Excavating Death in Co. Galway
The hilltop cemetery at Carrowkeel contained an overwhelming number of children’s graves, and the painstaking recovery of their fragile bones was both a poignant and unsettling encounter. It was eerily reminiscent of momento mori – the anonymous bones once displayed in medieval churches calling all bystanders to witness: remember that you too will die. For most of the time such thoughts were cast firmly aside, but in quiet moments I sometimes wondered whether the ethical professionalism surrounding me on site (not to mention the unruly gallows humour in the site hut) was also an attempt to insulate our modern sensibilities from what would otherwise be a frightening experience: facing the dead, and by reflection, our own mortality. Read more
