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Review Article

Some ways forward along Irish roads

Olivia Lelong
Glasgow University Archaeological Research Division
University of Glasgow
Gregory Building, Lilybank Gardens
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
(Email: olivia.lelong@glasgow.ac.uk)

The route of the section of the N8 national road from Cashel in Co. Tipperary to Mitchelstown in Co. Cork, Ireland, shadows that of the Cork to Dublin gas pipeline, the first major infrastructure project in the Republic of Ireland to adopt, at the planning stage and during construction, a strategy of avoiding and minimising impact on known archaeology. That was nearly 30 years ago. The pipeline had far-reaching consequences for the management, at a national policy level, of the effects of development upon archaeology. It also demonstrated the enormous potential for encountering previously unknown sites in what appeared to be relatively blank rural areas, leading as it did to the discovery of 82 new sites where 14 had been known before. In its preface to In the shadow of the Galtees, the National Roads Authority (NRA) highlights the potential for road schemes and other major infrastructure projects to act as agents of archaeological recovery rather than destruction.

This, however, depends upon the quality of the information retrieved and the ways in which it is disseminated. All excavation is the collection of data for the purpose of explaining the past: we excavate in order to understand how sites formed through people's actions and what their actions meant in the context of their daily lives, their social relations and their beliefs about the world. All excavation is therefore research, and higher level interpretation is not the preserve of academic archaeologists, but of archaeologists everywhere. We collect data in order to construct archaeological narratives, and this should have implications both for the content and the form of our publications (cf. Joyce 2002).

The investigation of long slices through landscapes in advance of road schemes presents certain challenges as well as opportunities. It opens a partial and artificially limited window onto traces of people's activities in the past. These would of course have extended well beyond the edges of the road corridor; they were linked to other routines that reached out into surrounding spaces. Therefore a road project presents an opportunity not just to recover data about the past through the excavation of individual sites, but to examine how these illuminate what people did through time in the landscape that contains them.

The galloping pace of infrastructure development in the Republic of Ireland over the last decade or so has seen the excavation of hundreds of archaeological sites. The close integration of archaeological considerations into planning for national road schemes, with the whole process managed by the National Roads Authority, has been of enormous benefit to cultural heritage across the country. If the management of similar projects has been less joined-up in the United Kingdom, infrastructure development still continues to generate considerable knowledge through archaeological investigation along linear routes. For Ireland, the achievements of road scheme archaeology can be evaluated from three quite different volumes, containing varying amounts of information achieved at different scales of analysis, briefly reviewed here.

County Meath

Places along the way, the fifth in the NRA monograph series dealing with road schemes, presents interim reports on eight of the most important sites excavated along the route of the M3 Clonee to North of Kells, running between Dunboyne and Navan in Co. Meath through the landscape that incorporates the Hill of Tara. All were written while post-excavation analysis was still underway. The volume is divided into nine chapters, eight of which present excavation findings while the ninth reviews the documentary evidence for medieval rural settlement in Meath. One chapter covers two funerary sites at Ardsallagh that were in use from the Bronze Age to the early medieval period, including Iron Age ring-ditches enclosing burials. Several cover the excavations of early medieval ringforts and demonstrate the need to examine their environs for associated features such as the paddocks and fields uncovered outside them. One chapter is devoted to the large early Iron Age ceremonial complex at Lismullin, which raised controversy about the road when it was first discovered and is now a National Monument.

As a collection of interim statements, this is an impressive endeavour. The archaeological work along the M3 was carried out within a formal research framework, developed in consultation with academic and professional archaeologists, to maximise the knowledge generated in the excavations and ensure that it would be interpreted in context. Judging the success of this endeavour must of course await full publication of the 167 excavations, but the quality of these interim statements is promising. As the fieldwork was proceeding, the project employed archaeologists to research the emerging results and produce research papers that would help field directors interpret the sites as they were excavating them; several chapters are co-authored by these researchers. The foresight of this approach seems to have paid dividends: it shows the benefits of explicitly weaving informed interpretations into the process of fieldwork, rather than allowing the deferral of higher-level interpretation (which can happen by default rather design under time pressures in advance of construction).

Together the chapters contribute to a sense of how the occupation and perceptions of the area changed over time; several papers touch upon the interaction between past and present, documented by the ways people inhabited the landscape and constructed significant places with reference to earlier monuments. The planned suite of period-based publications in the NRA monograph series, including one volume dealing solely with the Lismullin complex, should give ample scope for developing these themes to maximum potential.

In the shadow of the Galtees

From 2002 to 2007 nearly the entire length of the 150km-long N8 national road, linking Ballycuddahy in Co. Laois (100km south-west of Dublin), with Dunkettle near Cork, was subjected to archaeological investigation in advance of construction. In the shadow of the Galtees is the first monograph to be published on the results.

The volume begins traditionally enough with a short explanation of the project methodology. The N8 remains unique among Irish road schemes in that it involved all the relevant contractors, including archaeologists, from the early stages of the design. For the cultural heritage this involved a comprehensive desk-based study, walk-over survey and geophysical surveys in support of an Environmental Impact Statement, followed by field evaluation and resulting in the identification of 63 sites along a stretch of 41km.

