Tag Archives: National Monuments Service

Archaeology 2025: Development-led Archaeology

Posted on by

Archaeology 2025 is a 10 year strategy which will inform the journey for Irish archaeology. The Royal Irish Academy Standing Committee for Archaeology, in collaboration with The Discovery Programme, recognise the need to review the infrastructure and profession of archaeology in Ireland to ensure that its unique status as a cultural, scientific and social resource plays a part in Ireland’s current recovery.

Consultation on an all-island, and EU, level will probe how archaeology best adjusts within new political, economic and social landscapes. The Archaeology 2025 Strategy will be published in 2016, and will be drawn from extensive archaeological consensus. The aim is to:

• guide the profession from the lessons learned towards a solid path to the future
• connect with other relevant spheres in a meaningful way
• bring vitality, growth and sustainability to archaeology

Below is the text of my submission to Archaeology 2025 on the subject of development-led archaeology.

Development-led archaeology
In Ireland most archaeological work is carried out as a result of development that has an impact on archaeological heritage. Developers do not have an automatic right to carry out developments that impact archaeological heritage, the competent authority grants the developer the right to carry out the development on the basis that they implement a stated form of mitigation. This mitigation is often preservation by record of the archaeological heritage impacted. This process is an implementation of the Polluter Pays Principle which mandates that the polluter must pay for the full economic cost of the damage done to the environment. However, many of the problems encountered with successfully completing archaeological mitigation projects arise from the fact that many developers do not pay the full economic cost of mitigation. As a result many mitigation projects remain uncompleted and the statutory authorities responsible for overseeing the process are underfunded and short-staffed.

Archaeological preservation by record is a multi-stage process that involves not only the onsite excavation work but the post-excavation process, final reporting and the curation of the artefacts and archaeological archive. The curation of archaeological artefacts has continuing cost well into the future which needs to be recognised. However planning conditions related to archaeology are often vague and do not explicitly sate what the complete mitigation process entails and that the developer is responsible for funding the whole process to completion. In order to clarify the situation planning conditions relating to archaeological mitigation should be much more detailed in their requirements. They need to explicitly state that archaeological preservation by record is a multi-stage process that is not complete until the competent authorities have been furnished with a final excavation report, all finds have been conserved and have been curated by the National Museum. The conditions should require the developer to furnish the competent authority with a final excavation report that has been certified by the National Monuments Service and a receipt from the National Museum for the curated finds.

To ensure that the finance is available to bring all archaeological mitigation work to a successful conclusion the developer should be required to provide an archaeology bond. Bonds are currently attached as planning conditions and may be drawn down in the event of a developer failing to complete the development to the required standard. Once the archaeology work has been fully completed and the developer completes a release of bond application the bond can be released to the developer. If the developer for whatever reason fails to fully fund the archaeological mitigation the bond can be used by the competent authority to fund the completion of the work.

Most archaeological contracts in Ireland are of the fixed price type which transfer the financial risk of the archaeological mitigation from the developer to the archaeologist. The risk to the archaeologist is increased by the fact that project tenders are often accepted on the basis of lowest price to the exclusion of other criteria. As it is not possible to be certain of the nature of buried archaeological remains before they are excavated, even if they have been the subject of assessment, archaeological mitigation projects run the risk of encountering archaeology that is more complex or of greater extent than identified in the original assessment. As a result these projects may run over budget. The management of this risk has important consequences for the successful completion of the archaeological mitigation project.

