Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

[** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the secure button at the right. If you think it is interesting or useful, please re-share via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. To help keep the site in operation, please use the amazon search portal at the right - each purchase earns a small amount of advertising revenue **] On Friday the 6th of June 2014, I wandered along to the Pat Collins Reading Room at Waterman House, Hill St., Belfast to listen to the magnificent Dr Rowan McLaughlin speak about prehistory in Ulster. Specifically, he was intent on tackling the impact that data from excavations in the last decade-and-a-half have had on our understanding of prehistory in Ulster and Ireland generally. The MRB have been running a pretty excellent lecture series over the last while and have a full schedule of speakers lined up until the end of 2014 ( here ). I’ve not been to any of these before, but I felt that I wanted to make a special effort for th...

[**  If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the button at the end.  If you think the review is useful, please re-share via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. **] Preface: I am very happy to introduce our third guest writer, Rena Maguire, to the blog. Rena is an undergraduate student at QUB, in her second year. She is currently working on her undergraduate thesis: Iron Age horse harness Y pieces: function, manufacture and typologies. Robert M Chapple Being an archaeology and paleoecology undergraduate in QUB Belfast has perks, one of the best being the PCC Lunchtime Seminars organised by our department. I’ve personally found them invaluable to gain insights into sometimes quite obscure areas of archaeology. The guest lecturers are, as one would expect, at the cutting edge of their respective fields. Not least of these is Dr Seren Griffiths of the University of Cardiff , who gave a talk (March 20 2012) on Scatter Matters: ...

Alasdair Whittle, Frances Healy, & Alex Bayliss. Oxbow books, Oxford, 2011. 2 Volumes, xxxviii+992pp. ISBN 978-1-84217-425-8. £45 ( via Oxbow ) or £50.07 ( via Amazon ). [** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the button at the end.  If you think the review is useful, please re-share via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. **] For anyone with an interest in Irish and British prehistory and, specifically how the chronologies are assembled through radiocarbon dating, the publication of Gathering Time: Dating the Early Neolithic Enclosures of southern Britain and Ireland has been long anticipated and much, much desired. It is hard to overstate the importance of this book and how it has already rewritten our understanding of Neolithic enclosures, but it also stands as a template for other intensive studies to follow and emulate. The central importance of this study is not simply that it uses a lot of new radiocarbon dates for variou...