Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

[** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the secure button at the end. 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 end of the post - each purchase earns a small amount of advertising revenue**] Today (22 nd August 2013) is a very special day for me! It’s my blog’s second birthday! The stats are pretty impressive: 65 published posts 106 blog followers +81,500 page views OK … it’s not the Huffington Post , but it’s not bad! I had intended to write something for the first birthday of the blog, but with all the commotion going on about the Drumclay Crannog , there just didn’t seem to be the time. This year I wanted to reflect on where the blog came from, what it’s managed to achieve, and where it may be going. At Nendrum, Co. Down August 2011 was a pretty dark time for me. In terms of my c...

[** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the button at the end. 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 end of the post - each purchase earns a small amount of advertising revenue**] There’s a story in my family about the time that late father bought a white car. It was in the early 1990s and no one had a white car. Well, that was the opinion of the rest of the family – I’d never seen one driving about! White cars are pretty distinctive – they’re the type of thing that one would definitely notice. We were quite confident that, despite my dad’s reassurances, we were the owners of one of the few white cars west of the Shannon. It may, perhaps, have even been unique. Or so we thought! We hadn’t had it long when we noticed other cars of the same colour out and about on the roads. Where had these cars been hid...

[**   If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the button at the end.  If you like this post, please consider re-sharing this post via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc.**] In my review of Anne Lynch’s recent publication Tintern Abbey, Co. Wexford: Cistercians and Colcloughs. Excavations 1982-2007 I touched on the finding that some of the women buried at the Abbey may have routinely carried heavy loads perched on their heads. To be specific, O’Donnabhain (2010, 116) notes that among the sexed females from the site, there was a marked increase in the rate of osteophytosis in the neck than among the males. He notes that this observation correlates with an elevated rate of arthritis of the cervical vertebrae. Taken together, it is postulated that these conditions are evidence for the routine carrying of loads on the head. No published references are cited in support of this thesis. Similarly, no parallels are drawn with any comparable e...