Editorial

Abstract

i Editorial Last year’s volume of Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy was a special issue on the theme of ‘Climate and society in Ireland: from prehistory to the present’. It was initially published in the journal’s usual format and then, in summer 2021, as a separate title. Though too early to judge its impact, the initial response to the volume has been very encouraging. Currently, its key findings are being communicated to a wider audience through a series of blogs and podcasts available on the Academy’s website. The editors and board of the journal sincerely hope that the volume and related content will make a meaningful contribution to wider discourse and debate, in Ireland and beyond, on the complex relationships between climate and societies in the longue durée and how knowledge of climate history might usefully inform our approach to the current climate crisis. Though more disparate in the themes they address, the papers collected in the current volume maintain the high standards that readers expect from Proceedings . There is a wide chronological span from early prehistory to the early twentieth century. Given the journal’s long record of publishing prehistoric research , it is gratifying to see two substantial contributions in this area, following on from the very considerable prehistoric component in last year’s thematic volume. The flow of high-quality submissions in this area remains strong, so prehistory is also likely to feature prominently in next year’s volume, while the online supplement and open access agreements mentioned below should further raise the profile of the journal among prehistorians. In the present volume, Dowd and colleagues present a reassessment of the 1902 excavation of Alice and Gwendoline Cave, Co. Clare, informed by a recent re-excavation, which, like the original, was funded by the Academy. The second paper, by Kearney and O’Brien, presents a palynological study spanning much of the Holocene undertaken at the excavated later Bronze Age copper mine at Derrycarhoon in West Cork. The continuing legacy of prehistoric hillforts in the early medieval landscape is considered in O’Driscoll and Gleeson’s paper on Baltinglass, County Wicklow. There follows three papers on complementary aspects of the medieval archaeology and history of major ecclesiastical sites: Manning on the buildings and layout of Monasterboice; Murray on two crosiers associated with Clonmacnoise; and Bhreathnach and Dowling’s interdisciplinary study of Ferns, Co. Wexford. From a historical perspective, Grace’s paper on bloodletting, spanning the medieval to modern periods, is followed by O’Neill on the role and experience of women during the Nine Years War, while Barnard takes the study of material culture into a new arena with his exploration Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 121C, i–iv © 2021 Royal Irish Academy https://doi.org/10.3318/PRIAC.2021.121.11 Editorial ii of the circulation of English ceramics in Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finally, Coghlan and colleagues present new evidence about the life and work of Percy Ludgate, ‘Ireland’s first computer designer’. The concept of themed special issues, inaugurated a decade ago, is but one of the ways Proceedings has evolved and adapted in recent years. A complementary new initiative is the recent decision by the editorial board to approve the production next year of an online supplement on Mesolithic Ireland . With an introductory essay by Prof. Graeme Warren, a member of the board, the supplement will bring together the most important papers about the Mesolithic period published in the journal over the past century or so. Its appearance will coincide with UCD’s hosting of the thirteenth Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS) in June 2022, the first time this major international meeting will take place in Ireland. There are precedents for such online supplements among the Academy’s journals,1 and in the case of Proceedings further opportunities may arise in the years ahead to employ this format to showcase the journal’s unique and enduring contribution to the study of Ireland’s past. Another welcome development is the recent Read and Publish agreement between the Academy and IReL, the Irish e-resources licensing consortium for leading higher education institutions in Ireland, which...