Excavating Death: Newford, Ballygarraun and Carrowkeel

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ireland Multi-period burials

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The Galway to Ballinasloe N6 road scheme in the Republic of Ireland was 56km long: metre for metre, one of the largest archaeological projects anywhere in the world. The archaeology found along the scheme has shed new light on the treatment of the dead at crucial stages of Irish history. Brendon Wilkins explains the evidence.

Newford, Ballygarraun, and Carrowkeel

The massive scale of the N6 road scheme project was typical of the Irish ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom – a golden age for archaeo-logical discovery, paid for by an annual road building budget esti-

mated in 2005 at €1.5bn. Thirty-six sites were excavated along the road scheme, ranging from the prehistoric to the early modern period. Over the winter of 2005-2006, on behalf of Headland Archaeology Ltd, I excavated a quarter of these sites, nearly every one a mortuary site.

There were 13 funerary sites discovered on the N6, including one late Neolithic and one early Bronze Age cremation site, four Bronze Age cre-mation sites, one Bronze Age funerary pyre, one Iron Age cremation, one multi-period cemetery,

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WINNER 2010 awards for the presentation of heritage research

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Human skeletons often reveal more about the life of an individual than their death. Osteo-archaeology can assess how long people lived, their sex, diet, stature, and whether they suf-fered illness or disease – but the scope of funerary archaeology is much broader. Mortuary behav-iour is not just concerned with the dead, but also the living people who buried them. A funeral can involve many activities, such as ceremony and feasting, which may have been more signifi-cant to the mourners than the actual moment of burial but which leave only faint traces in the archaeological record. Knowledge of the anthro-pology of ritual is essential in order to understand a funerary site. Archaeologists must look beyond both dirt archaeology and modern attitudes towards death in order to breathe life back into mortuary remains.

The Newford Bronze Age burial

In prehistoric Ireland, cremation was the usual process for disposal of the dead, and the material remains are at best fragmentary. In many cases,

one Early Medieval transitionary burial, two Early Medieval cemeteries, and one Post Medieval chil-dren’s burial ground. This feature will focus on just three of those sites: the Bronze Age pyre at Newford, a solitary burial of the Early Christian period from Ballygarraun West and the early Medieval ‘cíllín’ cemetery at Carrowkeel. These sites reveal a multi-tude of different cultural expressions for mortuary behaviour in prehistoric and Medieval Ireland. With such a great time span to get to grips with, we might begin by asking: how do we learn about early societies from the way in which they treat death?

Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age

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cremation pits do not contain enough material to be a complete skeleton, and we must assume then that only a token part of the cremated remains are buried. It is not unusual to find cremation pits (where remains are collected from a pyre and deposited in pits or funerary vases) but it is rare to find any evidence of the actual pyre. Remark-ably, as well as finding token cremation burials at Newford (pits containing a miniscule quantity of burnt bone and pyre debris), we also discovered a Late Bronze Age funerary pyre dating to between 1000-800 BC, one of only a handful of such sites ever found in Ireland. Token cremation burials are a typical feature, but normally contain such small quantities of bone that many archaeologists have questioned what actually happens to the bone after burning. Here, the unique evidence found at Newford provides a rare insight.

The pyre had been constructed above a large pit, 3.5m long by 2m wide and 0.75m deep, which would have aided in the updraft of flames. The pyre superstructure would have been con-structed from stacked firewood, with the body laid on top. This structure had collapsed into the pit after burning, depositing about 700g of human bone, including fragmentary remains of finger bones, teeth and skull. Modern cremation techniques result in the production of between 1k and 3k of human bone from an adult body, and we estimate that archaeological contexts should yield a similar quantity of burnt bone. Using these estimates, it is clear that bone had been removed from the Newford pyre following burning. Only 15g of bone was recovered from cremation pits on site, suggesting that the rest of the charred remains may have been destined for non-funerary uses.

