Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500

8/3/2019 Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500

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As an archaeologist, I occasionally have to excavate human remains, and it can be vivid and

unsettling. I sometimes wonder whether the ethical professionalism surrounding me on site

(not to mention the unruly gallows humour in the site hut) is also an attempt to insulate

our modern sensibilities from what would otherwise be a truly frightening experience

to face the dead and, by reflection, our own mortality.

The M6 Galway to Ballinasloe motorway scheme was 56 km long, and metre for metre

that equates to one of the largest archaeological projects anywhere in the world. Thirty-six

sites were excavated in total, and these ranged in date from the prehistoric to the earlymodern period. I directed excavations on a quarter of those for Headland Archaeology Ltd,

and for some reason nearly every site I excavated was of a funerary nature (Illus. 1).

I suppose it was to be expected. If archaeologists study the material remains of the human

pastthe things that people left behindthen it stands to reason that sooner or later they

will come face to face with the mortal remains of the people who created that past in the

first place.

The funerary sites excavated on the M6 included one Late Neolithic and Early Bronze

Age cremation site, four Bronze Age cremation sites, one Bronze Age funerary pyre, one

Iron Age cremation, one multiperiod cemetery, one early medieval transitionary burial, two

early medieval cemeteries and one post-medieval childrens burial ground.

Learning from the dead

In a moment we will discuss two of those sites in detaila Late Bronze Age pyre at

Newford1 and an early medieval cemetery at Carrowkeel2 (Illus. 2)but before then Id

like to pose the question of how we learn from the dead. One of the great paradoxes of

funerary archaeology is that human skeletons often reveal more about the life of an

individual than about their death. Osteoarchaeology uses scientific techniques developed in

modern medicine to assess how long people lived, their sex, diet, stature and whether they

suffered illness or disease. This is valuable information in itself, but the scope of funeraryarchaeology is much broader. Mortuary behaviour is concerned not just with the dead but

also with the living people who buried them, and this evidence is harder to obtain. A

funeral can involve many activities whose traces are ephemeral and fragmentary, such as

ceremony and feasting, and which may have held more significance for the contemporary

mourners than the single moment when the remains were deposited in the ground.

To broaden the scope of their analysis and offset the potential for biases, archaeologists

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7. Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500Brendon Wilkins

1 NGR 149078, 226736; height 26 m OD; excavation reg. no. E2437; Ministerial Direction no. A024.2 NGR 159326, 223949; height 45 m OD; excavation reg. no. E2046; Ministerial Direction no. A024.


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Past Times, Changing Fortunes

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LateNeolithic/

EarlyBronzeAge

TreanbaunI

BronzeAge

TreanbaunII

Rathglass

CurraghMoore

Newford

Late

BronzeAge

Ballykeeran

IronAge

Deerpark

Multiperiod

cemetery

Cross

Early

medieval

TreanbaunII

Carrowkeel

BallygarraunWest

Post-medieval

Mackney

Illus.1

Thedistributiono

ffunerarysitesexcavatedontheM6motorwayscheme(JonathanMillar,Headland

ArchaeologyLtd).


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use anthropological models to understand the diversity of funerary remains. These concepts

have been developed by carefully observing funerary customs in different types of societies

all over the world. This breadth of knowledge is vital because we study the past not to

mirror our own behaviour but to understand past societies in terms of their own lived

experiences. By developing a nuanced understanding of what has been called a structured

choreography common to all mortuary rituals, archaeologists can breathe life back into

mortuary remains from both the near and the distant past.

Modern sensibilities

Perhaps this can be illustrated by comparing the differences between how the dead aretreated in modern Britain and Ireland. Cremation is the usual funerary rite in modern

Britain, practised by 72% of the population (Parker Pearson 1999, 41), with a memorial

service in church followed by burning in a crematorium, usually zoned at the edge of town.

But in Ireland burial is the usual funeral rite. In its traditional form this is preceded by a

wakea mourning custom requiring the corpse to be constantly attended. Beginning at

the time of death and continuing throughout the night, there is music, food and drink, and

stories are told to celebrate the life of the deceased. During the crucial hours of darkness,

the superstitious may insist that all mirrors be turned around, that windows are opened for

two hours and then firmly closed, and that the women of the house maintain their

keeninga vocal lamentation over the corpse. The following afternoon the body is

Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500

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!(

!(

!(

Carrowkeel

0 2 41 km

Newford

Illus. 2Location of the funerary sites at Newford and Carrowkeel, Co. Galway (based on the Ordnance

Survey Ireland Discovery Series map).


