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5 July 2008 Findings on Tara were altered, says archaeologist LinkArchaeologists working on excavations on the controversial M3 motorway near Tara (co. Meath, Ireland) feared they would be 'sacked, blacklisted or bullied out of their profession' for not supporting the building of the chosen route, it was claimed. Speaking at the sixth World Archaeological Congress (WAC-6) at UCD, Maggie Ronayne, a lecturer at the Department of Archaeology at NUI, Galway, said that pressure was put on site directors and field teams by archaeologists employed by the National Roads Authority (NRA). "Lip service was paid to archaeology but archaeologists were used to destroy our heritage," said Ms Ronayne. "From the point of view of archaeology, the route chosen by the NRA was the least desirable and other routes were not properly considered because they were not profitable for developers." Ms Ronayne, who was an excavation director at the Tara valley site in Co. Meath, recently claimed that reports submitted to the NRA had been changed to support the motorway when in fact there was evidence against it. Miss Ronayne claimed she was told to 'change interpretations' so as to 'lessen to potential of numbers of sites'. And she said she was excluded from NRA meetings in which her evidence was altered before reports were passed on to the Government. She said she would be asking congress to pass a resolution calling for the re-routing of the M3. Ms Ronayne also said that the Minister for the Environment's decision to support the nomination of the Hill of Tara as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) world heritage site, given the construction of the motorway, could have serious implications for other sites worldwide and could be to the detriment of the local community. Discussing the archaeological impact from the building of the motorway, chief archaeologist, Brian Duffy said that it was impossible to consider building a major road anywhere in the country without it having an impact. Laura Grealish of TaraWatch, called on the congress to pass a resolution demanding a stop to work on the M3 in its present route. The High Court ruled in 2005 that none of the 38 areas examined before construction on the road began were national monuments and that the wider area around the Hill of Tara could not be considered a single national monument. Labour Environment spokeswoman Joanna Tuffy said: "I think we need to bring in a completely independent archaeological survey to make sure that anything that can be salvaged will be. At this stage we’ve already gone too far so we can’t turn back." TaraWatch will this week meet officials from the UNESCO group as it continues its campaign to have the Hill of Tara and surrounding lands declared a World Heritage Site. Sources: TaraWatch, Irish Mail on Sunday (29 June 2008), Independent (30 June 2008), Irish Times (3 July 2008)
Prehistoric human skull found at Isle of Man Airport June 28, 2008 Original LinkA PREHISTORIC human skull dating back 5,000 years together with remains relating to a Neolithic house have been discovered during works on the runway extension project at Ronaldsway. Experts from Oxford Archaeology called in to carry out the excavation have described the finds as being of 'national and possibly European significance'. They include remains of a building, a rubbish dump and funerary and mortuary finds, including stone cairns built over the top of commemoration pyres, as well as flint flakes and tools and fragments of ancient pottery vessels. Airport director Ann Reynolds said the discovery of the remains, found within a 60m stretch of a proposed parallel taxiway extension to the north east of the airfield was 'unlikely' to delay the runway project, scheduled for completion in December 2009.
Gormley: Viking settlement artefacts to remain buried Original LinkBy Caroline O’Doherty MANY secrets of one of the country’s most successful Viking communities are to remain buried after the Minister for the Environment decided on only limited excavation of the hidden settlement. A plan for research at the 1,000-year-old Woodstown site outside Waterford city is to be drawn up, but Minister John Gormley accepted the recommendation of a working group that the area not be fully excavated. Only a portion of the site, which was discovered during work on the Waterford city bypass in 2003, has been uncovered, and has yielded almost 6,000 artefacts, but it is not known how many more could remain. ( Read more...Collapse )
Ah c'mon already! Is there some unspoken war being waged against Irish prehistory? First it was Tara, now there is a port wanting to be build near the neolithic tombs? This is crap..or better said, bullocks! Archaeologist raises fears over new port site 29/3/2008 Original LinkDROGHEDA Port Company`s plans for a new deep water port at Bremore near Balbriggan have run into controversy after a leading Meath archaeologist said that the chosen site was of huge archaeological and historical significance and could have been the place where St Patrick first landed in Ireland. The company plans to build the major new port at a cost of €300 million. However, Meath archaeologist Professor George Eogan, known for his work on the Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth archaeological sites, says that the area contains a unified prehistoric cemetery of mounds that extends for over a mile, from Gormanston, north of the Delvin river, to Bremore, which is to the south of the river. The river marks the boundary between Meath and Fingal. ( Read more...Collapse )
16 March 2008 Loughcrew Equinox Dawn March 2008 LinkThe Irish Office of Public Works will have staff in attendance at Cairn T at Loughcrew (about 40 km from Newgrange, Co. Meath, Ireland) for the equinox illumination on the mornings of March 20th, March 21st and March 22nd 2008 from 6.15am until 7.30am. Admission to the Chamber of Cairn T is free of charge. As the chamber is quite small, only 5 or 6 people can be inside at a time. Visitors are requested to stay inside for only a few minutes so that everyone can get a chance to visit. Please note that it is very important that visitors dress warmly and are wearing stout shoes. The climb to the top of Carnbane East is very steep and can be slippery after rain or on frosty mornings. Source: Knowth.com (7 March 2008)
