Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

For anyone interested, the Ulster Museum is hosting The Archaeology of Atlantic Crossings: Early Explorations, Trade and Migration on Saturday 7th May 2016. As noted in the poster, the day-conference is free, but advance booking is advised . It looks like it's going to be an excellent day, with a collection of great speakers!

[If you like what I write, please consider throwing something in the Tip Jar on the right of the page. Alternatively, using The Reading Room portal (top of page) for shopping with Amazon brings in some advertising revenue and costs you nothing] < Appendix Introduction At the end of 2015 I took a look at the financial health of the Northern Irish commercial archaeology sector ( Another turn round the plughole? Commercial Archaeology in Northern Ireland in 2014 ). This, in turn was a follow-on from two previous posts on the topic, chronicling the post 2008 collapse of the market and its sustained failure to recover [ here | here ]. These posts have made use of the publicly available data submitted by these enterprises as part of their end-of-year accounts and hosted by, for example, Company Check . The available data was time limited, only going back to 2007 – and that only for one Company. For the other three NI Companies, the data only started in 2008, as the crash hap...

[If you like what I write, please consider throwing something in the  Tip Jar  on the right of the page. Alternatively, using  The Reading Room  portal (top of page) for shopping with Amazon brings in some advertising revenue and costs you nothing] < Back to the contents page Following from Jackie McDowell’s presentation on the Deer Park Farms excavation Session Chair, Dr. John O’Keeffe, next introduced Claire Foley to the podium. She is the co-author (with Ronan McHugh) of the Archaeological Survey of Co. Fermanagh and is Senior Inspector with the NIEA. To set the scene, Foley noted that there are approximately 2,000 crannogs known from the island of Ireland. They are mainly to be found in inter-drumlin lakes and are thus concentrated in a dense band through south Ulster and north Connaught. They are also well known in Scotland, where there is a similarly long history of research and investigation. There are also a number in north Yorkshire, but only o...

Books ( Source ) Once again, I'm back with a selection of reading materials - mostly on Irish archaeology - from the Academia.edu holdings. They are a collection of papers and chapters that caught my attention and I reckoned would be of wider interest, if you've not already encountered them. However, before you dive into any of these, I would ask you to take a look at the new book by Stuart Rathbone:  Archaeological Boundaries. Discussions, Experiments and Unprovoked Attacks . Go take a look & then come back to these! Even if you're not immediately ready to commit to a book length offering from Stuart, there's always a select collection of his papers to start you off! Stuart Rathbone: A Middle Bronze Age stone head from Slievemore, Achill Island, Co Mayo Stuart Rathbone: Excavating the Cromlech Tumulus on Slievemore. The story so far Stuart Rathbone: The Village People. An Early History of Neighbourly Disputes Vicki Cummings: A view from the ...

[If you like what I write, please consider throwing something in the  Tip Jar  on the right of the page. Alternatively, using  The Reading Room  portal (top of page) for shopping with Amazon brings in some advertising revenue and costs you nothing] < Back to the contents page As part of the public outreach campaign surrounding the excavation of the crannog at Drumclay, Co. Fermanagh, the NIEA organised a one-day conference on the site. This followed on from the two very successful open days where the public were allowed to visit while the excavation was ongoing and see the work in progress, get up close to some of the astounding artefacts, and hear of the progress directly from those on the site [ here ]. The point of the conference was to present the findings of the excavation and its research context to a broad, non-specialist audience; chiefly the local population of Enniskillen and Fermanagh. The first session was chaired by Dr John O’Keeffe, Pri...