Where it is a recognised principle that the risk of encountering archaeology that is more complex or of greater extent than identified in the original assessment lies with the developer, in line with the Polluter Pays Principle, then sufficient funds should be negotiated to fully complete the archaeological mitigation work. However, where the developer insists that the originally agreed fixed price stands irrespective of the actual complexity or extent of archaeology then a situation arises that will jeopardise the successful archaeological mitigation. The developer has the right to have the archaeological mitigation carried out at a reasonable cost but should not have the right to transfer the risk of cost overruns onto an archaeologist who is a third party and does not have primary responsibility for the implementation of the planning conditions. This is contrary to the Polluter Pays Principle that the developer must pay the full economic cost of mitigating the impact. In this situation the developer should be required to fund the additional work, irrespective of any prior agreement with the archaeologist. Where a dispute arises as to the extent of the additional costs the dispute should be subject to arbitration by the archaeological licencing authority. Ultimately, unless the archaeological mitigation is completed, the final report is produced and the finds are curated the developer will not have complied with their planning conditions and any party could seek an order from the competent authority to have the conditions enforced or to have the recommended archaeology bond forfeit.

Who pays the cost of overseeing the licensing and excavation process?
Currently the National Monuments Service is funded directly by the State. However part of its functions are concerned with development control and the related issues of excavation licensing, archaeological reports, etc. As this workload would not arise where it not for the proposals of developers the Polluter Pays Principle suggests that the developer should pay a contribution towards the costs of the administration of this system. An Bord Pleanála, for example, charges a range of fees for its services relating to development proposals, and a similar range of charges should be considered by the National Monuments Service.

Who pays the cost of curating archaeological finds from development?
Currently the National Museum is funded directly by the State. However part of its functions relate to development control and the related issues of excavation licensing, archaeological reports, and the eventual curation of archaeological finds from developer-led excavations. As is the case with the National Monuments Service this workload would not arise where it not for the proposals of the developer and the Polluter Pays Principle suggests that the developer should pay a contribution towards the costs of the administration of this system. Archaeological consultancies charge developers fees for the storage of archaeological finds and samples and similar charges should be considered by the National Museum of Ireland.

Archaeological Consultancies
In Ireland most archaeological work is carried out within the parameters of the commercial sector of the economy whether the work is commissioned by the for-profit private sector, the commercial semi-state sector or the not for-profit governmental sector. The Irish commercial archaeological sector has relatively low barriers to market entry and relatively low start-up costs which combined with competitive project tendering determined by lowest cost, results in all participants competing on low price. As a result any advantages that might be gained from investments in buildings, training, staff, equipment or innovation are eroded away in the face of price competition. Is this the most appropriate model for conducting development-led archaeology?

The objective of archaeological consultancies in the development-led process is to implement State policy and create public goods by preserving by record a non-renewable cultural resource for current future and generations. Therefore archaeology can be defined as a public good. If we accept the principle that archaeology is providing a public good is it appropriate that the organisations carrying out the work are organised and funded as for-profit commercial companies. Should these organisations not be organised and funded in the manner of not-for-profit non-governmental organisations providing public goods such as public service broadcasters, charities, educational or arts organisations?

Recommendations
• In order to clarify what the complete archaeological mitigation process involves planning conditions relating to archaeological mitigation should be much more detailed in their requirements.

• To ensure that the finance is available to bring all archaeological mitigation work to a successful conclusion the developer should be required by the competent authority to provide an archaeology bond.

• Where an archaeological mitigation project encounters archaeology that is more complex or of greater extent than identified in the original assessment the developer should be responsible for the additional costs irrespective of any fixed price agreement in place.

• Developers should pay a contribution towards the costs of the National Monuments Service related to development control and excavation licensing.

• Developers should pay a contribution towards the costs of the National Museum related to development control, excavation licensing and the long term curation of artefacts.

• Consideration should be given as to whether the for-profit commercial model is the most appropriate for archaeological consultancies.

Cite this post as:

Mount, C. 2016. Archaeology 2025: Development-led Archaeology. Dr. Charles Mount Blog, 29 January 2016. http://charles-mount.ie/wp/index.php/archaeology-2025-development-led-archaeology

New data indicates recovery in archaeological activity in Ireland in the first quarter of 2014.

Posted on by
Chart of quarterly excavation licences issued 2012-14.

