EMAP_Progress_Reports_2009_2.pdf - The Heritage Council

Introduction
1.2. The excavation of early medieval dwellings and settlements in Ireland: some
thoughts on the character and patterns of discovery
Archaeology in Ireland has undergone a substantial and significant evolution
between 1930 and 2008. In the early years, it was the preserve of a small number of
individuals – university academics; museums curators; and government
archaeologists (especially the various incarnations of the Office of Public Works in the
Republic of Ireland, and the Historic Monuments Branch in Northern Ireland). As
such, only a small of handful of excavations were undertaken on an annual basis,
and these were often limited to short summer excavation seasons. The vast majority
of these excavations were focused on known, standing monuments, and in the case
of early medieval sites (i.e. sites dating c. A.D. 400-1100), these tended to be
concentrated on either ecclesiastical sites, or ‘ringforts’ (whether earthen-banked
‘raths’ such as Garranes, Co. Cork (Ó Ríordáin 1941-42), or stone-walled ‘cashels’
such as Cahercommaun (Hencken 1938).
Excavations on secular enclosures tended to target those sites that looked impressive
and were potentially high status, and there was a very deliberate focus on aspects of
defence (especially complex entrances) as well as on the artefactual remains. Jerry
O’Sullivan (1998, 182-4) has suggested that these site excavations were hugely
influential in the development of normative ideas about early Irish society as rural,
pastoral and largely based upon the activities of archetypal self-sufficient, small
farming households that inhabited ringforts – and who could be usefully portrayed
(in terms of the socially conservative ethos of mid-twentieth Ireland) as living in a
manner that was not entirely dissimilar to that of Irish rural communities in the
1930s and 1940s. In Northern Ireland, ‘political self-consciousness’ (Evans 1968, 7)
also played an important role in defining the way in which archaeological excavation
developed. Here the care of ancient monuments was entrusted to the Ministry of
Finance, and although civil defence was a budget priority, an Advisory Committee
(later an Advisory Council) was established in 1926 to deal with archaeology. The
result of this was the creation in 1934 of the first regional archaeological survey in
Ireland, which in turn led to the publication of ‘A Preliminary Survey of the Ancient
Monuments of Northern Ireland’’ (‘PSAMNI’ (Chart 1940), which would form the basis
for future archaeological surveys.
State-funded excavations became an increasingly important aspect of archaeology in
Northern Ireland from the 1950s onwards, and many of the excavations undertaken
in the 1950s and early-1960s by the archaeologists of the Historic Monuments
Branch of the Ministry of Finance (N.I.) were focused on Co. Down in preparation for
the production of the Archaeological Survey of Co. Down (Jope 1966). A similar
excavation-strategy was planned at the same time to inform the recently published
Archaeological Survey of Co. Armagh (Neill 2008), although only a handful of these
were undertaken. In contrast to these research-led excavations, the excavations in
the late-1960s and early-1970s were development-driven, and were focused on the
road-works associated with the creation of the M2 motorway in south Co. Antrim In
this sense they were prescient of the bulk of archaeological enquiries that would be
undertaken thirty years later.
Membership of the European Economic Community (latterly the European Union) has
had a significant impact on archaeology on the island of Ireland since the 1970s. The
European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage, 1992
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