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 **] External view of Carrickfergus Castle The Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork, QUB have been excavating at Carrickfergus Castle , Co. Antrim.   They’ve been uncovering some of the 19th century military aspects of the castle. In particular, they’ve traced the length of a munitions tunnel where ordnance was off-loaded from ships and taken into the castle for storage. So far they’ve found a number of narrow-gauge tracks, and a turntable for moving this material around. In amongst the tightly-compacted back-fill they’ve recovered numerous artefacts from earlier periods of the castle’s occupation. The excavations are being dir...

[ ** 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 **] A selection of 2D panoramas of Carrickfergus Castle (click for larger images). The 3D versions are available: here .

Samples as far as the eye can see ... In a recent piece on the current financial health of commercial archaeology in Northern Ireland I speculated that the Northern Ireland Environment Agency ( NIEA ) may not have a coherent plan in place to deal with the heritage implications of one of the commercial archaeological companies going bankrupt. This is a serious consideration, as my research had shown that the financial viability of all of these four consultancies has suffered markedly in the period from 2008 to 2012. Without repeating the entirety of the previous post, the situation can be best summed up in the Net Worth, averaged across all companies where the data was available. This indicated that the mean value was £192k in 2008, rising slightly to £209k the following year. However, this dropped sharply to an average of £6.5k in 2010 and to a mere £2.3k in 2011. It made a slight return, reaching an average of £9.5k in 2012. However these figures mask actual negative Net Worth...

I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce Lauren Jean, a US student seeking funding to undertake interesting and exciting research: The Hands of a Healer: The Culture of Medicine in Late Medieval Ireland . I would urge you to read about her research and consider donating to her fund . Every donation will be matched dollar for dollar, so even a small contribution can go a long way! Robert M Chapple *           *           * For undergraduates in the United States who hope to apply to PhD programs, the writing of either a senior thesis or an honors thesis is a fairly crucial piece of the overall application. Yet as I approached my junior year, I was somewhat at a loss as to what I wanted to research. I have a strong grounding in Modern Irish history and have spent nearly a decade trying to examine the Easter Rising from a number of different angles. Yet I wasn’t entirely positive that I wanted to do my doctora...

Drumclay Crannog under appalling conditions of mis-excavation July 2012 ( Source ) On January 23rd 2014 I wrote to Prof. Gabriel Cooney . In his role as the Chairperson of the Historic Monuments Council for Northern Ireland, he had been charged by the (then) Minister of the Environment, Alex Attwood , to write a report on the planning and excavation background to the Drumclay crannog issue. My hope was to glean some information on the status of this report and to elicit an idea of the timeframe for its publication. I had been informed by a number of well-placed sources that the report had been written and submitted to Mark H. Durkan (the current Minister), but that there was no immediate plan to make it public. I asked Prof. Cooney if he could confirm this situation. Purely on the basis of ‘if you don’t ask you don’t get’ I wondered if I could have a summary statement of his findings and conclusions. On March 13th 2014 I received the following reply: RE: Review of the ...

Radiocarbon and Palaeoenvironmental Reconstruction in Practice | Call for papers From Ben Gearey: We are organizing a session as part of “ The Radiocarbon and the Environment Conference ” which is being held at Queens University Belfast on the 18th-22nd August 2014.  The session is entitled “Radiocarbon and Palaeoenvironmental Reconstruction in Practice” and we invite papers on aspects of the theory and practice of radiocarbon dating of palaeoenvironmental sequences and deposits. Given the cost of radiocarbon dating and associated problems of ‘doing archaeology’ in the Age of Austerity , we are especially keen to focus on approaches to and issues concerning radiocarbon dating within commercial archaeology. We also hope to discuss and reflect on ‘best practice’, for example, how can we maximise cost benefit from radiocarbon dating programmes? The session is open to anyone with an interest in these and related issues. The full abstract is available at: http://www.qub.a...

In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day 2012, I posted a short piece on this blog about how the very beautiful gravestone of the Saint in the grounds of Downpatrick Cathedral is a recent fabrication, and not an ancient monument. The person behind this apparent deception was the rather larger than life character Francis Joseph Bigger (1863-1926) [see also: here | here ] and you can read about the whole thing in: St. Patrick’s Gravestone: A Bigger fake! Francis Joseph Bigger Schema of how the three cross fragments could have fit together In that post I wrote: “During the preparation of the ‘grave site’ three fragments of a broken cross were recovered. Although searches were carried out to recover further portions, they were in vain. Bigger notes that the fragments were placed in the cathedral for safe-keeping, until such time as more pieces could be located and a reconstruction attempted.” I’ll admit that a part of me suspected that these pieces would, most likely, be...

Hi there! I’m Robert M Chapple and I’d like you to read my blog. If you like the articles I write, or those by the guest authors who pop in from time to time, I’d love it if you’d consider sending me a small donation via PayPal (it’s down there on the right – you can’t miss it!). Failing that, I’d be immensely grateful if you could use the Amazon search portal – it’s down there on the right, too … again, ya can’t miss it! I particularly like that one because every time you use it Amazon pays me (literally) a few pence in advertising fees, but it doesn’t cost  you  a penny! It's totally optional - I make no demands for payment! That said, I’m not in it for the money – I just love writing and this gives me a great means of remaining connected to the world of archaeology, even though I no longer make my living there. The thing that really keeps me going on this blog is knowing that there are people out there who’re interested in what I write and the work of the other lik...