Chart of quarterly excavation licences issued 2012-14.

 

In the first quarter of 2014 to the 31st of March there were 129 new excavation licences issued by the National Monuments Service in the Republic of Ireland. This is an increase of 15% over the number of 112 new licences issued in the first quarter of 2013. Other types of licence and consents, that I haven’t previously tracked, also showed increases. There were 47 extensions to licences taken out in previous years and 26 Ministerial Consents for excavation were issued. This data supports the conclusion of my post of the 19th 19th of December 2013 that the decline in archaeological work had ceased and activity was recovering.

The archaeological licencing figures are supported by the Ulster Bank Construction PMI Report  for February which registered a statistic 56.2 (a figure above 50 indicates expansion in activity), the sixth consecutive month of increase in construction activity. The increased construction activity has also seen a rise in employment in the sector. Respondents were generally optimistic for the year ahead citing improved developer confidence amid stronger economic conditions.

This is the second consecutive quarter of growth in archaeological activity which is broadly in line with the Irish construction sector. As the construction sector returns to a normal level of activity archaeological activity should continue to recover.

Cite this post as:

Mount, C. 2014. New data indicates recovery in archaeological activity in Ireland in the first quarter of 2014. Dr. Charles Mount Blog, 3 April 2014. http://charles-mount.ie/wp/?p=1346

The role of the Internet in Irish archaeology

Posted on by

This is the the text of my contribution to Trowel Vol. XIV 2013. My thanks to the editors Bernard Gilhooly, Joseph Cully, Chris Coffey and Rowan Lacey.

 

Trowel Vol. XIV 2013

Trowel Vol. XIV 2013

One of the abiding memories of my early days studying in UCD in the 1980s was of spending time in the library thumbing through the old card catalogues looking up call numbers for references and then searching the stacks. Of course after a few months you knew the call numbers off by heart. Irish Archaeology was 936 so you could head straight to the stacks to find the book or journal you needed. Only there was usually only one copy available and if it was a current course topic it probably wasn’t there. The Library tried to get around this problem with the multi-copy section where a number of copies of the more important papers were available but for everything else you had to search the tables and library carts to find what you were looking for. If a book was miss-shelved, then it was lost for months. The other option was to photocopy everything you needed to read throughout the year. During my postgraduate research photocopying corpus studies became a tedious and time-consuming pastime.

As undergraduates we wrote our notes and essays by hand but when we became postgraduates we got computer access. I started my MA on the old UCD VAX system using the tortuous Waterloo Script word processing language, and by 1989 I had migrated to my own PC using WordPerfect. But my PC wasn’t networked, I had no access to email and the files couldn’t be read by any machine that didn’t have the same software. Today I still have the floppy discs with my MA files but I need a digital archaeologist to read them.

In the 1980s archaeological data was available only on paper. The sites and Monuments Record (SMR) was still being collated and the maps and manuals could only be accessed in libraries or in the SMR office itself. Unpublished excavation reports were only available from the excavators themselves or in the files of the National Museum and the National Monuments Service. Aerial photography mainly consisted of the oblique photos taken by St. Joseph, that were available in the National Museum, and high level photography taken for the Ordnance Survey that could be consulted in the Geological Survey and photographic reproductions ordered from the Ordnance Survey.

Today all that is changed. I hardly write any notes by hand anymore. I make my notes in a cloud-based notebook on my phone, tablet or PC. I often publish preliminary versions or summaries of papers or lectures as blogs. Digital versions of my draft papers are emailed to editors and all the editing and refereeing is done via the internet. I can search and access thousands of archaeological publications and excavation reports online and view historical Ordnance Survey maps and a wide variety of aerial photographic archives. I regularly have online discussions with my archaeological colleagues. All this change has been brought about by the internet.