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removed to the church, where it spends the night before burial, bringing to an end a cycle

of grief with what psychologists would call closure.

At face value these differences could be explained as a consequence of different

religious beliefs, but history shows that cremation was only legalised in Britain in 1884. The

widespread adoption of cremation was driven by social changes related to industrial

urbanisation, awareness of hygiene and medicalised attitudes to the corpse. Whilst it may be

possible to identify these trends from a range of historical sources from the recent past, how

are we to explain deeper traditions like the Irish wake, whose origins stretch further back

than our records allow? What connection could this possibly have with the sites we will be

discussing laterthe Bronze Age pyre at Newford, or the early medieval cemetery at

Carrowkeel?

Rites of passage

In 1908 Arnold van Gennep published The Rites of Passage, and this was a turning point in

our understanding of the ritual process. His assessment was that there are rituals common

to all culturesinitiation, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth and deaththat follow a

distinctive pattern. These rites of passage are in effect social milestones, marking the

otherwise intangible crossing of biological thresholds (such as the passage from childhood

to adulthood). Applying this model to funerary archaeology enables us to extend the scope

of our analysis beyond the moment when physical remains were deposited in the ground.

Rites of passage conform to a tripartite scheme (Illus. 3) characterised by pre-liminal rites


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htaedlaicoShtaedlacisyhP

sthgirlairubyradnoceSsthgirlairubyramirP

Death and preparing

the corpselairuBlavomerdnaekaW

egatslanoitisnarTnoitarapesfosetiRCeremonies of incorporation into

the new state or world

setirlanimil-tsoPsetirlanimiLsetirlanimil-erP

Illus. 3The ritual process (Jonathan Millar, Headland Archaeology Ltd).


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(rites of separation), liminal rites (transitional stage) and post-liminal rites (ceremonies of

incorporation into the new state or world). In a traditional Irish funeral, the burial would

be performed as a post-liminal rite, but the wake takes place during the transitional or

liminal phase. The word liminal derives from the Latin limin, meaning threshold; itsignifies a dangerous and ambiguous period, perhaps explaining why it is customary during

the wake to maintain a constant vigil over the corpse. Excluded from the society of the

living but not yet included into the society of the dead, the deceased individual is separated

from their past but not yet established in their future identity. They are free from all social

categories, and this draws forth a crucial distinction for funerary archaeology between

physical and social death.

To the modern mind this may sound fanciful. In this age of science and scepticism

ghostly apparitions can be explained away to nothing, but, as the prehistoric sites discovered

on the M6 demonstrate, the origins of our modern-day funerary behaviour lie in a world

where manifestations of death were experienced as profound encounters with another

world, seldom seen and never entered by the living.

Prehistoric death

As we turn now to the archaeological evidence, remember these two concepts (primary and

secondary burial rites, and physical and social death) and we shall examine whether they

can help to bring the data to life. The prehistoric sites excavated on the M6 show that

cremation was the usual process of disposal of the dead. We usually only find cremation pits,

where remains were collected from the pyre and deposited into pits in the ground or

funerary vases as part of secondary burial rites. But at Newford we also discovered a Late

Bronze Age funerary pyre, one of only a handful of such sites found in Europe. This was

really significant for usthe pyre was part of the primary burial rites, and as such it

represents a real breakthrough in our understanding.

It had been constructed above a large pit, 3.5 m long and 2 m wide, that may have aided

in the updraft of flames (Illus. 4). The pyre superstructure would have consisted of stacked

firewood, with the body laid on top (Illus. 5). This had then collapsed into the pit after

burning, and about 700 g of human bone were foundfragmentary remains of finger

bones, teeth and skull bones. There were also funerary features more typical of this period

in Irelandcremation pits or token cremation burials dating from 1114918 cal. BC (UB-

7401; see Appendix 1 for details) that contained such small quantities of bone that

researchers have begun to question what was happening to cremated remains if they werenot all ending up in the ground (Illus. 6). Here, too, the Newford pyre can shed some light.

Modern cremation techniques result in the production of between 1 kg and 3 kg of

human bone from an adult body, and from this it has been estimated that archaeological

contexts should yield a similar quantity of burnt bone. Using these modern correlates we

can infer that at Newford bone had been removed from the pyre following burning. If only

a token quantity of this material was then deposited into cremation pits on the site, the rest

of the bone may have been destined for what we now assume to have been non-funerary

contexts.

Cleary (2005) outlined the evidence for the occurrence of human bone on Irish

Bronze Age settlement sites, in house foundations and ritual pits, suggesting that it was


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Illus. 4The pyre

at Newford, Co.