You only die twice

By carefully observing funerary customs in dif-ferent types of societies all over the world, archae-ologists can broaden the scope of their analysis. The anthropologist Robert Hertz used evidence from contemporary traditional societies in Borneo, observing that funerary rituals can be divided into two separate actions – primary and secondary burial rites – a distinction that high-lights the crucial difference between ‘physical’ and ‘social’ death. Primary burial rites take place soon after physical death, and in Borneo this entailed leaving the body to decay completely. Once the bones were de-fleshed, they were then removed to their final resting place, where sec-ondary burial rites could be performed. Hertz argued that what happens physically to the body after death symbolised beliefs about the progress of the soul. Just as the decaying corpse is excluded from the the world of the living, so the soul of the dead person cannot immediately enter the society of the dead: they are in an intermediate state. Whilst primary rites may take place soon after an individual has physically died, social death will only occur after secondary burial rites and a successful completed funerary ritual.

Cremated human bone has been found often on Irish Bronze Age settlement sites, in house foundations and ritual pits, leading some archaeologists to argue that it was being used as a ‘social artefact.’ This seems like a bizarre prac-tice to us now: how could burnt bone be used in social contexts? But think of all the complex legal arrangements that have to be made when our own loved ones die. Death ruptures the fabric of social relations and it is vital, following a funeral,

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aBoVe The pyre following excavation at Newford, showing the large pit on which firewood would have been stacked. inSet One of 14 token cremation pits containing miniscule quantities of burnt bone. aBoVe leFt Reconstruction of a pyre made from stacked firewood, with the body laid on top.

pyre constructed above pit here

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that bonds are maintained and extended. By using human remains as a social artefact, they could forge the new relationships through cer-emonial exchange between different groups. Land and belongings could be redistributed, and claims to ancestral territory legitimised through deliberate deposition of these remains in specific locations.

An un-Christian burial at Ballygarraun West

Our second unusual burial belongs to the Early Christian period: but how far had Christianity really penetrated Irish life? In this age of sci-ence and scepticism, ghostly apparitions can be explained away to nothing. However, as the pre-historic sites discovered on the N6 demonstrate, our modern-day funerary behaviour is very dif-ferent from a world where death was experienced as a profound encounter with another world. The great transition came in the Early Medieval period, when those encounters were challenged by new beliefs that sought to distance themselves from the pagan past and monopolise the passage of the soul.

Early Medieval Ireland (AD 500-850) is also known as the early Christian period, as Christi-anity had become the dominant religion by the 6th century AD. Christian beliefs may well have been the official orthodoxy, but the N6 funerary

sites indicate that in some places pagan burial customs were much slower to change.

This is well illustrated by the single, isolated burial excavated at Ballygarraun West by John Lehane. The grave was radiocarbon dated to between the early-5th and late-7th centuries AD, a transitional period when Christianity was expanding and consolidating its position as the dominant faith. Christians always buried their dead in consecrated cemeteries, yet this was a single, isolated burial. The grave was defined by a simple east-west cut 1.5m long and 0.8m wide, and contained the remains of an adult female, estimated to be about 40 or 50 years old on the basis of teeth and bone degeneration. However, other features of the inhumation were distinctly pagan. She was lying on a bed of partially car-bonised plant material of alder and hazelwood, together with cereal grains such as black bind-weed, barley and wheat. This had been scattered into the grave before receiving the body, and a piece of naturally shed antler had been placed over her pubic region.

Two aspects of the burial might be consid-ered Christian. The positioning of the body as a supine east-west inhumation is usually regarded as a Christian practice, combing the belief that

BeloW Excavating the Carrowkeel cemetery on a cold winter morning.

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An early cíllín at Carrowkeel

Our third interesting burial site was a cemetery at Carrowkeel, which had all the hallmarks of a cíllín (pronounced ‘ki-lleen’). In later and Post Medieval Ireland, unbap-tised children were not permitted to be buried in consecrated ground, but were interred in cíllín cemeteries - a practice that continued right up into the mid-1960s. The origin of this practice is often assumed to be asso-ciated with the adoption of Christianity, and the Medieval Church’s doc-trine of Limbus Infantus. Baptism was the necessary threshold through which all must pass before entering Christian society, without which incorporation into the society of the dead was impossible, and thus unbaptised children, together with suicides and murderers, could not be buried in consecrated burial grounds, but had separate burial grounds of their own, called cíllíni.

