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

The wrong way man

London tales 1: the wrong way man

Walking to get my paper this morning, a car pulled up beside and asked for directions. Cheerfully (though completely unintentionally) I sent them the wrong way. They were long gone before I realized my mistake, and as I continued to the shop I pondered their fate with mounting concern. Where would they go? How long would it be before they realised? Would they have enough food to see them through the night? Read more

Celtic Tiger Archaeology – the view from afar

Like Vincent Vega in the opening scene of Pulp Fiction, describing to Jules Winnfield why he digs Europe, what has struck me most about working as an archaeologist in Britain and Ireland are the ‘little differences.’ Not just the differences in terms of the sites or artefacts that I actually found, but also the differences in how the archaeology is actually dug. Example: compared to the long-handled Irish shovel, the British shovel has a short handle barely three feet long, and they swear that anything different would break their backs. And in Ireland the archaeology cops (council archaeologists) can’t tell you what to do. Read more

Astroarchaeology (or the law of unintended consequences)

‘Shoot for the stars, and you might hit the moon,’ the kindly teachers used to tell me whenever I wanted to do anything more complicated than tie my own shoelaces, and I’m sure they said the same thing to Louis Armstrong when he said he wanted to walk on the moon. Read more