Settling Down or Moving On?: The Settlement of the Irish Neolithic Landscape

Abstract

The Irish Neolithic spanned some 1,600 years from approximately 4,000 to 2,400 bc. At the beginning of this period, Ireland was a frontier land at the remote edge of Europe. The first farmers arriving from Britain or the continent found a heavily forested land teeming with wildlife, which was already home to scattered groups of hunter-gatherers who had coexisted with this world for centuries. As these farmers set about clearing the woodland to lay out their farms and construct the first robust rectangular (and, later, circular) houses, they would give rise to a society which in time would build a range of megalithic tombs, various earthen monuments such as henges and mounds, great ritual complexes spread over many acres like Bru na Boinne in County Meath, large ordered settlements, and massive fieldwall systems. The history of excavating Neolithic settlements dates back to the 1890s, when such pioneers as William J. Knowles began uncovering prehistoric coastal settlements. Over the following decades, the number of known sites slowly increased until Sean P. O Riordain’s landmark 1954 publication of the major Lough Gur settlement in County Limerick. During the remainder of the century, trained researchers excavated a small but steady number of house sites. The affluence of the 1990s triggered a surge in the number of sites excavated; this ended with the financial crisis of 2008. Nonetheless, the archaeological literature now includes hundreds of published house excavations. And yet, the Neolithic, one of the most researched periods in ancient Irish history, remains the subject of ongoing debate in Irish archaeology. The debate stems from many causes: the sheer wealth of sites; the realization that the Irish Neolithic differed radically from the Neolithic experience in neighboring Britain; and a changing emphasis in the research. Empirical data-driven analysis of sites has been succeeded by a greater desire to understand how people of the time actually lived and interacted with their world. A key issue in the debates—