Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

I was recently browsing for something completely different in The Met’s online catalogue when I thought ‘I wonder if they have any Irish stuff?’ Not only do they hold Irish material in their collections, they generously make photographs available under a Creative Commons Zero Licence. These 20 items are all of metal (bronze, copper alloy, silver, and gold), and represent finds from 10 counties (Antrim, Cavan, Cork, Down, Dublin, Galway, Limerick, Tipperary, Westmeath, & Wexford) along with five merely provenanced to the island of Ireland. Together they are ascribed to three archaeological periods: Bronze Age (9), Iron Age (1), and Early Medieval (10). The Met does hold a number of other ancient Irish pieces, but all are without images so I've decided to omit them from this post. The one story that strikes me immediately from putting this collection together is to wonder who one  Patrick O'Connor of New York was and how he amassed his little collection of metalwork and h...

< Back to Table of Contents In recent posts, I’ve concentrated on some of the treasures on display at the Musee de l'Ancien Eveche, but now I want to turn my attention to the wonderful Grenoble Archaeological Museum. If one were to be pedantic, I’m sure the case could be made that the museum is slightly miss-titled – it’s not so much a museum dedicated to the archaeology of Grenoble, but to the historic church site of Saint-Laurent. However, it’s just as true to say that the archaeology of Saint-Laurent is in no small part, the archaeology of Grenoble too. The church as it survives today is a intricate set of building phases and burial activity. However, the core upstanding structure is Romanesque (12th century) and the burials stretch back to the Gallo-Roman period (4th century). So far, so good! But what really sets Saint-Laurent apart from … well, pretty much anything else … is that fact that it has a surviving Merovingian crypt from the 6th century. Coming from I...

< 3D Images < Table of Contents Having concluded our visit to Sketrick Castle (Chapple Major: Loved it. Chapples Minor: Unimpressed), we next headed for Tullynakill church. This was to be our fourth archaeological site of the day and the children were getting bored and tired. I did my best to be enthusiastic, but I wasn’t holding out too much hope. While we were at Sketrick the clouds had closed over, the wind had risen, and the temperature dropped. It only looked like it was going to get more miserable. It’s less than three miles from Sketrick to Tullynakill, but somewhere along the way, the clouds parted, the wind ceased to blow, the air grew warm, and the sun shone. We parked the car and made our way onto the site and the atmosphere just felt magical. Although the majority of the standing structure is 15th to 16th century, all the decorated stonework is of 17th century date. In the late 15th century it replaced Nendrum (4 miles away by road, or 1.5 miles as ...