Cíllíní burial grounds, also known as ceallúnach, callragh and caldragh, are unique to Ireland, and are most commonly found in the western coun-ties. Generally dated to the Post Medieval period, cíllíní are most often located within Early Medi-eval settlement enclosures that had fallen out of use. They are also frequently associated with boundaries in the landscape, such as ringforts, crossroads, cliffs, rivers, tidal markers, wells or other clandestine places. A recent analysis of similar sites in County Kerry revealed that 51% of cíllíní were sited within the confines of a pre-existing archaeological monument; 22.6% were associated with Medieval church sites and 16% within ringforts and cashels. The word cíllín itself was thought to derive from the Latin cella, meaning little church or oratory, probably because these sites had been chosen because of their earlier religious association.

By the end of the 12th century, records show that baptisms were performed at the earliest opportunity. The concept of ‘original sin’ main-tained that the infant was the fruit of carnal

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aBoVe Excavating the earliest burial in the cemetery at Carrowkeel: an adolescent burial in a semi-flexed position, in the terminus of a ditch which partially enclosed the cemetery. leFt Three intercutting burials of children, dating to the earliest phase at Carrowkeel, c.AD 650-850.

the dead will rise again, with an alignment with the orientation of the rising sun during Easter-tide. A lack of grave goods is also interpreted as a changing conception of the afterlife from a pagan to a Christian world-view. However, analysis of other sites excavated in Ireland suggests that positioning the body in this manner is actually a Roman burial custom that was adopted inde-pendently of Christianity, so there must be other supporting evidence in order to determine the religion of an individual.

Whilst the meaning of the Ballygarraun West burial remains elusive, it provides intriguing evidence that the supremacy of the Christian authorities was not yet above challenge. Burning of grain is known from slightly later Anglo-Saxon burials in England, and is interpreted as a sym-bolic practice associated with purification, an action condemned by the ecclesiastical authori-ties. If the performance of these rituals was a chal-lenge to the contemporary Church, the isolated location of burial was another bone of conten-tion. Monks, ecclesiastical tenants and sections of the wider community were being encouraged to recognise their affiliation in death through burial at ecclesiastical sites, though a large cem-etery site excavated on the N6 indicates a con-tinued use of ancestral burial grounds late into the Medieval period.



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settlements were being constructed in Ireland. Most fall into one of two categories: ringforts and cashels, which are secular farmsteads of cir-cular plan, and ecclesiastical settlements, that often have larger, less regular but usually curvi-linear enclosures. Carrowkeel was a type of early Christian burial enclosure generally referred to as settlement/cemetery. Used for occupation as well as burial, these sites are similar to ecclesiastical settlements, but without church buildings.

Choosing this ancestral site rather than the offi-cial church burial yard was a deliberate strategy by a group, probably bound by familial and kin-ship ties, to re-establish their relationship with their ancestors and guarantee connection with the land. Burial within a settlement/cemetery would have been a visible marker of ownership of the land. As Christianity and the church estab-lished a monopoly on salvation of the soul in Ire-land, the dead were taken instead for churchyard burial and ancestral burial grounds like Carrow-keel declined in importance and eventually fell out of use.

Suffer the little children

An in-depth analysis of the cemetery popula-tion has provided some very interesting results regarding the origins of segregating children for burial in Ireland. This was a practice thought to have originated in the Late Medieval period, but the burials at Carrowkeel point to a much earlier date. About 89% of the burials were infants, juve-niles and foetuses, barely buried beneath the top-soil. During the excavation, we quite reasonably assumed (given the lack of clear grave cuts) that these were cíllín burials; our working hypothesis was that Carrowkeel was an Early Medieval enclo-sure, which had been reused in the Post Medieval period as a cíllín. It has actually turned out to be far more interesting: radiocarbon dating on over

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BeloW These images, based on site plans and geophysics results, show how the cemetery at Carrowkeel eventually fell out of use and was reclaimed by the landscape; it was not completely forgotten, however, and its boundaries were respected by farming and other activities.im

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lust; thus, without removing the stain of sin from their souls, dead children would be denied entry to heaven, and remain for all eternity in a realm between heaven and hell referred to as Limbo or limbo infantus. The 12th century Church reformation had also led to the abandon-ment of many ecclesiastical sites throughout the country, and as these sites fell out of use and were marginalised in the contemporary landscape, they were perceived as a physical embodiment of Limbo, in common with other abandoned mon-uments from the past.

