Hello and welcome to Digging For Ireland,
the programme that promises to bring you this year's most
outstanding new archaeology.
We've got highlights from all the digs,
we'll have in-depth analysis, and we've also got some really amazing
treasures from the past.
All year, in hundreds of digs across Ireland and Britain,
archaeologists have once again been
unearthing our history.
They've gone to extraordinary lengths to uncover long lost
treasures, retelling our story in a way only archaeology can.
Our archaeologists have been out filming themselves to make
sure that we were there for every moment of discovery.
And they'll be joining us back here at the Ulster Museum,
to help us understand of what these new finds really mean.
Tonight, we'll reveal a 3,000-year-old bog body.
Could this be a murdered king?
And we'll see the perfectly preserved boat of the warriors who fought the Vikings.
And we'll meet the dead from the notorious prison
known as Ireland's Alcatraz.
The Ulster Museum's collection has been built up over nearly 200 years.
The archaeological treasures it holds connect us to people long gone
and to vanished worlds in a unique way,
from the Malone Hoard,
ceremonial axe-heads unearthed in the middle of Belfast...
..to the Corrard gold torc, a Bronze Age offering to the gods, pulled
from a bog in County Fermanagh.
We've taken over the Ulster Museum
to tell the story of Ireland like never before.
We begin with a dig exploring the shift in power that reshaped
the North of Ireland. Alongside an iconic ruined castle,
a long-lost village which tells the stories of the English
and Scottish settlers brought into Ulster in the 17th century
in what's known as the Plantation.
For over 500 years,
Dunluce Castle has towered over the North Antrim coast.
Though it hasn't been lived in for over 300 years,
this year, there is plenty of action in the castle grounds.
A team of archaeologists are kicking off a five-year dig.
This is their video diary as they search
for clues into the castle's most important and controversial period in history.
In 1608, Dunluce became the seat of power for a new planned
settlement, a plantation.
The plantations were ordered by King James to civilise the North of Ireland.
Controversially, Scottish and English settlers were brought in to work
and live in newly formed towns and villages, displacing the indigenous Gaelic population.
This ushered in a new economy, one that replaced subsistence farming.
Evidence of this monumental shift is being
pulled from one of the trenches.
We're right at the very edge here of the 17th-century garden.
So, we've got our 17th-century topsoil layer here.
And it's been quite an interesting layer so far.
We've picked up a few finds,
but some of the most interesting ones have been this coin
and a musket ball.
The coin is silver.
We're starting to see the introduction of money and currency.
We're starting to see people paying rent rather than just
living off the land and paying in crops and whatever else.
The landlord of this estate, Randal MacDonnell, was the largest
landowner in County Antrim, owning over 300,000 acres.
When he ruled this estate in the 1620s,
it grew into a successful plantation.
Almost 400 years later,
clues to life on the estate are emerging every day,
with valuable artefacts kept in the dig's conservation room.
The most interesting find we've got, or the personal find, you
can imagine somebody using it, is this little seal matrix, it's called.
It's a stamp for creating a seal on wax.
So, if you're writing your letter, or verifying a document,
you'd have used this.
Tell me about this seal. This is a copper alloy seal matrix.
This is the object you would use to put your impression
into the red wax seal of an official document. It's lovely.
It is, isn't it? Yes. So what's the picture on it?
It seems to be a representation of a castle.
Dunluce town is established around a marketplace
and it would have been merchant families who were
brought in by the MacDonnells to
populate the town and undertake trade.
This could have been associated with one of
those Scottish merchant families. Perhaps they have taken the
image of Dunluce as their family symbol, the symbol of their business.
The image of the castle, yes. Tell me more about Randal MacDonnell. Who was he?
Randal was the chieftain of the MacDonnell clan in Ulster.
He's a really interesting character because he transcends
the period from the late medieval through to the early modern period.
At the start of the 17th century, he undertakes his own private
plantation scheme in order to secure the favour of the king.
What was that scheme? What is a plantation scheme?
You might have heard of the Ulster Plantation, and that's
a scheme in the opening decades of the 17th century where
a lot of people from England and Scotland were brought across
into Ulster to basically set up new towns
and populate the landscape,
and the idea was to populate what was previously a rebellious
Gaelic province with loyal British subjects.
The interesting thing about Randal MacDonnell and Dunluce
is that this is a plantation enterprise
undertaken by a Gaelic Catholic landlord, which is
in contrast to the normal narrative of the Plantation.
Randal is the only major Gaelic lord at that time who holds
on to his lands and in fact he's the largest land-holder in Ulster at the
start of the 17th century because he's gained the favour of the king.
What about these other artefacts? What about the pottery from the dig? What does that tell us?