The first chapter briefly reviews the archaeological and historical context of the road corridor, with explanations of the main trends during periods of prehistory and history aimed at the lay reader and supported by a glossary. Chapters 2 to 6 present the results of excavation by period. In each chapter, accounts of excavations are grouped together as settlement sites, burial sites, industrial sites and fulachtaí fia (burnt mounds) with succinct descriptions of the excavation results. Human remains, environmental and faunal evidence and artefacts from all the excavations are treated together in three following chapters. A short concluding chapter summarises the main patterns in settlement and burial practice by period; while the findings spanned the Neolithic to the post-medieval period, the majority dated to the mid second millennium BC.

In the preface, the authors state their ambition to 'allow the findings ... to be integrated and examined in relation to their particular chronology, their cultural use and their place, in time, in their landscape.' It is difficult to see how they have actively sought to achieve this. The individual chapters essentially present descriptive summaries of the detail contained in the full excavation reports, which are contained in an accompanying CD. Artefacts from all the sites are discussed together, set apart from the discussion of their contexts of manufacture, use, discard and so on. Likewise, the presentation of human remains, faunal and macroplant analyses in separate chapters seems to abstract them from the acts that originally integrated them with the archaeology. Though treating these kinds of material together allows specialists to develop discussions of certain themes (such as changes in burial practices and agricultural regimes across the surrounding landscape), generally speaking the volume is very light on synthesis. It presents details of excavated features and material according to traditional categories rather than attempts to understand them as a whole in terms of the practices that left these traces. This is an opportunity missed for greater synthesis, which could have drawn on the details rather than rehearsed them.

If the volume is pedestrian in its approach and content, it does go some way to achieving its aims by presenting highlights of such a large body of data between two covers. There is certainly scope for more sophisticated and imaginative interpretations of the changing inhabitation of this landscape, using the rich body of evidence from the N8 excavations. This workmanlike overview offers a good starting point.

County Down

Archaeological investigations along the A1 Dualling Scheme presents the results of excavation of several concentrations of archaeological remains along a 10km stretch of road between Loughbrickland and Beech Hill, Co. Down in Northern Ireland. The volume is arranged chronologically, working through the evidence for early Neolithic houses, later Neolithic to Bronze Age campsites and pits, a Bronze Age barrow cemetery and various other ring-ditches, cremations (including an Iron Age example) and several burnt mounds. It adopts a pyramid approach: the evidence for each period from a particular excavation is presented in descriptive, feature-by-feature detail, with summaries of specialist analyses of material. The discussion of the period then proceeds to higher-level interpretation of those specific findings, including treatment of broader trends and parallels, both chronologically and geographically. The third part of the volume contains full reports on the analyses of artefacts, environmental evidence and human remains.

The pyramid only climbs to a certain point, however. The drawing back from detailed description to interpret particular archaeological remains in context adds solidity to the overall structure, but the authors have left it rather flat at the top: the concluding chapter is barely more than two pages long. This would have been the place to draw together the detailed discussions into a substantial, more deeply considered interpretation of how the landscape around the road scheme was inhabited during millennia of prehistory.

Both NRA volumes (Places along the way and In the shadow of the Galtees) are visually appealing — clearly set out in readable layout, with numerous good colour photographs and maps and line drawings that use colour to aid interpretation — and this quality of production is an asset of a series which will see many more reports emerge. Loughbrickland to Beech Hill on the other hand is a traditional British Archaeological Report, with text-heavy layout punctuated by simple line drawings and rather muddy monochrome photographs, relieved occasionally by colour photographs and plans.

Given that fieldwork concluded in 2005 for the Northern Ireland scheme and 2007 for the others, these volumes have been produced at commendable speed. In the case of the NRA monographs, this is in accordance with the agency's policy of making information from pre-construction programmes accessible as quickly as possible, an aim supported by their on-line database of sites (http://www.nra.ie/Archaeology/NRAArchaeologicalDatabase). If In the shadow of the Galtees and Loughbrickland to Beech Hill represent the full publication of these excavations, as they seem to, then opportunities for more meaningful analysis and synthesis within their covers have been missed. That said, their detailed content can form the basis for other synthetic works that take interpretation of the landscapes further. They are decent, if not imaginative, models for the rapid dissemination of the large amounts of data generated on such projects.

The huge and complex sets of data produced in large infrastructure projects merit the most interesting treatment we can give them. The publications briefly presented here — particularly those in the excellent NRA monograph series — demonstrate that archaeologists, curators and developers can work together to create strategies for fieldwork, publication and dissemination to maximise the benefits to culture, society and economy. With all the publications yet to emerge from the numerous excavations along road schemes in Ireland and elsewhere, let us hope that their authors engage fully with the knowledge those projects have generated and endeavour to make the most of their potential for interpretation.

Reference

• JOYCE, R.A. 2002. The languages of archaeology: dialogue, narrative, and writing. Chichester: Blackwell.

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