The hilltop cemetery at Carrowkeel appears to be such a cíllín. It comprises 132 burials, of which an overwhelming number are children’s graves. Measuring 65m x 47m, it was defined by a 1.5m deep ditch. Roughly two-thirds of the site was excavated in total, with the cemetery area con-tinuing beyond the limit of excavation. It is situ-ated on the western brow of an east-west ridge of higher ground, overlooking an Early Medieval settlement, consisting of cashels (a stone wall of rough stone enclosing a settlement or church) a souterrain, house sites, and a field system.

Carrowkeel was founded in the 7th century AD. At this time, a great number of enclosed

aBoVe Site plan of Carrowkeel, showing location and detail of the cemetery area.


a third of the burials has shown that the segre-gation of children’s graves began in the earliest phase of the site, from about AD 700-1100. When these dates came back, it became clear that we had to revise our assumptions.

Cíllíní are sensitive subjects; some were in use into living memory and are strictly off-limits, others have been neglected, forgotten and bull-dozed to make way for modern development. Very few of these sites have been comprehensively dated and therefore may be much older than we think. And, perhaps the way we have categorised these cemetery populations into foetus, peri-nate, infant, and younger child are also blinding us to what is most important about these sites. Medical technologies and modern attitudes towards parenthood focus development of the ‘person’ into clearly defined stages; in the past, it was precisely the lack of definition of children as full social beings that marked them out for sepa-rate burial treatment. How can children join the society of the dead if they haven’t yet officially joined the society of the living? Cíllín cemeteries are as much about social death as they are about physical death. The infant segregation in the Early Medieval period at Carrowkeel shows that divisions were already being drawn between non-adults and other individuals, long before the Late Medieval practice of cíllín burial that occurred after Christianity bedded down as the main faith and these divisions became doctrine.

Later generations continued to use the cem-etery at Carrowkeel intermittently until the end of the 15th century. Ancestral cemeteries were eclipsed but not forgotten, and it is no coinci-dence that they were predominantly used for the burial of children. Surviving at the edge of tilled fields and pasture, these abandoned enclo-sures were marginal places in the landscape: ideal repositories for the remains of the troublesome dead who lay beyond normal social categories or

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A schematic diagram of the cemetery at Carrowkeel, indicating the phases of burial based on radiocarbon dating and grave cuts.

who, through their own deeds, had offended the social order.

As post-excavation work is finished and these sites are prepared for final publication, we might conclude by asking: what did we gain by waking the dead from their eternal slumber? In 2008, there were 279 road traffic deaths in Ireland, and the sight of bouquets of flowers taped to railings and lamp-posts is now a familiar site to many motorists. The most compelling argument for building roads is the amount of lives that will be saved; there’s nothing safer than a long straight road, so by acting intelligently, death can be cheated. In addition to building safer roads, per-haps another way death can be cheated is through archaeology. Many hundreds, even thousands, of years after the final reckoning, we can use scien-tific methods and theories to unlock knowledge of life and death. In excavating the dead and for-gotten, archaeology is one tangible way in which personal loss becomes society’s gain. Ca

SourCe

Brendon WilkinsSenior Project ManagerWessex [email protected]

aCknoWledgementS

Sincere thanks to Headland Archaeology (Ireland) Ltd, and Jerry O’Sullivan of the National Roads Authority, acting on behalf of the Galway County Council.

Phase 1 AD 650-850

Phase 2 AD 850-1050

Phase 3 AD 1050-1250

Phase 4 AD 1250-1450

Grave Cuts

Wilkins, B and Lalonde, S. ‘An Early Medieval settlement/cemetery at Carrowkeel, Co. Galway’, Journal of Irish Archaeology, Vol. XVII, pp57-83.

Further reading

Excavating Death: Newford, Ballygarraun and Carrowkeel

Documents

Transcript of Excavating Death: Newford, Ballygarraun and Carrowkeel