Galway, following

excavation, showing

the large pit onwhich firewood

would have been

stacked (Headland

Archaeology Ltd).

direction of airflow

ash and slag formed here

direction of airflow

cooler

hotter

(body)

Illus. 5A reconstruction of a pyre, constructed of stacked firewood, with the body laid on top (Jonathan

Millar, Headland Archaeology Ltd).


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deployed as a social artefact. This sounds like a bizarre practice to us now, but think of all

the complex legal arrangements that have to be made when our own loved ones die. Death

ruptures the fabric of social relations, and it is vital after a funeral that bonds of inheritance

are maintained and extended. By using human remains as a social artefact, this could have

been achieved through ceremonial exchange between different groups. Land and

belongings could be redistributed, and claims to ancestral territory legitimised, through

deliberate deposition of these remains in specific locations.

Suffer the little children

Moving forward in time now to Carrowkeel, we encounter a cemetery site where

interpretation is much trickier. The site was in use for nearly 700 years, and the conditions

of founding were quite different from its eventual abandonment (Illus. 7). How will our

anthropological model fare with this site?

Carrowkeel was of a type of early medieval burial enclosure site generally referred to

as cemetery-settlements (Wilkins & Lalonde 2008). They are similar to ecclesiastical

settlements but differ in that they lack church buildings and were used for occupation as

well as for burial. It contained 132 burials (Illus. 8 & 9) and it was situated on the western

brow of an east/west ridge of higher ground overlooking a known area of early medieval

settlement, consisting of cashels, a souterrain, house sites and a field system approximately


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Illus. 6One of 14 token cremation pits containing minuscule quantities of burnt bone (Headland

Archaeology Ltd).


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Illus. 7Sunset over the cemetery at

Carrowkeel, Co. Galway (Brian

MacDomhnaill, Headland

Archaeology Ltd).

Illus. 8Three intercutting childrens

burials dating from the earliest phase

of the site, cal. AD 650850

(Headland Archaeology Ltd).


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150 m away. About two-thirds of the enclosure was excavated, with the rest remaining

outside the path of the road. The enclosure had been identified on the first-edition (1838)

Ordnance Survey six-inch map, though not on subsequent map surveys, indicating that it

had been ploughed away or levelled during agricultural improvement in the 19th century.

Precisely 89% of these burials were infants, juveniles and foetuses, barely buried beneath

the topsoil. We assumed during the excavationquite reasonably, given the lack of cleargrave-cutsthat these were cilln burials, and our working hypothesis was that Carrowkeel

was an early medieval enclosure that had then been reused in the post-medieval period as

a cilln (Illus. 10). In later medieval Ireland, and right up into the mid-1960s, unbaptised

children were not permitted to be buried in consecrated ground but interred in cilln

cemeteriesliminal, clandestine places often associated with physical and conceptual

boundaries in the landscape.

In fact the story of those burials turned out to be far more exciting. By radiocarbon-

dating over a third of all the burials, we have found that the segregation of childrens graves

was happening right back in the earliest phase of the site, from about AD 700 to 1100 (Illus.

11). (For full details of the radiocarbon dating results see OSullivan & Stanley 2007, 1557.)


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Illus. 9Excavating the

earliest burial in the cemetery,

an adolescent in a semi-flexed

position in the terminus of a

ditch partly enclosing the

cemetery (Headland

Archaeology Ltd).


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So what is going on here? Once we got our dates back we started to look again at our

assumptions. Cillnare sensitive subjects; some were in use into living memory and are

strictly off limits, while others have been forgotten, neglected and overshadowed by

modern development. The origin of cilln burial practice is often assumed to have been a

response to the 12th-century church reformations and the doctrine ofLimbo Infantusthis

decreed that baptism was the threshold for entering Christian society and that without

passing this hurdle entry into the society of the dead was impossible (Finlay 2000, 4089).Very few of these sites have been comprehensively dated and therefore they may be

much older than we think. Perhaps the conceptual tools we use to categorise cemetery

populations into foetus, infant and younger child are also blinding us to what is most

important about these sites. Medical technologies and modern attitudes towards

parenthood implicitly focus our perception of the person into embryonic stages, when it

was precisely the lack of definition of children as full social beings in the past that marked

them out for separate burial treatment. How can children join the society of the dead if

they have not been officially admitted to the society of the living?Cillncemeteries are less

about physical death than social death, which is why they were also used for the restless

souls of individuals who had died a bad death (see below).


