Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

Finn Delaney & John Tierney. The National Roads Authority, Dublin, 2011. x+225pp & CDr. ISBN 978-0-9564180-4-3. £22.26 ( via Amazon ) or €25 ( via Wordwell Books ). [**  If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the button at the end.  If you think the review is useful, please re-share via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. **] In The Lowlands of South Galway is the seventh in the National Roads Authority Scheme Monographs series. In my review of the previous volume ( Of Troughs and Tuyères ), I stated that since its inception in 2007, the series has established itself as a benchmark in high quality academic publishing. This volume is a fine addition to the series and, if anything, sets the bar higher for future contributions. In the Introduction , Finn Delaney, Jerry O’Sullivan and Maurizio Toscano describe their study area as ‘a self-contained sort of place with a strongly defined character that derives in part from ...

Eoin Grogan & Charles Mount (eds.). The Organiastion of Irish Archaeologists, Dublin, 1995. 72pp. ISBN 0-9524666-0-0. €7.99 + P&P from Dr. Charles Mount (see contact details at the end of this piece). [**  If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the button at the end.  If you think the review is useful, please re-share via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. **] Since I started this blog in August 2011, and realised that there was some interest in archaeological book reviews, I have pretty much kept to the latest offerings available to the profession. Thus far I have published seven reviews of books, all of which were released either in 2010 or 2011. This review is a little different as the book I have chosen was published some 17 years ago, in 1995, and presents papers from a conference held in UCD two years previously. Even the sponsoring body of the conference, The Organisation of Irish Archaeologists is now long def...

Review: ‘Bandee:’ from Curach Bhán Archaeology Design Collection (from €39.95 from their website ) [**  If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the button at the end.  If you think the review is useful, please re-share via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. **] Some readers of this blog will be aware that there is an archaeological star rising in the east – in Berlin to be precise. Curach Bhán Publications are rapidly establishing themselves as a publishing house of note in the fields of archaeology, philology, linguistics, anthropology, and Celtic studies. Added to this, the proprietor, Daniel Büchner, also runs a, small but growing, online bookshop and art gallery . If this was not enough, Daniel and his team have now launched their Archaeology Design Collection . The first offering in this range is the ‘ Bandee: ’. When I first saw it on their website, I presumed that it was some form of long, curving sock for holding your ...

Alasdair Whittle, Frances Healy, & Alex Bayliss. Oxbow books, Oxford, 2011. 2 Volumes, xxxviii+992pp. ISBN 978-1-84217-425-8. £45 ( via Oxbow ) or £50.07 ( via Amazon ). [** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the button at the end.  If you think the review is useful, please re-share via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. **] For anyone with an interest in Irish and British prehistory and, specifically how the chronologies are assembled through radiocarbon dating, the publication of Gathering Time: Dating the Early Neolithic Enclosures of southern Britain and Ireland has been long anticipated and much, much desired. It is hard to overstate the importance of this book and how it has already rewritten our understanding of Neolithic enclosures, but it also stands as a template for other intensive studies to follow and emulate. The central importance of this study is not simply that it uses a lot of new radiocarbon dates for variou...