Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

Today’s image is a small selection of bronze axes from the rather wonderful Ulster Museum. The example on the left is from Lisnisk, Co Antrim , while the one on the right is from Drumlough, Hillsborough, Co Down . The example in the middle is only located to Ireland in general. The Ulster Museum is open Tuesdays to Sundays & is free! Go explore!

A hoard of five copper axes from Lough Ravel, County Antrim. Now in the Ulster Museum. I just liked the composition of the display and the prominence of the museum accession numbers ... to me they speak of the importance of collection, curation, and study - all the things a good museum facilitates and fosters. The Ulster Museum is open Tuesdays to Sundays & is free! Go explore!

Books ( Source ) Hello again and welcome to issue 13 of my continuing deep dive into the papers that have caught my eye on Academia.edu. They’re mostly Irish in focus, but other topics and writers that attract my attention are included too. But, before you consider investing some quality time settling into reading any of these, take a moment to acquaint yourself with Stuart Rathbone’s extremely excellent new book Archaeological Boundaries. Discussions, Experiments and Unprovoked Attacks . It’s available on the Leanpub site as a downloadable PDF on a pay-what-you-like basis. Who could ask for more? Anyway, here are my latest recommendations – enjoy! Kieran Westley et al. Mapping Submerged Landscapes Using Multibeam Bathymetric Data: a case study from the north coast of Ireland Julian Thomas What Do We Mean By 'Neolithic Societies'? Sam Moore The Archaeology of Slieve Donard, Co. Down: A Cultural Biography of Ulster’s Highest Mountain Tho...

[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...

I’m going to keep this short! The nominations for the Current Archaeology Awards [ Facebook | Web ] have just been announced and there are two entries from the island of Ireland there and I would be very grateful if you would consider voting for them. Rescue Dig of the Year 2016 The Drumclay crannog-dwellers: revealing 1,000 years of lakeside living (Nora Bermingham and Caitriona Moore) Book of the Year 2016 The Archaeology of Caves in Ireland (Marion Dowd) Please go to the voting page [ here ] and do your bit! That’s it! That’s all! Thank you for helping! +           +           + The longer bit: Every one of the nominees deserves their place on the list, but I think these two are particularly special and deserve all-Ireland archaeological support. The nomination for Drumclay reads: “The rare excavation of a medieval artificial island,...

[If you like what I write, please consider throwing something in the Tip Jar on the right of the page. Alternatively, using the site portals for shopping on either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk brings in some advertising revenue and costs you nothing] As we rapidly plunge towards the end of another year, many people’s minds turn to Yule festivities, gifting, feasting, quaffing and all the joys that the Winter Solstice has to offer. For myself, I find my mind turning to the financial health of the archaeological sector in Northern Ireland, because that’s just how I roll. In what is becoming something of a year-end tradition, I’ve been looking at a number of Key Financials for the four main archaeological consultancies in Northern Ireland. Previous posts have analysed the period from 2011-2012 and 2013 . A recent post on the commercial archaeological sector in the Republic of Ireland made use of a Tableau dashboard to display the data and allow a degree of user interactivity beyond ...

< 3D Images | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V I had left it pretty late on the Sunday afternoon before I got out to see May Street Presbyterian Church, and then lingered there quite some time. But, scanning the EHOD brochure, I saw that the First Presbyterian Church on Rosemary Street was still open and nearby … I could make it! Like St Mark’s, Dundela, I’d been in this building only once before, many years ago for another EHOD event. It was time to renew an old acquaintance! This beautiful building was initially constructed between 1781 and 1783 to the design of Roger Mulholland . Thus, it is the oldest surviving place of worship in Belfast. The front façade was extended in 1833 and the rear was extended in 1906-7. The latter additions were to the design of Belfast architecture firm, Young & Mackenzie . From the outside, it appears that the main body of the church is circular in plan, but it is only when you go inside you find that Mulholland’s des...