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Illus. 10The director and a

member of the excavation

team, with the earliest burial

on site in the foreground

(Headland Archaeology Ltd).


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Legend

0 5 m

N

Phase 1 AD 650850

Phase 2 AD 8501050

Phase 3 AD 10501250

Phase 4 AD 12501450

Illus. 11A schematic diagram of the cemetery, indicating the phases of burial based on radiocarbon dating

and grave-cuts (Headland Archaeology Ltd).


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Burials

A B

C D

Illus. 12Top panel: the cemetery-settlement at Carrowkeel, looking south-west, based on site plans, aerial

photography and geophysical survey. The excavated enclosure ditches are outlined in red and the unexcavated

sections beyond the road corridor in yellow, superimposed on a greyscale image of the geophysical survey results.

Lower panels AD: reconstruction of how the cemetery-settlement fell out of use and was reclaimed by the

landscape (Jonathan Millar, based on an original survey by Scott Harrison, Headland Archaeology Ltd).


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Is it perhaps more likely that the infant segregation in the early medieval period at

Carrowkeel was a precursor to the more general, historically documented later medieval

practice of burial? And this cannot just be a response to the Christian doctrine ofLimbo

Infantus. Suicides, shipwrecked sailors, strangers, unrepentant murderers and theirunfortunate victims were also interred in cilln cemeteries. To die a bad death led to the

restlessness of the soul, and these sites are saturated with superstition and folklore, the home

of fairy changelings, or the night washerwomana child-murderess destined to wash the

bloodied bodies of unbaptised infants (Garattini 2004). So let us reconstruct the site now,

overlaid with the aerial photos and geophysical data for the remaining unexcavated portion

of the site (Illus. 12).

Carrowkeel was founded in a predominantly pastoral economy based on a

transhumance model of summer grazing. In this period, burial within the cemetery-

settlement would have secured tenure to the land. Choosing this ancestral site above the

official church was a deliberate strategy by a group, probably bound by familial and kinship

ties, to re-establish their relationship with their ancestors and guarantee connection withthe land. As the church established its monopoly on the salvation of the soul, ancestral burial

grounds (ferta) declined in importance, and sites like Carrowkeel eventually fell out of use.

The dead were taken instead for churchyard burial, where they could bask in the reflected

glory of the bones of the saint (OBrien 1999, 52).

The segregation of children within one part of the cemetery indicates that conceptual

divisions were being drawn between non-adults and other individuals even in the early

medieval period. As Christianity bedded down as the main faith, these divisions were

elaborated into doctrine. Later generations continued to use the cemetery at Carrowkeel

intermittently up until the late 15th century. Ancestral cemeteries were eclipsed but not

forgotten, and it is no coincidence that they were predominantly used for the burial of

children. Surviving at the edge of tilled fields and pasture, abandoned enclosures were

liminal, ambivalent places in the landscape. They were ideal repositories for the remains of

the troublesome deadthose who lay beyond normal social categories or who through

their own deeds had offended the very social order. And as Carrowkeel fell out of use, as its

ditches silted and became overrun with vegetation, its abandoned nature enhanced the

liminal status of infants as betwixt and between this world and the next.

Conclusion

As post-excavation work is finished and these sites are prepared for final publication, wemight conclude by asking what we gained by waking the dead from their eternal slumber.

In 2008 there were 279 road traffic deaths in Ireland, and the sight of bouquets of flowers

taped to railings and lampposts is now familiar to many motorists. The most compelling

argument for building roads is the number of lives that will be saved; there is nothing safer

than a long, straight road, so by acting intelligently death can be cheated. In addition to

building safer roads, perhaps another way in which death can be cheated is through

archaeology. Many hundreds, even thousands, of years after the final reckoning, we can use

scientific methods and theories to unlock knowledge about life and death. In excavating

the dead and forgotten, archaeology is one tangible way in which personal loss becomes

societys gain.


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Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to all staff at Headland Archaeology Ltd, particularly Susan Lalonde

and Carmelita Troy, who undertook osteoarchaeological analysis on both assemblagesmentioned in the text. Sincere thanks to NRA Archaeologist Jerry OSullivan and NRA

Assistant Archaeologist Martin Jones, who provided welcome comment and guidance at all

stages of the project. Thanks to the staff of RPS Consulting Engineers for their assistance

throughout the project: Senior Resident Engineer Tom Prendergast, Resident Engineer

Niall Healy and Resident Archaeologist Ross MacLeod. CRDS Ltd and Valerie J Keeley

Ltd also excavated sites on the M6 motorway scheme.


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Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500

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