16 March 2008 LinkThe Irish National Roads Authority is insisting that construction work on the controversial M3 motorway in Co Meath (Ireland) is not damaging a protected national monument at Rath Lugh. ( Read more...Collapse )
3 March 2008 Heaney claims motorway near Tara desecrates sacred landscape LinkPoet and Nobel laureate Séamus Heaney has described the M3 motorway as a ruthless desecration of the sacred landscape around the Hill of Tara, in a BBC documentary broadcast last weekend. In the same programme, Dr Jonathan Foyle, British chief executive of the World Monuments Fund, which placed Tara on its endangered sites list last year, likened the motorway to the destruction by Afghanistan's Taliban regime in 2001 of the Bamiyan Buddhas. In his interview, Prof Heaney said the motorway "literally desecrates an area - I mean the word means to desacralise' and, for centuries, the Tara landscape and the Tara sites have been regarded as part of the sacred ground". Referring to the 1916 Proclamation having summoned the Irish people "in the name of the dead generations", he said: "If ever there was a place that deserved to be preserved in the name of the dead generations from pre-historic times... it was Tara". Prof Heaney added: "I suppose Tara means something equivalent to me to what Delphi means to the Greeks or maybe Stonehenge to an English person or Nara in Japan... It conjures up what they call in Irish dúchas, a sense of belonging a sense of patrimony, a sense of an ideal. The traces on Tara are in the grass, in the earth. They aren't spectacular like temple ruins in Greece but they are about origin, they're about beginning, they're about the mythological, spiritual source - something that gives the country its distinctive spirit." While it is unlikely that Prof Heaney's protest will halt the construction, his comments will fuel a growing debate about values in modern Ireland. The 1995 Nobel prizewinner recalled that WB Yeats, George Moore and Arthur Griffith had written a letter to The Irish Times complaining that the British Israelites, who thought the Ark of the Covenant was buried at Tara, were desecrating a 'consecrated landscape' by digging there. "So, I thought to myself, if a few holes in the ground made by amateur archaeologists was a desecration, what's happening to that whole countryside being ripped up [for the M3] is certainly a much more ruthless piece of work," Prof Heaney said. The Irish government has insisted the road is a vital piece of infrastructure to ease severe traffic congestion suffered by commuters in the satellite towns on the north and west of Dublin. According to Dr Foyle, the entire Tara complex "is the equivalent of Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey for its royal associations and Canterbury for its Christian associations all rolled into one" yet it was being destroyed "to shave 20 minutes off a journey time". The European Commission has begun legal proceedings against the Irish government over its decision last year to build through an archaeological find classed as a 'national monument' at Lismullen, close to Tara on the M3. Noel Dempsey, the Irish Minister for Transport, refused to participate in the programme. Sources: The Irish Times (1 March 2008), The Observer (2 March 2008), Times Online (3 March 2008)
3 March 2008 Archaeological treasures found in Ireland LinkA beautiful Bronze Age axe and a number of ancient burial grounds have been unearthed near Roscrea during the construction of the new Dublin-Limerick motorway in the area. The bronze axe was found in Camblin, south of Roscrea. Archaeologists say the find dates to the later Bronze Age and appears to have been hidden in a shallow pit and never recovered by the person who concealed it. Two Bronze Age enclosed settlements with two ancient houses were found near the N62 Templemore Road. The report said the concentration of ancient sites discovered near the present N62 Templemore Road at Camblin reflected the location of the ancient Roscrea to Cashel routeway. A total of 23 ancient burnt mounds have been unearthed during the excavation works, the largest at Camblin. These burnt mounds, which were used for cooking food, typically date to the Bronze Age. Hot stones were dropped into water-filled roughs to heat water to boil meat. The find at the Camblin burnt mound included an ancient wooden crane used for lifting water out of a local well. The crane, known as a Shaduff, is often linked to Ancient Egypt and North African and the Camlin Shaduff has been described as 'an exceptional discovery' and 'the first evidence for such a machine being used in Bronze Age Ireland'. At the Nenagh end of the scheme a group of Bronze Age cremations were found at Derrybane. One burial pit contained an upturned pottery urn. Source: The Nenagh Guardian (22 Febuary 2008)
Original LinkIrish stone of eloquence may be just Blarney Thu Feb 21, 2008 11:37am EST By Andras Gergely DUBLIN (Reuters Life!) - The millions who have made the pilgrimage to Blarney Castle in southern Ireland to kiss its "stone of eloquence" have put their lips on the wrong stone, according to a new book on the medieval fortress. ( Read more...Collapse )
Original LinkDoubts over Blarney Stone talked down By Tom Peterkin, Ireland Correspondent Last Updated: 4:11am GMT 21/02/2008 The custodians of the Blarney Stone yesterday disputed claims that pilgrims have been romancing the wrong stone. For centuries, travellers including Winston Churchill and Sir Walter Scott, have gone to Blarney Castle, Co Cork, in the hope that the supposed magical properties of the ancient stone will bestow on them the gift of the gab. But a book launched last night raised questions about the authenticity of the lump of bluestone built into the castle battlements, which attracts 400,000 tourists a year. The book was dismissed as a "load of blarney" by Sir Charles Colthurst, the castle's aristocratic owner. ( Read more...Collapse )
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