Saints and Sinners: religion and conflict in Medieval Ireland

‘History,’ said Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, ‘is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ Joyce was commenting on the violence of Irish history, particularly that done in the name of Christian faith. Read more

Ireland’s Invisible People: the Celtic present meets the Celtic past

Rising majestically above Dublin’s busiest street, the Georgian façade of the General Post Office still contains bullet holes – grim reminders of Easter Monday 1916, when Padraic Pearse read a declaration that signalled the start of the Easter Rising and the beginning of Irish Independence. ‘In the name of God,’ he began, ‘and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.’ Read more

Ancient Waterways: Ireland’s Prehistoric Beginnings

On a misty morning eight thousand years ago, two young women pushed their way through the head-high reeds of a tidal estuary, six metres below the busy streets of what is now modern Dublin. As they stepped onto the shifting mud flats, their baskets, wattle work and fishing ground came into view, and they could see, even from this distance, that it had been a bountiful evening. Read more

360 Production – Orkney Dig

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Digging for Britain – the Alice Roberts archaeology show recently screened on BBC 2 – was about as enjoyable as a wedgie. Press ganged by commissioning editors at the BBC to start with the Romans (cause everyone loves em!), hamstrung by a presenter who knows more about anatomy than archaeology (cause everyone loves er!), the show fired too many misses to be regarded as anything other than flawed… but perhaps not fatally. Read more

Dr. Elsa Schneider

When it comes to leading ladies, Marion Ravenwood owns this website’s heart. But if truth be told, there was once another contender: Dr Elsa Schneider – the Austrian art professor in Indiana Jones and The last Crusade. She played our heart like a cheap fiddle, achieving the unlikely feat (in the words of Empire magazine) of making a Nazi sympathizer seem sympathetic. Take the following exchange: Read more

Archaeology iPad: i-Do or i-Don’t?

Ever since Gordon Childe attempted to record the entire Skara Brae excavation on a prototype Etch A Sketch, archaeologists have hunted high and low for the holygrail in trench technology: a paperless device that can take the library to the site and the site to the library in one easy seamless move. Read more

When the Celtic Tiger Roared: Ireland’s golden age for archaeology

Imagine a place where the term ‘millionaire archaeologist’ would not sound ridiculous and young archaeology students could look forward to excellent career prospects, with salaries equivalent to any other profession. Imagine hundreds of excavations up and down the country crying out for help, willing to pay handsomely, even for inexperienced diggers; imagine also that these excavations were fiercely regulated to control their quality. This is an archeo-utopia: but for a short time it existed. This was Ireland’s Celtic Tiger archaeology. Read more

How the west was won (by commercial archaeology)

Teaching would be great if it weren’t for the kids; parliament even better if it weren’t for the voters; and commercial archaeology, or so the joke around the site hut goes, would be the best job in the world if it weren’t for the clients. With no clients, there would be no project managers, and with no project managers, there would be no competitive tendering, and with no competitive tendering we could all live happily ever after in the land of milk and honey. Read more

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

The Biggest Poo in History

Struggling for something to blog about this morning, I suddenly thought:

‘I know, I’ll do the biggest poo in history!’

Well… obviously I won’t do it personally. Talk about performance anxiety!

‘Yeah, is that the Guinness book of records? Can you send Norris McWhirta round, I’ve got a big job for him.’ Read more

The top ten sites of the Celtic Tiger

Many people will be aware of the handful of contentious Irish sites that made international headlines during the heady years of the Celtic Tiger for all the wrong reasons – Carrickmines Castle, Woodstown, and Lismullin on the Tara M3. These sites gained notoriety for either holding up the progress of a developing nation or being bulldozed to line the pockets of the profiteering political elite, and the archaeological story was often lost in the cross fire. Read more