The information web

To make this revolution in knowledge management and dissemination possible took not only the development of the internet and the access provided by Internet Service Providers. It also required the development of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee’s triad of URLs, HTML and HTTP, the development of web browsers like Mosaic and Netscape and new file formats like PDF, JPEG and the slightly older TIFF.

It was perhaps the PDF file format more than anything else that ushered in the era of internet archaeology. No other digital format has contributed as much to making archaeological reports and publications available to students, professionals and the general public. Once a report consisting of both text and graphics was converted to PDF it could be emailed, stored in an internet database and downloaded via a website or shared through a peer to peer system. Anyone who wanted to read a PDF file could download a free reader from Adobe that would work on any device irrespective of the hardware manufacturer or operating system. The combination of universality and free access had made PDF the de facto portable document standard by the late 1990s. PDFs meant that thousands of articles, papers, journals and books could be stored digitally and made available across the internet. But what’s more excavation and assessment reports would no longer remain in filings cabinets but could be disseminated. It was the new digital formats like PDF and TIFF that allowed the development of internet-based knowledge management sites such as JSTOR.

JSTOR was founded in 1995 to provide digitized back issues of academic journals. Today it has grown to include books and primary sources, and recent issues of journals. JSTORs Irish archaeology section includes: Proceedings of Royal Irish Academy, the Journal of the Royal Society of Archaeologists of Ireland, the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, and Archaeology Ireland. JSTOR was originally only available to participating institutions but in 2010 JSTOR was opened up to non-academic Irish archaeologists who were members of the IAI. This was accomplished through the good offices of the Nick Maxwell of Wordwell. While a number of other Irish archaeological journals have become available through the internet, such as Decies, some newer resources have also become available. The Eachtra Journal was established in 2009 by John Tierney to curate the work of that consultancy and contains excavation reports, articles, lectures, posters and other documents. To date 16 issues of the journal have been published online.

Wordwell was responsible for another important step in bringing Irish archaeology onto the internet. Wordwell had been publishing the Excavations Bulletin since the 1980s and over that time the size of the publication had increased from just a few hundred entries to over a thousand a year by 2001. In that year Wordwell secured funding from the National Monuments Service and the Heritage Council to make the excavation summaries available on the web at excavations.ie. Since then the site has been both updated and backdated and now has summaries dating back to 1970. The ability to access and search excavation summaries from Abbeyknockmoy to Youghal has made excavations.ie one of the most important resources in Irish archaeology.

Another part of the mosaic had been established as early as the year 2000 when Dúchas, the old name for the Heritage Services, established a heritage data website (now taken down). This allowed consultants who managed their own GIS applications to download the data files of the Archaeological Survey of Ireland (ASI). In 2007 The National Monuments Service website went online and included a new GIS based map/search facility for the ASI records. This data set has been continually updated with summaries of monument descriptions and updated mapping, aerial photography, historic mapping and drawing capabilities and details of approximately 150,000 monuments. More recently the development of the National Roads Authority (NRA) excavations database has begun to transform access to full unpublished excavation and specialist reports related to the many excavations carried out on national road schemes over the last decade.

As information became available on the internet a major challenge was to make it searchable. Libraries had the decimal system of organizing information and catalogues but nothing similar existed for the web. The development of search engines would change this. WebCrawler and Yahoo became available in 1994 and Google in 1998. These search engines allowed websites to be searched using key words.

In the last decade the web has moved from providing pages of information and PDF and image files to making books available. In fact the ability to make books available electronically predates the web. Gutenberg was founded as far back as 1971 to make out of copyright eBooks available in digital format. But issues of copyright and digital rights held back the availability of in copyright books until the late 1990s when some of the first eBook readers were launched. Arguably it was the launch of the Amazon Kindle in 2007 that commenced the era of books in copyright being made available on the internet. While most books on Irish archaeology are still published only in print editions one can purchase some eBooks such as Jim Mallory’s Origin of the Irish and a range of internationally published books such as Richard Bradley’s The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland, and instantly download them for a fraction of the cost of the paper version.