The people who would have been brought in to live
at Dunluce town, we think a lot of them would have been merchants,
quite wealthy people who would have come in, built a house and then undertaken trade through
the marketplace which the town was founded around.
We also see them bringing in new types of pottery that hadn't
been seen before, so in contrast to, in the late medieval period,
we found this type of pottery which is known as Ulster coarse ware pottery,
and that is basically a type of locally produced cooking pot.
It looks pretty basic doesn't it? Exactly, yes, so with
the new type of economy in the 17th century,
we see imports from England,
so this would have been imported from the Midlands in England
and that's the base of a little cup or mug.
You can see one of the handles on that side.
It's probably the merchant class, the people of Dunluce
buying expensive goods just to show off their wealth and status.
So we've got the arrival of English-speaking Protestant
rulers into Ireland.
Is this the beginning of Northern Ireland as we know it?
There are massive shifts in the demographics
and the population make-up in Ulster,
so there's this massive influx of people from lowland Scotland
and from England and that's a Protestant population coming in.
Now we see that shift in demographics
down to the modern day
and, really, you can see some of the origins of modern Ulster,
modern Northern Ireland,
in the population changes that were happening at that time.
The town at Dunluce grew up in the shadow of the castle
under Randal MacDonnell's influence.
In the second phase of this year's dig,
the team are searching beyond the castle garden walls, looking
for the lost town where the estate workers lived.
We're in the middle of the 17th-century town
and this surface I'm standing on would have
been where the 17th-century roadway was.
So you can see down the slope where the grass was cut,
that's the line of the 17th-century road.
And it would have been flanked by houses on either side.
So we've positioned some of our trenches over these houses,
so we've positioned them on the corners to see if we can try
and find out what size they were.
We are standing at the side, the end gable of one of the houses.
Cormac is over here trying to expose the other side
and trying to find any evidence for a chimney or a fireplace.
There would have been a series of houses running up the slope
here and all opening out onto the marketplace.
The team is mapping the vanished town that reflected the vision
of landlord Randal MacDonnell, forming the economic hub of his estate.
What he was doing here was establishing a new type
of settlement in this landscape, which hadn't been seen before.
It was a mercantile settlement,
an economic town built around a market place.
So, very much a modern type of development.
The world was changing. This emerging local economy
was also connecting to places much further afield. And this is a
change seen in the artefacts coming out of the ground.
In the 17th century, it's kind of the beginning of tobacco smoking
coming from the Americas.
I've got some pipes here that we found onsite.
It's almost like cigarette butts, we start seeing them
being thrown away whenever they break.
They are maybe quite fragile.
As smoking becomes more fashionable, we start seeing an increase in these pipes.
While some aspects of society may have changed,
the team are finding that certain class boundaries still remained.
This wall acted as the boundary wall
between the 17th-century town
and the 17th-century formal gardens.
Your gardens would have been very private,
so you would have wanted a large boundary wall,
giving you some privacy
from the sights and smells of the 17th-century town.
This dig is providing an uncensored snapshot
of what life was like in a plantation town.
But the reason that this site
is offering quite so much amazing archaeology
is because of how the town met its end.
So, looking at Dunluce today, there's a ruined castle
and just empty fields. So, what happened?
In 1641, there is the Irish Rebellion,
which starts in County Tyrone but quickly spreads throughout Ulster.
And in January of 1642, it arrives at Dunluce.
So there's an attempt to capture the castle by rebellious forces.
They're unsuccessful.
The garrison in the castle refused to surrender
and they're successful in defending it.
But in the aftermath of that, the forces,
some of the soldiers set fire to some of the buildings
in the town and the fire spreads and burns everything down.
So, who was actually leading this rebellion?
Well, this rising was led by the native Irish
and there are a lot of different reasons behind it.
But at a local level, a lot of the local people who would've
been dispossessed through the Plantation
saw this as an opportunity to settle scores, to get back
some of what had been taken from them during the plantation process.
So it became very brutal and violent at a local level
with murders and massacres going on.
And that really sounds the death knell for the settlement.
And within a number of decades, it's abandoned
and it reverts back to just being grassy, green fields again.
And it's because of that abandonment,
and there was no subsequent development into the modern era,
that the archaeology is so well preserved.
Inches beneath the surface of the fields around Dunluce Castle
today, you have a real-time capsule of life in the 17th century.
So, have you found archaeological evidence of this
period of violence and uprising?
Some of the really interesting finds we've found
include this nice musket ball.
And you couldn't really ask for a more tangible object
associated with violence than a musket ball. Has it been fired?
That one hasn't been fired.
It's still pristine from the mould that it would've been pressed in.
You can still see the impressions of that.
Whereas this one is more interesting.
This is half a musket ball.
So, it's been cut in half? Why on earth would you want to do that?
It's been deliberately cut in half to make it more deadly.
