Title:
Integrating ground-penetrating radar, magnetometry, and targeted coring in the study of Irish medieval settlements and settlement patterning
Content:
Across global contexts, buried settlements are rich archaeological resources, recording the daily lives and repeated practices of ordinary people and diachronically archiving changes and continuities. In their complexity and frequently large size, settlements present a host of challenges for the researcher, who is often limited by time, money, and labor. This paper presents a methodology designed to address challenges inherent in settlement archaeology, by firstly combining datasets of ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry to create large-scale three-dimensional maps of subsurface archaeological features, and secondly coring targeted buried features to better inform geophysical interpretations and to collect paleoethnobotanical, soil, and radiocarbon samples. In doing so, a buried archaeological landscape can be “pseudo-excavated”, where features are identified, mapped, and sampled without a single shovel being raised, leaving most of the archaeology intact and preserved. The case study is a medieval cultural landscape in Western Ireland at Ballintober, Co. Roscommon, centered on a newly discovered deserted medieval village but incorporating its wider context, notably a series of smaller dispersed earthwork settlements that dot the surrounding area. The project hopes to reconstruct the history of each site, but also to create a chronology of settlement patterning in the region through the entire medieval period.
Keywords:
Geophysics, Ireland, Medieval, Auger, Settlement