In the 1980s examination of maps, especially historic ones, required a trip to a map library. In the early part of the last decade the Ordnance Survey Ireland began offering mapping data through its website. The importance for archaeologists was the inclusion of historical mapping, especially the 1st edition Ordnance Survey maps and aerial photography. Then in 2004 Google acquired EarthViewer 3D, which maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery and aerial photography, and made the basic version of the application freely usable over the web as Google Earth. The potential of Google Earth for archaeology was quickly grasped and it came into use not only as an off-the-peg method of presenting spatial data but was used to identify new archaeological sites.

Since 2004 Google has been providing Google Scholar as a freely accessible site that indexes the full text of scholarly papers across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004 Google Scholar includes many online journals of Europe and America’s largest scholarly publishers, plus scholarly books and other non-peer reviewed journals. Google Scholar now also provides data on paper and author citations that allow archaeologist and students to tell what authors and what papers are the most influential.

The social web

The first stage in the development of the internet was about providing information that people could easily access. The second stage, the social web, is about interaction and collaboration between the users of the internet through the use of social media sites like Facebook, and the generation of content by users in the form of blogs, images and videos. One of the earliest approaches to user-generated content was Wikipedia which was launched in 2001 as a collaboratively edited encyclopaedia. The site has grown to over 30 million articles and has a range of Irish archaeological articles that are often used by the media as source material for articles.

The most successful social media application for Irish archaeology is undoubtedly Facebook. Since its foundation in 2004 Facebook has attracted many millions of users. Ireland is the biggest user of Facebook in the English-speaking world (Independent.ie) and the ubiquity of its use has encouraged many archaeologists to become involved with pages and groups related to archaeology and heritage. In recent years a number of pages related to archaeology have developed. Irisharchaeology.ie with over 23,000 followers has brought archaeology to tens of thousands of Facebook users. Other groups such as Archaeology Ireland Network, Early Medieval and Viking Research Group, and Togher: Irish Raised Bog Archaeology, to name a few, host discussions of archaeology. Other groups such as UCD Experimental Archaeology showcase ongoing experimental research and provide important insights into the development of the archaeological record. Facebook has also allowed the development of campaigns aimed at preserving archaeology and heritage such as Cherrymount Crannog Crisis which successfully campaigned for the full excavation of the Drumclay Crannog in Fermanagh.

Since 2008 a number of websites have developed that allow scholars to share their published research with their peers. Mendeley was launched in 2008 and is a desktop and web program for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating online. Academia.edu, launched in 2008, is a social networking website for academics with 3 million registered users. The platform is used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field.

Another development in Irish archaeology has been blogging. Over the last few years Irish archaeologists have started to write about archaeology and heritage on the internet through the medium of their own blogs. Blogging is a less formal and more interactive way of publishing and discussing archaeological material and has the capability of reaching out beyond the confines of the archaeological community of practice to a wider public. One of the oldest, the Moore Group Blog, has been published since 2007 and has been a regular finalist in Irish Web Awards. Brian Dolan has been writing Seandalaiocht since 2009. I started writing Charles Mount’s Blog in 2011 to discuss my research and areas of interest and as a sounding board for ideas. I often publish early versions of papers intended for publication in order to get feedback as well as abstracts or summaries of published papers. Other notable blogs are Robert Chapple’s Blog Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist which features his own writing and contributions from a range of guest writers. Colm Moriarty’s Blog Irisharchaeology.ie contains a wide range of stories about Irish archaeology and has a large following. Other blogs are Terry O’Hagan’s Vox Hiberionacum which specialises in Early Medieval Ireland and Chris Corlett’s Blog on a range of archaeological and historical topics.