But because it's that funny shape, it's very inaccurate,
so it's a close-quarters weapon.
And you can imagine it would've been quite brutal fighting that
would've been involved in.
It is a very familiar story, this tension between
Gaelic-speaking Catholics and English-speaking Protestants.
Absolutely.
And you see that in some of the violence in the 17th century.
But we also see incidences of local people
and English and Scottish people living side by side peaceably.
And that's part of the story of Dunluce town as well.
The vanished town beneath Dunluce Castle
was witness to a seismic shift of power in Ireland.
Found less than ten miles away,
the Ulster Museum houses an astonishing hoard.
Just decades earlier,
Protestant England faced an invasion by a Catholic superpower.
The Spanish Armada.
This is a fantastic collection of some of your treasure
here at Ulster Museum. What is it?
This is just a small sample of treasure from one of our
most prized collections.
It's a collection of international importance from the Spanish
Armada shipwreck, the Girona,
which sank off the north Irish coast on 26th October in 1588.
The Girona was discovered in 1967.
And there was a particular effort made to shoot
a series of underwater footage.
And what really that allows us
to do is imagine we're down with the divers.
It was place name evidence.
And ironically, the names had been staring
people in the face for hundreds of years on a map.
The Girona was discovered at an area known as Lacada Point.
Beside Lacada Point, you have Port Na Spaniagh, Spanish Cave
and Spanish Rock.
And it almost sounded too good to be true,
but that's what proved to be the key factor in discovering the wreck.
It's a very treacherous coastline, subject to strong tides.
And it was a combination of these factors, including a storm,
that eventually led to the ship going down.
This is the discovery, well, the excavation in the '60s. Yeah.
It was discovered... Is that gold there?
Well, what we're actually looking at is a series of gold coins.
When we talk about an Armada wreck being laden with treasure,
the Girona hits all the marks.
There was something in the region of over 400 gold coins discovered.
And there was almost something like 800 silver coins,
including the classic pieces of eight.
Is that a cannonball?
Yeah, that's a cannonball.
The Girona was well-armed. She had in the region of 15 cannon on board.
But a number of the cannon were deliberately jettisoned
in order to make room for more crew.
More gold coins.
What's that? Well, this is one of... I think it was something like 12.
This is a massive gold chain. Is it like this one here?
I think it actually is the one here.
It's something like 2.3 metres in length
and this is it actually being discovered.
Not necessarily the sort of practice that
we'd like to see from archaeologists today.
There were quite a few rings discovered, so we definitely
don't recommend trying those on, in case you can't get them off!
Why was the ship so laden with treasure?
I mean, this is part of the Armada. This was an attack fleet.
The reason why it was laden with treasure,
and that's the key to understanding the Girona, is that it had
held up for repairs in Killybegs in County Donegal
and it took on board the remains of two other shipwrecked crews.
Although the Girona was originally designed to hold 500 people,
when it eventually set sail again,
it was holding 1,300 people.
And this included members of some of the most famous
and rich families in Spain.
They imagined they were going to be victorious
and would parade through the streets of London wearing all their finery,
but, of course, fate was to decide otherwise.
And out of the 1,300 people on board, only five survived.
This is just a small sample of some of the gold objects from the Girona.
It looks like a book that held something
of precious religious values.
Both of those items there are kind of for protection and good luck.
Presumably, the same goes for this one here. That's a little cross.
This is a little cross belonging to an order of chivalry,
Santiago de Compostela.
It was awarded to comparatively few people,
but very interesting to know that one of the people it was
awarded to was one of the commanders of the Armada.
And we know that he was actually on board the Girona
when it set sail on its fateful voyage.
So when the little cross was discovered,
the significance of that was that they knew beyond
probably any reasonable doubt that it was Girona shipwreck
that they had discovered.
From treasure that allowed archaeologists
to tell the story of the Spanish Armada's doomed invasion,
to a skirmish in Ireland's Wild West.
Irish history has caused many arguments.
In County Fermanagh, a war of words
has broken out between historians and locals.
It's war about a battle.
Where exactly did the Battle of the Ford of the Biscuits
take place in 1594?
Along the Arney River, six miles from Enniskillen,
a group of enthusiasts has gathered to find the exact spot
where Irish forces surprised English troops
at the start of the Nine Years' War.
The team is basing their search around local knowledge.
Knowledge that differs from where
the history books claim the battle should be.
Chief archaeologist, Paul Logue, believes the history books.
We'll check out the field
and then we'll check out the base of that slope.
And we'll just see what we get.
If we get nothing, or if we get bored,
what we'll do is we'll go back, get a cup a tea
and then we'll go over to Dromane, where I think it actually is.
So if you just want to go out, enjoy yourself for a while. OK.
Don't find any musket balls.
