The Tale of the Axe by David Miles

Author:David Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780500773451
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2016-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Ireland

In Ireland most archaeologists were reluctant to accept the theory that mobile native hunter-gatherers gradually adopted Neolithic traits, and for a very good reason. For a long time they had been finding the traces of Neolithic houses, which seemed to mark settled farming communities. Neolithic houses turned up at Lough Gur, County Limerick, in the 1930s;18 across the Knockadoon peninsula in the 1940s and 1950s; and in the late 1960s at Ballynagilly, County Tyrone. Irish pollen diagrams also suggested that early Neolithic farmers had made significant impacts on the landscape: for example, there was evidence of permanent woodland clearance at Lough Sheeauns, Connemara.19

This was further supported by Seamus Caulfield’s revelation of Ireland’s earliest field system, preserved beneath up to 4 m (13 ft) of peatbogs at Céide, County Mayo.20 Lines of stone in a boggy field may not match Tutankhamun’s tomb but, to some of us, Seamus’s discovery was exciting stuff. Here were rectangular fields of several hectares bounded by stone walls up to 2 km (1¼ miles) long and 150 m (490 ft) or more apart: a regular chequerboard of fields principally for the purpose of raising stock and controlling grazing, which covered more than 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres). A dozen megalithic tombs were firmly planted around them. Pollen analysis 16 km (10 miles) to the south of the Céide Fields further indicates extensive Neolithic forest clearance for farming. Seamus suggested that several Neolithic communities – families or small clans – had cooperated in clearing the land from about 3700 BC, and then farmed it for several centuries. However, by about 2700 BC, blanket bog began to spread across the area, making the land unfit for intensive farming yet preserving the evidence of the first fields to be discovered in the British Isles and Ireland.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.