Blogging has made archaeology increasingly accessible to the public and media and bloggers are often contacted by journalists to comment on archaeology. The trend of using social media for archaeologists to collaborate and reach out from the discipline to a wider audience using social media is exemplified by the project known as Day of Archaeology. Each year the project collates and publishes blog posts from archaeologist throughout the world to the document their work and their lives. The most recent day in July 2013 featured over 300 posts with a number of Irish archaeologists participating.

Conclusion

Over the last 20 years the internet has begun to transform how we do archaeology in ways that no one could have imagined. It has provided archaeologists with access to primary information. It has allowed them to connect and collaborate with one another. Most recently it has provided archaeologists with new ways to communicate and reach out beyond the confines of the profession to a wider public. But this is only the beginning, and as the internet reaches into every corner of world and every aspect of people’s lives, the greatest impact of the technology on archaeology is probably still to be seen and the future will undoubtedly hold even greater surprises.

References

Academia.edu http://www.academia.edu/

Archaeology Ireland Network https://www.facebook.com/groups/ARCHAEOLOGY.IRELANDNETWORK/

Robert Chapple’s Blog http://rmchapple.blogspot.ie/

Cherrymount Crannog Crisis https://www.facebook.com/groups/254450291340252/?fref=ts

Chris Corlett’s Blog christiaancorlett.com

Day of Archaeology http://www.dayofarchaeology.com

Decies http://www.waterfordcountylibrary.ie/en/localstudies/ejournals/decies/

Eachtra Journal http://eachtra.ie/index.php/journal/

Early Medieval and Viking Research Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/102550331629/

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/

Google Earth http://www.google.com/earth/

Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/

Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/

Ordnance Survey Ireland http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer

Independent.ie http://www.independent.ie/business/technology/irish-are-the-biggest-facebook-users-in-englishspeaking-world-29587083.html

Irisharchaeology.ie https://www.facebook.com/irisharchaeology.ie

JSTOR http://jstor.org/

Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/

Moore Group Blog http://www.mooregroup.ie/blog/

Colm Moriarty’s Blog http://irisharchaeology.ie/

Charles Mount’s Blog http://Charles-mount.ie/wp

National Monuments Service http://archaeology.ie

NRA Archaeology ttp://archaeology.nra.ie

Ordnance Survey Ireland http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer/#V1,591271,743300,0,10

Seandalaiocht http://www.seandalaiocht.com/

Togher: Irish Raised Bog Archaeology https://www.facebook.com/groups/317068375005156/

UCD Experimental Archaeology https://www.facebook.com/groups/286322324795899/?fref=ts

Vox Hiberionacum https://voxhiberionacum.wordpress.com

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Cite this post as:

Mount, C. 2014.

The role of the Internet in Irish archaeology. Charles Mount’s Blog, 23 January 2014. http://charles-mount.ie/wp/?p=1339

 

Irish Peatland Archaeology in 2011: the Bord na Móna Archaeological Programme

Posted on by

Bronze Age trackway under excavation in Killaderry bog, Co. Galway July 2011

Part of my professional work involves providing archaeological advice to Bord na Móna, where I act as Project Archaeologist. Bord na Móna is the commercial Semi-state body with responsibility for the development of the Irish national peat resource. Bord na Móna owns and manages more than 80,000 ha of lands, the majority of which are peatlands, that contain a wealth of preserved archaeological and palaeoenvironmental material. The archaeological survey of the peatlands in the ownership of Bord na Móna has been a huge task, carried out under the auspices of the Archaeological Survey of Ireland and funded by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. It has been continuing for two decades and has indentified thousands of archaeological sites that are not only near the bog surface but also quite deeply buried.

The Bord na Móna method of working is to harvest a few centimetres of peat each year from the top of the bogs that are in operation. This slowly reduces the height of the bog and as the work goes on, like an archaeological excavation that stretches across the landscape, the archaeological features close to the top are either excavated or a decision is made to preserve them in situ. Bord na Móna workers attend annual training seminars provided by the National Museum of Ireland and the National Monuments Service and are well aware of the types of features and finds that might be uncovered. The excavation of the archaeological features and the post-excavation and palaeoenvironmental work is funded by Bord na Móna, under a set of principles agreed with Government and is the subject of an annual excavation programme. Today the Bord na Móna archaeological programme is the largest ongoing archaeological excavation project in Ireland.