THEY LAUGH
You've been warned.
In the 1590s, English troops were coming up
from their stronghold at Dublin Castle
intent on conquering Ulster,
the last area of Gaelic rule.
This battle was one of the first skirmishes in a struggle for power
that would last nearly a decade.
Paul believes the battle took place in another nearby field,
but he and the history books are very quickly faced with a dilemma.
Yep. Musket ball.
Paul?
First find.
INDISTINCT
PAUL SIGHS
There's two sizes of shot and weight that are quite close.
And they date widely apart.
So, looking at this one,
without weighing it and measuring it,
it's either going to date to the late 1700s,
or it's going to date to the time of the battle.
I'm guessing, actually, that it's 18th-century,
but that's partly because I want it to be 18th-century.
This is the way it starts.
We'll see if we start picking up any more.
The English troops were heading for the besieged Enniskillen Castle.
The soldiers there were desperate for supplies.
But after the ambush, the much-needed provisions,
including biscuits, floated downriver,
providing a name for this battle.
Its exact location has never been archaeologically confirmed.
HIGH-PITCHED WHIR
Well, it's a musket ball, roughly about, I would say,
about an ounce in weight, down about four inches under the soil.
I think it's very exciting.
It's the little boy in me looking for treasure.
A very, very old little boy, but nevertheless, a little boy at heart.
Now, there's something else here. I'm not quite sure what it is.
So I'm going to look further.
Yep. Another one.
Hello?
Remember we were talking about when somebody finds one
and then it just all starts?
This could've been a battle site,
or they could've been sighting in their muskets.
Yeah. Somebody's clearly either firing at this hill... Yeah.
That's made my day.
I'm not sure if it's made mine, but we found what we came to look for.
HIGH-PITCHED WHIR
Paul?
Have you got another one?
Pfft! Similar to the other one I found.
Once you get one, you get a hotspot and there's a few.
There could've been a hedgerow along here where the troops cover
if they were firing, or being fired at. They're all in one line.
So we'll keep our fingers crossed that
it's the time of the battle, 1590s.
I think that's about 15.
Faced with this growing evidence,
Paul is trying to understand the dynamics of the battle.
If you can imagine you have a firing line of men
and they're standing here and firing out this direction,
what you should get is the odd dropped shot here
that the men have dropped during combat that have never been fired.
And then you would hopefully get the enemy's rounds coming in
and hitting where these men are standing.
And that's what you might have there.
So if we were over where I want the battle to be,
I would be absolutely ecstatic.
But...it's starting to look like the battle may be here.
The English would ultimately win the war,
changing the course of Irish history.
And the musket balls the team are unearthing here
suggest that they have indeed found the site of this battle.
The local story is that the battle is out here to my right,
but it actually looks like what might be happening
is that the Irish troops are in a line along here
and they're firing up behind me to the English troops,
who are moving along this ridgeline, trying to get into Enniskillen.
It's a very rare day, in my experience,
that we would actually find this much.
It's so rare that I'm not really believing it
because it's not meant to happen.
This is so good, what's happened today,
I can't quite believe it's happened.
To give everybody an idea of how rare this is,
the last battlefield we looked at and we found, it took us
two years to find as much as we've found here in one day.
So...it's absolutely amazing.
HIGH-PITCHED WHIR Another one!
That lost battle, with its precise location
preserved in local knowledge,
was a small part of a long war that reshaped Ireland.
Now, we travel 200 miles away and three millennia back in time
to Ireland's Bronze Age,
and evidence of another group of incomers.
In County Wexford, a team of archaeologists
have been working on a site that's far, far older.
While carrying out test excavations ahead of a new roadway,
they discovered a 3,000-year-old cemetery
dating to a time when Irish people
had just started to bury their cremated dead,
as incomers brought new customs with them.
We're looking at a Bronze Age flat cemetery
which contains a number of discreet burials,
each of which contains cremations
and some of which we've already observed contain pots.
All of which seem to be inverted.
So they're turned upside down inside the pit.
This type of burial began around 2000 BC
and continued for 1,500 years into the Iron Age.
It was a new way of burying the dead.
Previous traditions might have included sky burials,
where the dead were left to the open elements
and lost to history.
But in the Bronze Age, this all changed.
Cremation's very important, because the burial itself can be postponed.
And that allows time for news of the death to get around,
for relatives perhaps not living close by to gather together.
The urns are in impeccable condition,
and the process of excavation is painstaking.
So this is our urn, and this is the cut of our pit here.
We're going to lift out the urn next,
and then we're going to explore what's going on at this side.
We would have thousands of examples of these kind of graves.
Most of what we have are from very old excavations
which weren't scientifically conducted.
It's the scientific side that's rare,
because these burials don't turn up that often in the modern world.
