Gabriel Cooney

The Place of Megalithic Tomb Cemeteries in Ireland

The megalithic chamber tombs that are the most striking monuments of the Irish Neolithic have long been divided by the shape of their plans. With the shapes there goes a characteristic pattern of distribution and of spacing in the landscape, and from this arise some puzzling questions of sequence as to how ‘cemeteries’ grew up. A fresh view is taken of this old problem

Stone Axe Studies in Ireland

This paper starts by outlining the history of stone axe studies in Ireland, from their antiquarian beginnings to 1990. It then offers a critical review of the current state of knowledge concerning the numbers, distribution, findspot contexts, morphology, size, associated finds, dating and raw materials of stone axes. Having proposed an agenda for future research, the paper ends by introducing the Irish Stone Axe Project—the major programme of database creation and petrological identification, funded by the National Heritage Council, currently being undertaken by GC and EG.

Newgrange – a view from the platform

It was in Antiquity that the late M.J. O’Kelly (1979) first presented a detailed discussion of the restoration of Newgrange. Debate on this issue has focused on the decision by the Office of Public Works to build a reinforced concrete retaining wall inside the kerb to keep the restored material in place, using mortar and metal pins to affix quartz and granite to the face of the concrete over the kerb in the vicinity of the entrance. This was intended to present what O’Kelly believed would have been the original drum-shaped mound and the dry-built appearance of the quartz and granite wall (1979: 209: Figure 1). In a recent critical evaluation of O’Kelly’s restoration, Palle Eriksen (2004) argues that the monument may have been built in a number of stages, that the mound would have been dome-shaped and hence there never was a vertical revetment wall placed on top of the kerb. In the vicinity of the entrance, rather than a vertical wall composed of quartz and granite standing on the kerb, it may have been either laid on the face of a less steeply sloping mound or as a deposit on the ground in front of the monument. By way of complementing Eriksen’s remarks this contribution places the reconstruction work in a wider context, offers a different interpretation of the stratigraphic sequence and the role of the quartz/granite layer at Newgrange and comments on the consequences of the quartz wall for archaeological and public interpretation of Newgrange. The use of the term ‘passage tomb’ rather than ‘passage grave’ has become standard in Ireland (see de Valera & Ó Nualláin 1972: xiii) and this is used here. While not the focus of this debate the discussion below is based on a recognition of the range and depth of symbolic value that quartz would have held for people in the Neolithic (e.g. Cooney 2000a: 176-8).

Getting to the core of the problem: petrological results from the Irish Stone Axe Project

When a distribution map of Neolithic stone axes in Ireland was published in ANTIQUITY (Grogan & Cooney 1990), the new Irish Stone Axe Project (ISAP) was mentioned. Stone axes, it turns out, are unusually common in Ireland. Here Project progress is outlined, with special attention being given to those axes identified as having been moved across the Irish Sea.

A preliminary distribution map of stone axes in Ireland

Stone axes are numerous in Ireland, where there are important porcellanite sources in the northeast. Now there is a first clear idea of just how many Irish axes there are and what their pattern of distribution is

Irish Neolithic Landscapes and Land Use Systems: The Implications of Field Systems

I approach this paper as a prehistorian whose research has been primarily in areas with little or no surviving evidence for prehistoric fields, so that my only close encounter with field systems has been at Kilmashogue and other sites in the uplands just to the south of Dublin (figure 1 shows the location of the main areas and sites in Ireland mentioned in the text). These are certainly fixed in space but unfortunately are as yet floating in time (Cooney, 1985). But this personal predicament is in fact central to the problems approached in this paper: that while there is increasing evidence for prehistoric field systems in Ireland, they are frequently perceived as occurring in the archaeological record only in certain areas; that the relationship between them and other aspects of the archaeological record is not always clear; and that there are major problems in dating these field systems. My second introductory point is to comment that the sequence of the title is deliberate. The significance of field systems must be seen in the context of what would have been the contemporary cultural landscape and land use, and the various interpretations which have been made of these. The occurrence of field systems has major implications for the way we view the human impact on the environment and use of the land during the Neolithic period in Ireland (4,000 – 2,500 BC).

