Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

[** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the secure button at the end. 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 end of the post - each purchase earns a small amount of advertising revenue**] Earlier this summer I took time off work to help out with childcare and to spend some time with my two sons, while their regular child-minder took a much needed and deserved holiday. It turns out that my wife and I had … let’s call them ‘divergent’ … ideas as to what constitutes a ‘fun day out’ for the children. She does things like making aliens out of cardboard boxes and tissues, providing home-made playdough (called ‘squashy’ in our house), and building temporary housing for our garden snails (a snail aquarium, or ‘snailarium’, if you will). I, however, appear to have a different idea of ‘fun’. My tendency is to stick the...

[** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the secure button in the column on 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 on the right - each purchase earns a small amount of advertising revenue**] If you hang about this blog for long enough you could easily come away with the impression that I’m engaged in something of a bromance with Wordwell Books . I do seem to review and promote an awful lot of their wares [ here | here | here | here | here | here | here | here | here ] ... OK that is a lot! The simple reason for this is that they are the major publisher of archaeological books in Ireland. They – or, more accurately, their books – have been constant companions since I first started studying archaeology and encountered the first few issues of Archaeology Ireland magazine in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop...

[ ** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the secure button in the column on 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 on the right - each purchase earns a small amount of advertising revenue** ] If you’ve known me for any length of time, poked around on the ‘back issues’ of this blog, or even had a browse through my publications on my Academia.edu page, you’ll get a fair inkling that I like gravestones. It’s not too uncommon in an archaeologist – even one such as myself who dedicated most of a career to the prehistoric periods. Like many, my chief interest is in the earlier gravestones from the early to mid 1700s, and into the early 19 th century. At a push, I can show curiosity in markers from the mid 19 th century onwards, but there is a clear feeling that more recent memorials are less interesting, a...