This cemetery gives us a window into burial practices
from 3,000 years ago.
The conservation may take several years.
We're coming literally face to face with our ancestors.
It's about the human interaction between ourselves
and people who are our ancestors.
And from whom we can learn a great deal
about the way that humans interact with the world.
These burials are part of a massive cultural shift.
Archaeologists believe this was partly due to new people
coming to the island, as trade routes opened up.
So who were these new people,
and what other customs and goods did they bring with them?
Archaeology can help us piece together a vanished world
when Ireland was Europe's golden capital.
Ireland was known at that time, I suppose,
as the El Dorado of western Europe
simply because of the quality and quantity of the goldwork.
Now I have to say my eye has been drawn all the time
by this beautiful object here,
and you've very kindly said that I can pick it up.
This is one of the most spectacular single items
of prehistoric gold jewellery ever discovered in Ireland.
It dates from around 1300 to 1100 BC.
Is it very delicate?
You can tell me whether you think it's delicate or not.
No, it's not at all, is it?
It's so solid!
And heavy. It was found in 2009
in a town called Corrard.
It would originally have formed a circular hoop,
and the ends acted like a clasp on a necklace,
or a belt with a buckle, allowing it to be opened and closed.
And is it local gold? Are they finding this gold locally?
That's sort of the $64 million question.
We do know that there are a number of sources of Irish gold today.
My dentist told me that he had panned enough gold in the Sperrins
to fill a tooth.
So where the source of the gold is, we're not sure,
but it was almost certainly alluvial gold -
that means gold that was our classic vision of people panning in rivers.
And in terms of who would have worn this,
I'm imagining it would have been somebody of extremely high status -
perhaps even a Bronze Age king or queen?
We don't know. Again, one of the unusual things
is that no torc has been found with skeleton remains.
But it must have belonged to somebody, you know,
of really high status. Another unusual thing about this metalwork
is that it's often found in boggy locations.
These include rivers, lakes and bogs.
So they must have been regarded as some form of sacred landscape.
Finds like the Corrard torc suggest that for the ancient people,
peat bogs were sacred places
between earth and water,
where ritual offerings to the gods could be made.
But unique discoveries of human remains
are evidence that these divine gifts were sometimes quite macabre.
As a physical anthropologist,
I am absolutely fascinated by our next story.
You can't really come to Ireland and look at archaeology
without looking at bog bodies.
And there are some extraordinary new theories emerging here -
theories about ancient ritual,
prehistoric kingship,
and human sacrifice.
In the conservation rooms of the National Museum of Ireland,
numerous bog bodies are in storage - literally frozen in time.
Ned Kelly has been tracking these bodies
as they come out of the ground for years.
This body was reported in December of 2012.
It was found when
a pile of peat was moved.
We now realise that
the body had actually been
extracted from the bog
perhaps as much as two years previously,
so it was lying on this pile of peat, drying out,
which is why it has desiccated
and shrivelled up.
Peat has been dug out of Ireland's bogs to heat homes for centuries.
But modern industrial extraction
is tearing an extraordinary harvest from the wetlands.
In the past decade,
eight bog bodies have been found dotted across the island
wherever peat is mined.
When examined by the state pathologist,
many of them have proved to have been horrifically murdered.
It's a ritual that stretches back
deep into Ireland's prehistory.
This bog body dates to around 900 BC,
which is during the later Bronze Age.
So here's the left...
the left arm and hand.
The right arm here -
the end of it has been cut away by a milling machine.
And the head also is missing.
Again, we're fairly sure
that that's a result of action by the milling machine
rather than an ancient decapitation,
because all the neck vertebrae are in place there.
Based on previous findings, it almost certainly is a male.
It appears to be a young adult male.
Gabriel, that was incredible.
And to see the individual fingers of a body like that -
the preservation is amazing.
Yeah. I suppose I was very struck by that.
And this sense that we have as archaeologists,
that we have this extraordinary opportunity,
but also responsibility when we see these people from the past.
It's so unusual to have a body so well preserved as well,
you've actually got soft tissue.
It's very odd, isn't it, what the bog does to a body,
in that the bones become very pliable.
The acid environment means that the bones become quite bendy,
but all the soft tissues are tanned, they're preserved.
Yeah. And then, of course, it's from that detail
that we can say so much about these people,
the fact, for example, that they seem to be treated
in a way that we would find extraordinary,
in terms of the kind of acts of violence
that, in some cases, are meted out to them.
So, what kinds of violence are we seeing on these bodies?
Well, these are photographs, National Museum photographs,
of another of the bog bodies from Old Croghan.
He seems to have been decapitated, disembowelled.
His nipples were cut off.
That sounds like torture, really, isn't it?
So there really is extraordinary violence
associated with these people's death.
