passage tomb

The Ancient World

The Hill of Tara, once the seat of the High Kings of Ireland, is a site steeped in mythology and history, dating back over 5,000 years. At the centre of the image lies the Mound of the Hostages, an ancient…

New insights into kinship in Neolithic Ireland

A recently published study has shed new light on the ways in which kinship was tied to monuments from Ireland in the Neolithic period, suggesting that biological relationships and social status were not strong factors in deciding who was buried…

Knowth

REVIEW BY JAMES O’DRISCOLL The passage-tomb complex of Knowth is often relegated to the status of smaller sibling to the better known Newgrange, despite it being of international importance in its own right. This book summarises over 60 years of…

Ballynahatty: excavations in a Neolithic monumental landscape

REVIEW BY VICKI CUMMINGS Six miles from Belfast city centre is the monumental complex at Ballynahatty. Today, the circular earthwork known as the Giant’s Ring, with a small megalith set at its centre, is still visible, but once this was…

Ballynahatty: Reconstructing a rare Neolithic timber monument

Ballynahatty, in County Down, Northern Ireland, is an astonishing site that deserves to be far better known for what it tells us about Neolithic timber monuments. At the core of the site is a series of deep post pits that once held 471 tree-sized wooden posts. The newly published excavation report seeks to reconstruct the original appearance of the monument and tell the story of its creation, use, and deliberate destruction, as Chris Catling reports.

The Past

Neolithic stone balls found in Orkney tomb

The purpose of the balls remains obscure, but they could have been used as weapons to inflict head injuries, or as ritual objects.

RIGHT Burial B10 is one of 14 people buried at Knowth between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD. Isotope analysis has established that some members of the group came from northern Britain. The choice of this Neolithic monument for their burial was perhaps intended to create a link between the newly arrived people and the indigenous ancestors.

Mounds and monasteries: burials in late Iron Age and early medieval Ireland

The Irish archaeologist Barry Raftery (1944-2010) wrote: ‘Death represents the ultimate confrontation between the human and the supernatural worlds. The surviving burial remains and the associated funerary monuments thus provide us with the clearest and most tangible surviving evidence of religious beliefs and practices’. With this as her theme, Elizabeth O’Brien has studied every excavated Irish burial dating from the period c.200 BC to c.AD 800. She found great diversity and one common strand – burial in close proximity to ancestors or to people regarded as saints, as Chris Catling reports.