no doubt varied (the painful nature of the subject, the lower profile of post-Medieval archaeology in Ireland in general, etc.). Famines are, however, definitely worthy of the attention of archaeologists, as they seem to have often coincided with significant social disruptions—a critical focus of much archaeological investigation. The end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt c. 2150 BC, for instance, appears to have been associated with a series of low flood levels on the Nile and subsequent famine, while here in Ireland great social change was brought about in the fourteenth century AD in a context of the Black Death, famine and invasion from Scotland. Linda Lynch’s contribution to the present volume takes a close osteoarchaeological look at the remains of the dead from three Poor Law Union workhouses, institutions which have become synonymous with the Great Famine of 1845–52. The workhouses were intended to cater for the basic needs of the impoverished and hungry, but both the architecture and the regimes imposed were also designed to prevent more widespread social disruptions. Lynch examines the demographic profile and social personae of the dead in the wider context of social change. Her analyses throw up some unexpected findings in terms of who was and who wasn’t buried at the workhouses, and these findings provide insights into the particular circumstances of the workhouse populations. Lynch also explores nineteenth-century attitudes to the poor and their place in society as reflected in their manner of burial. The papers in the current volume range in chronological focus from the later Mesolithic to the mid-nineteenth century AD. Methodologically, they encompass landscape studies, excavations, artefact studies, osteological studies and isotope studies. I am sure that most readers will find something to interest them here. There are more highlights than I could fit into this editorial, and I leave it to readers to discover the remainder for themselves. viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the generous assistance of a number of organisations or companies. The production of this volume of the Journal of Irish Archaeology was made possible by the sponsorship provided by the following sponsors: JOURNAL OF IRISH ARCHAEOLOGY EDITORIAL BOARD Carleton Jones, School of Geography and Archaeology, National University of Ireland, Galway (editor) Katharina Becker, Department of Archaeology, University College Cork Fiona Beglane, CERIS, Department of Environmental Science, Institute of Technology, Sligo Colin Breen, Geography and Environmental Sciences, Ulster University Penny Johnston, Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland Conleth Manning, National Monuments Service, Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Conor McDermott, School of Archaeology, University College Dublin Nick Maxwell, Wordwell Ltd (publisher) Elizabeth Twohig, c/o Department of Archaeology, University College Cork