I mean, they've been killed in a very violent, traumatic way.
Yeah. I think it would be valid to use the term "overkill" for this.
This is way over and above what was needed to kill these people.
Do you think that in itself is evidence of ritual, then?
Yes. And it poses very interesting questions about who saw this,
and whether this was a kind of public ceremony.
What about the bodies themselves, though? Are there any other clues
about the nature of their last days, perhaps?
Well, there are the fantastic investigations
that have been done by the museum,
looking at the contents of the stomachs, for example,
that these people had,
and telling us something about clues about the last meals that they had.
This is an X-ray of the Moydrum bog body
and, in fact, you can get a good sense of the body from the X-ray.
Again, the right arm,
the left arm, and so on.
We were rather puzzled by these small, spherical objects.
There's a mass of them there.
So we got the state pathologist to have a look and to investigate,
and we found that these small, spherical objects are sloes,
they're the stone at the centre of a sloe.
The sloe is the fruit of the blackthorn.
The sloe ripens at the end of October, or early November,
and this is precisely the period of the festival of Samhain,
which is modern Halloween.
And Samhain is the period when,
according to all the early Irish mythological stories,
kings were ritually sacrificed.
One of these stories describes how the king was
"burned on the night of Samhain after being drowned in wine".
But, for Ned, the final clue to unlocking the story of this body
is where it was found -
on the border of two ancient counties.
He's plotted other discoveries
and found that they also lie on ancient boundaries.
This, and what Ned believes is a ceremonial last meal in the stomach,
leads him to conclude
that the Moydrum bog body is a sacrificed king.
The presence of what I think can only be interpreted
as a ritual meal, within this man,
and the sort of mythological connections we can make
with the contents of that meal,
I think it makes it absolutely clear
that he is an ancient king who has been sacrificed
because his kingship has failed,
and the people needed to replace him with a new king.
I think these are part of a social elite.
We know how other elite people are buried,
and how much of a contrast it is
with this placement of bodies in bogs.
Most other people that we know of were cremated.
So their bones or their bodies were placed on pyres, burnt,
and then the bones collected and placed in cemeteries.
Is there any other evidence of ritual
associated with these bodies, then?
Well, I think where they're placed is important.
If we think about, in many societies, many religions,
the notion of there being portals to the other world,
and they're very often associated with sources of water.
And here we have bogs,
they're actually open pools where these people are placed.
And I think, in that sense, these are...
They're being put into the other world.
And either to make their journey, if you like, secure -
their bodies going into the other world -
or perhaps deliberately to kind of hold them in limbo
so that they won't come back and transgress further
in living society.
I really love this about prehistory, though,
the fact that there are all these questions.
I think we'll probably never get all the answers,
but we can use the latest scientific techniques
to really understand what was happening to these people
in the days before they died and the point of death.
But there will still be
some element of mystery about it.
Only archaeology can shed light on these rituals
and hint at the beliefs and customs
of the ancient inhabitants of this island
from millennia before written records began.
It's clear that ceremony and ritual
were incredibly important
to the lives prehistoric people in Ireland.
And this year has seen the first-ever dig
at a very important site
that's strongly associated with the Celtic festival of Samhain,
otherwise known as Halloween.
At the Hill of Ward in County Meath,
archaeologists are digging an important ritual site
known in Irish as Tlachtga.
The team are keeping a dig diary.
I've been interested in this site for as long as I can remember.
Wrote a book about it in 1999.
I'm interested in the mythology of the site,
hoping that we will be able to find
something that might confirm
the different strands of mythology here.
Samhain is one of the four major Celtic festivals,
and its association with this site
makes the dig extremely important.
The team are hoping that discoveries here
could shed light on ancient rituals.
Folklore suggests that this hill fort takes its name from Tlachtga,
a druid's daughter who died here giving birth to triplets.
With its connections to Samhain,
the dig generates a wealth of public attention,
with the locals checking up on progress.
So, we're now eight days in to the excavation here,
we've got three main trenches that are open,
which we're imaginatively calling Trench One, Two and Three.
Geophysical surveys of the site
show earth features stretching over one square kilometre,
with circular ditches over 100 metres in circumference.
The team has situated their trenches
in three distinct areas on this massive site.
Now over halfway through the dig,
the team is finding potential evidence of ritual ceremony.
As you can see behind us,
we've got the remains of quite a big ditch.
It's a rock-cut ditch,
so on either side you can see the bedrock coming up.
We're doing it very carefully now,
because we're finding lots of animal bone
and we also found a large piece of antler.
The archaeologists believe that these clues are important.
The animal bones could be evidence of ancient ritual feasting,
possibly a direct connection to the festival of Samhain.
In the last days of the dig,
the team makes an unexpected discovery.
At the bottom of trench number three,
they find more bones.
