People of Prehistoric Ireland Website Launched
The People of Prehistoric Ireland project has been funded through the INSTAR (Irish National Strategic Archaeological Research) initiative of the Heritage Council and is a collaborative project between UCC and QUB. The project investigators are Dr Eileen Murphy (QUB) and Dr Barra Ó Donnabháin (UCC) and the aim is to raise the visibility of the people of prehistoric Ireland through bioarchaeological research wherein evidence from human skeletal remains is combined with other archaeological data. This permits a more holistic understanding of past populations than traditional methods. This type of multidisciplinary approach can provide insights into a variety of key themes, such as social structure, burial practices, labour divisions, warfare, economy and migrations.
To date, the data derived from human remains have had a very limited impact on understandings of Irish prehistory. This situation has arisen because much of the osteoarchaeological information for Ireland is inaccessible, residing in the ‘grey’ literature, while published osteological reports are often relegated to an appendix within an excavation report. To address this issue, the first phase of the project involved the commissioning of a suite of new radiocarbon dates and the collation of important baseline data for collections of Irish prehistoric human skeletal remains from the Mesolithic to the late Iron Age.
The database of
prehistoric burials has recently been launched and this online resource can be
accessed at:
http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/INSTARpeopleofprehistoricIreland/
