Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

In 2019 The Keeper of Irish Antiquities threatened to send both the Director of the National Museum of Ireland and the Chief Archaeologist after me, but neither had sufficient backbone to either approach me or reprimand their errant employee. Now it's the back end of 2024 and there's still no end in sight. So I'm thinking it's time to resolve this. For this reason, I'm calling on  Michael MacDonagh , Chief Archaeologist at the National Monuments Service of Ireland, and Lynn Scarff , Director of the National Museum of Ireland, as well as the entire Board of the NMI ( here ) to show some forlorn modicum of actual leadership and reach out to me with a workable solution. I would point out that such a solution must include a full apology and retraction of the curel, hurtful, and simply untrue remarks made by  The Keeper of Irish Antiquities; answers to the questions repeatedly posed but unanswered by The Keeper of Irish Antiquities; as well as payment for my time in do...

I’m giving up on this archaeology blog and from now on I’ll be using it to showcase my creative writing. Please read my latest piece of fiction: *             *             * Narrator: Let me take you back in time! The European: How far back? Narrator: All the way back! Well, back to the Bronze Age anyway … bump, click, whirr! Bang! And here we are in a place that will one day be known as Tullallen in the county that will eventually be called Louth.   We’re watching the digging of a ring ditch and the placement of a cremation burial at its centre. But we can’t stay here! … We have to go the couple of hundred metres to an area of land that will be called Mell. Here we see a rather strange, elongated ring ditch that is being filled up with burnt stone, and bone … so much bone! All of it burnt, but it includes both animal and human bone. Unfortunately...

How many days has it been since the Keeper of Irish Antiquities claimed that I was trying to defraud the Irish State when I was merely looking to be paid for work they directed me to undertake? My count up Countup Backstory: In a letter dated February 17 2019  Maeve Sikora , Keeper of Irish Antiquities said that  “It is completely unacceptable for you to attempt to extract public monies for discharging duties to which you signed up under the terms of the excavation licence.” She appears to believe that I am held in perpetual indentured servitude to her on the basis of a licence application I signed almost two decades ago and that I must carry out her orders on my own time and at my own expense, without expectation of payment for my services. I have repeatedly asked for a retraction of her egregious and wounding words and to offer a full, unconditional apology. To date, this has not been forthcoming. On November 27 2019 I published my account of m...

Regular readers of this blog may just have an inkling that I have a tendency towards the controversial and downright provocative. I realise that it’s hard to believe such notions from a blog that has published posts on both swastikas and cock rings (though not at the same time … yet). Still, it may come as a surprise that a little piece I published on February 6 2019 called ‘ Archaeological Archives for Sale! Buy it or bin it! ’ ruffled a few feathers. While I would urge you to go back and read this minor masterpiece, the TL;DR version is that under the guise of putting all the archaeological archives I still hold (but have never been funded to completion) up for sale, I wanted to highlight a real issue in Irish field archaeology. Simply put, this is the well-known fact that many excavation directors are forced to hold onto excavation archives in their own homes and at their own expense for many years, even past the point of any hope for their eventual publication. Some of wha...