The Bord na Móna excavation project is let as a single Peatland Archaeological Services contract covering three years of operations. Archaeological Development Services (ADS) have been carrying out the programme since 1998, under the Direction of Operations Manager Jane Whitaker, and to date have carried out more than 250 excavations and surveyed more than 45,000 ha of bog lands.

The current programme, covering the years 2010-13, is focusing on the bogs of Littleton, Derryvella, and Longford Pass, Co. Tipperary; Cloonshanagh, Mountdillon and Edera, Co. Roscommon; and Castlegar, Killaderry and Gowla, Co. Galway. In 2011, investigations of the wooden trackways in Gowla, Killaderry and Castlegar bogs are taking place and ADS are joined by a group of students from the University of Florida at Gainesville lead by Prof. Florin Curta.

Google Earth image indicating the location of Gowla, Killaderry and Castlegar bogs. The River Suck, highlighted with a blue line, crosses the image from north to south.

Gowla, Killaderry and Castlegar bogs are situated just to the west of the River Suck, a tributary of the River Shannon, and in the past would have presented a barrier to anyone trying to cross the river over a substantial stretch between Ballyforan and Clooncoran. The trackways have a wide date range from the Bronze Age right through to the fifteenth century AD. The longer trackways tend to cross the bogs at their narrowest points linking areas of dryland. In a number of cases trackways follow the routes that were established at earlier periods. For example trackway 5 in Killaderry bog, which dates to the period 660-770 AD, probably allowed travel from the area of Ahascragh, Co. Galway to Ballyforan, Co. Roscommon by crossing Killaderry bog at its narrowest point between Killaderry and Cloonshee. The interesting thing is that Killaderry 5 runs parallel to Killaderry 3 which dates from 910-820 BC. An earlier trackway, Killaderry 13, dated to 1380-1210 BC, also runs in a parallel direction a little to the east. There are other alignments of trackway that are being investigated this season that will soon be dated and will provide more detail. At this stage the evidence indicates that this routeway through Killaderry bog was in use for at least two thousand years and is probably the preserved wetland part of an ancient road network that existed in this area. Investigation of the nearby River Suck has the potential to identify ancient fording points and possibly the remains of bridges associated with this ancient routeway.

In nearby Castlegar bog trackway 1 links the lands around the Late Medieval Carmelite Monastery at Eglish, Co. Galway, founded in 1376, to an island of land in Dalysgrove townland next to the River Suck. This trackway dates to the historic period 1410-40 AD and indicates that the construction of wooden trackways continued almost to the post-Medeival period.

The bogs not only contain archaeological features but preserve a wealth of stratified environmental data. This is an integrated archaeological and palaeoenvironmental project with the environmental sampling and analysis work carried out by QUEST and ArchaeoScape. QUEST Quaternary Scientific, is part of the School of Human and Environmental Sciences in the University of Reading under the Direction of Dr. Nicholas Branch. The palaeoenvironmental investigations involve taking samples for pollen, plant macrofossils, insects and peat humification. Dr. Branch’s work focuses on the relationships between human activities, vegetation history and climate change. ArchaeoScape is part of Royal Holloway Geography Department, University of London, and is an environmental archaeological (‘palaeoenvironmental’ and ‘palaeoeconomic’) interpretation facility.

The excavation programme wil be continuing in 2012 and will be followed by post-excavation and palaeoenvironmental analysis and eventual publication of results.

Cite this post as:

Mount, C. Irish Peatland Archaeology in 2011: the Bord na Móna Archaeological Programme. The Charles Mount Blog, July 14, 2011. http://charles-mount.ie/wp/?p=238