But this time, these aren't animal bones,
this is the skeleton of an infant.
It's a big responsibility to have to excavate a human burial,
but especially an infant burial on a site like this.
As archaeologists, it's important to find discoveries like this
because it tells us a bit more
about what would have been a hugely important and significant moment
in the lives of the people, the parents,
the wider family and community.
In response to the find,
the team decides to take a quiet moment
to pay their respects to this ancient child.
It was nice to have a group of people around,
sort of remembering this child as it was being lifted.
Just a few moments out of our day,
but it was a nice thing to do.
The human remains are taken to the University College Dublin
to osteoarchaeologist, Abigail Ash.
To anyone who's dealt with human remains, even vaguely,
you can see that this is a very small individual.
The posture was very juvenile.
If you've ever laid down a baby,
immediately, the legs bow
in a very characteristic way, like this.
And that is exactly
how it was in the ground,
so it's just as if
somebody had laid the baby down
and it was just perfectly preserved like that.
Abigail sets out to examine the remains,
and to work out how old the baby was when it died.
It's juvenile. Even though it's very, very young,
it does have some teeth forming.
The majority of these are actually still in the jaw
as they haven't erupted through the gums yet.
The estimate that I want to put on it
is quite conservative.
I want to say about three to five months of age.
Infant burials have been found at ritual sites before,
but they are extremely rare.
Dating the burial reveals that it is from the late Iron Age,
over 1,500 years ago.
Knowing the importance of this site
and how little has actually been excavated,
the broader significance of this find
will depend on further digging in the years ahead.
All I can say is that, at the end,
somebody took the time to bury it,
to put it somewhere maybe they thought it would be safe,
and to cover it up and to leave it there.
Sometimes, archaeology offers more questions than answers,
and nowhere is this truer than Iron Age Ireland.
It's the era of warrior chieftains,
heroes like Cu Chulainn,
and when Celtic art arrives here.
But what can archaeology really tell us
about the people of the Iron Age?
Were the Celts another wave of invaders?
The situation in Ireland
regarding the association between the Iron Age and the Celts
is a complex one,
and it's one that's much debated, even still today.
The debate essentially revolves around whether,
between 600 and 300 BC,
there was a major influx from the Continent
of Celtic-speaking people, bringing objects with them,
or whether we can account
for Iron Age objects of that date in Ireland
by some other means.
I think this looks to me like a classic example
of what we would call Celtic art.
So tell me about this disk.
It's made of bronze,
and some of the finest and prestigious objects of the Iron Age
weren't actually made of iron, but made of bronze.
And it exhibits elements of a Celtic art style
that's identifiable on the Continent,
known as La Tene art,
named after a site in Switzerland.
We have these beautiful curving lines linking together.
It's quite organic-looking, isn't it?
And if you contrast, I suppose,
a little bit with the decoration on this,
and these two objects,
the decoration is a bit more complex.
And what are they? They are part of a scabbard.
So if you imagine you're carrying around a sword,
you don't want to carry it around all day,
you would wear it inside a scabbard,
which would have been worn around the waist.
So the scabbard wouldn't have just been a dull, leather object,
it would have had these, which are... Are they made of bronze?
As I say, both of these objects were made of bronze,
and bronze was used for the more prestige items.
These just don't belong to anybody -
probably the average warrior would maybe have had his wooden scabbard,
but these were beautifully decorated plates.
But this brings us back again
to the debate as to how do we account for them.
Because the rest of the archaeological record in Ireland
doesn't suggest that there was a major invasion
of Celtic-speaking people.
So perhaps these could be accounted for
by an incursion of a warrior elite.
Some people think they're the products
of itinerant or travelling smiths, or even trade.
But it does... This does mark
the end of the great Bronze Age civilisations,
and the end of all the big hill forts
and the gradual decline of bronze as it is replaced by iron.
And it marks this change that comes across Europe
that most people associate with the Celts.
Ireland's coast and waterways
have always provided invading warriors with easy access,
and now one site is offering an amazing treasure trove of boats
spanning from the Bronze Age through to the Viking era.
Next, we're going underwater,
with an incredible discovery
that started off as a blip on a sonar scan
of the bottom of Lough Corrib in County Galway.
And joining us is marine archaeologist, Karl Brady.
Now, Karl, you've brought in some amazing footage to show us
of this discovery.
Yeah, well, this first discovery we made over three years ago,
and from there, we've made a whole load of new discoveries,
so I'll show you some footage now.
Could you see what you were doing?
Yeah, we could see all right.
It tends to clear up quite quickly,
but that was actually the log boat there,
you can see it here just coming up now.
We're looking at the bow and we're just travelling along the log boat.
It was actually found by a local surveyor, Trevor Northage,
who's been mapping the lake for a number of years.