Posterior Probability Modeling and Image Classification for Archaeological Site Prospection: Building a Survey Efficacy Model for Identifying Neolithic Felsite Workshops in the Shetland Islands

The application of custom classification techniques and posterior probability modeling (PPM) using Worldview-2 multispectral imagery to archaeological field survey is presented in this paper. Research is focused on the identification of Neolithic felsite stone tool workshops in the North Mavine region of the Shetland Islands in Northern Scotland. Sample data from known workshops surveyed using differential GPS are used alongside known non-sites to train a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classifier based on a combination of datasets including Worldview-2 bands, band difference ratios (BDR) and topographical derivatives. Principal components analysis is further used to test and reduce dimensionality caused by redundant datasets. Probability models were generated by LDA using principal components and tested with sites identified through geological field survey. Testing shows the prospective ability of this technique and significance between 0.05 and 0.01, and gain statistics between 0.90 and 0.94, higher than those obtained using maximum likelihood and random forest classifiers. Results suggest that this approach is best suited to relatively homogenous site types, and performs better with correlated data sources. Finally, by combining posterior probability models and least-cost analysis, a survey least-cost efficacy model is generated showing the utility of such approaches to archaeological field survey.

Introduction: transformations at the quarry face

It is now over twenty-five years since the publication of a World Archaeology volume (1984, 16(2)) on stone quarries. That volume marked a growing interest in the topic (e.g. Ericson and Purdy 1984; Torrence 1986) and since that time our understanding of the significance of the recognition, extraction and production of artefacts from particular stone sources has dramatically increased and changed. Ericson identified the character of the material record on stone mine and quarry sites as ‘shattered, overlapping, sometimes shallow, nondiagnostic, undatable, unattractive, redundant, and at times voluminous’ (1984: 2). In extracting knowledge and realizing the interpretative potential of these data not surprisingly a major trend has been to recognize and work with the character of this record and to further develop approaches that have been traditionally at the heart of quarry and mine studies, such as the need to take a geologically informed approach and the critical importance of matching artefacts with their specific sources. New analytical approaches allied to the application of a range of scientific techniques, particularly geochemical ones, have facilitated the discrimination of the use of sources, the tracking of the process of working stone, the nature and scale of production zones and the geographical extent of movement of objects from sources. To take just three examples, Weisler and colleagues have demonstrated that using geochemical analysis to identify specific island sources for basalt adzes plays a key role in understanding island and archipelago interaction in Polynesia (Weisler 1998; Weisler and Kirch 1996). In Europe Projet JADE has identified quarries for jadeitite, eclogite and omphacitite axes at Mont Viso and in the Mont Beigua massif in the north Italian Alps, 2000–2400m above sea level, and the circulation of axes in Neolithic societies over 1000km from this source area (Pétrequin et al. 2008; in press). LeBlanc and colleagues (2010) have shown that geochemical approaches have the potential to differentiate Mistassini quartzite from northen Quebec and Ramah chert from Labrador, which can be confused in visual inspection. This geochemical differentation is of considerable importance given that these materials were among the most widely used in the manufacture of stone tools in eastern Sub-Artic prehistory. But, important as these advances have been, a more important development informing quarry and related studies has been a shift to centre stage of a different understanding of the role of stone. While contemporary capitalist societies tend to perceive stone and other minerals as passive commodities, in pre-industrial societies and in the past stone was not viewed as neutral and inert but rather as animate, alive, with rich symbolic potential

Stone Dead : Uncovering Early Mesolithic Mortuary Rites, Hermitage, Ireland

In Europe, cremation as a burial practice is often associated with the Bronze Age, but examples of cremated human remains are in fact known from the Palaeolithic onwards. Unlike conventional inhumation, cremation destroys most of the evidence we can use to reconstruct the biography of the buried individual. Remarkably, in Ireland, cremation is used for the earliest recorded human burial and grave assemblage (7530–7320 bc ) located on the banks of the River Shannon, at Hermitage, County Limerick. While we are unable to reconstruct in any great detail the biography of this individual, we have examined the biography of a polished stone adzehead interred with their remains. To our knowledge, this adze represents the earliest securely dated polished axe or adze in Europe. Microscopic analysis reveals that the adze was commissioned for burial, with a short duration of use indicating its employment in funerary rites. Before its deposition into the grave it was intentionally blunted, effectively ending its use-life: analogous to the death of the individual it accompanied. The microwear traces on this adze thus provide a rare insight into early Mesolithic hunter-gatherer belief systems surrounding death, whereby tools played an integral part in mortuary rites and were seen as fundamental pieces of equipment for a successful afterlife.

Island Quarries, Island Axeheads, and the Neolithic of Ireland and Britain

A notable feature of the Neolithic Period (4,000-2,500 cal B.C.) of northwest Europe is the exploitation of lithic sources on islands for the production of stone axeheads and other artifacts. This article focuses on three such islands: 1) Rathlin in the North Channel off the northeast coast of Ireland, 2) the island group of Shetland between the North Atlantic and the North Sea, and 3) the island of Lambay off the east coast of Ireland. This work provides support for the importance of insular axehead sources during the Neolithic. The quarries on these islands and the pattern of the distribution of their products provide evidence of quite different scales and organization of quarrying activity and extent of distribution of products from the quarries and hence types of social networks.