And one day he was out
and all of a sudden a blip came up on the sonar,
and it took the shape of a boat.
And perfectly preserved, as well.
Really well preserved, yes.
Preservation on it was excellent.
The muds and silts in it are really fine, in the lake,
and they tend to cover over the boat very quickly and preserve it,
almost like as if it was vacuum-packed.
So what do we know about this boat? Do you know what it was used for?
We know it dates to the early Bronze Age,
it was made about 4,500 years ago.
So it's probably one of the earliest Bronze Age boats
we have in Ireland.
There seems to be very little wear and tear on the boat,
so we think it was only used on special occasions.
I think this is the sort of thing you imagine
is going to be a once-in-a-lifetime find, and incredibly rare -
but it's not that rare.
No. Well, shortly afterwards, Trevor was out mapping the lake again
and came across another boat
near Lees Island in the middle of the lake.
What's that thing lying inside it there?
Is it a sword or an oar? No, that's a steering oar.
So it's quite long, over two metres in length. Wow!
And it's really well preserved.
And beside that there was also an iron spearhead,
so it was a really exciting find.
And are those seats going across, or something like that?
Yeah, that's a seat. And just below the seat there,
you can see the remains of an iron axe.
What's unusual about this axe
is that it was inserted purposely in the boat.
They carved out a little notch on the handle
so it fit snugly underneath the seat and the floor.
An iron axe.
So this is a little bit younger than the last boat, then?
Yeah, a little bit younger.
We just got back some radiocarbon dates
from Queen's University here in Belfast,
and we just found out last week
that it dates to between the 8th century BC and the 5th century BC.
And that date's actually on the boat itself, is it?
That's the date of the boat itself.
We probably will go and date the axe as well, just to confirm it,
but the boat is early Iron Age.
The next boat you found was even more recent.
Yeah, the next boat actually dates to around the 11th century,
a kind of turbulent time in Irish history
when the provincial rulers were vying with the Vikings
for political control over the island.
Our first impression was that this was quite a late boat,
maybe 18th, 19th-century.
But as we began to excavate, we came across some interesting artefacts
that obviously changed our minds very quickly
and kind of made us think
this probably dates around the 11th or 12th century.
So this is not actually a Viking boat,
it's a native boat from the Viking era?
That's right. It's an Irish boat built in Irish style,
but what was interesting with the boat
was that we found three Viking-style axes on board, three battle-axes.
So the Irish had adopted kind of the Viking weapons
because they were so effective.
We also found a work axe and two iron spears,
so we reckon that this was possibly a boat carrying a group of warriors
who were ferrying around maybe a local dignitary or chieftain
or one of the ruling elite.
Again, why do you think that boat ended up on the bottom of the lough?
Well, we think this boat actually sank as the result of an accident.
It was carrying a large stone,
maybe for use in a monastery or as a grave slab.
And we felt that maybe they were bringing the stone
to one of the monasteries on one of the islands on the lake
and, unfortunately, it developed a crack
and got swamped with water and sank.
The people who were on board, maybe it took them a while to get out,
and they had to leave their personal belongings behind
and kind of try and swim for shore.
We'll never know if the warriors manning this boat
ever made it to shore,
but the Viking raiders they fought
left their own traces,
including one of the museum's greatest treasures.
So, sitting in front of us here is an extraordinary group of artefacts
that can really tell us about the exploits and plunders
of those most notorious invaders - the Vikings.
So, Greer, these all came from the same site, did they?
Remarkably, these lay in the bed of the River Blackwater
for hundreds and hundreds of years until around the 1990s,
when they were dredged from the river bottom.
You think they all came from the same hoard, then?
They almost certainly came from the same hoard.
But one of the really challenges was
that some of the objects were chopped up into tiny bits.
So it's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle - what exactly is it we have here?
And there are a few classic telltale signs,
and one of the telltale signs of a Viking presence
came from this little gold ring.
You can see that it's tied with a tiny, tiny knot,
and this is a characteristic Viking gold ring,
so we are quite sure there was a Viking presence.
What we also had as well
was material coming from a local church site.
So we know that we had shrines,
we had covers for books,
we have remains of crosses, we have bells,
we have material comparable to some of the finest pieces
produced in the early Christian period,
the only problem being that they've been chopped into tiny bits.
So these are real pieces of Viking plunder?
These are real pieces of Viking plunder.
And I suppose the question maybe to ask then is,
where on earth were the Vikings getting this material from?
And the most likely answer is that it came from Armagh,
which is a city nearby.
We know that from around the 800s,
Armagh was the most important church site in the whole of Ireland.
And written accounts record the first Viking raids in Armagh
in the year 832,
and it was raided three times in one month.
So all this could have been dropped
on the way back from one of those raids?
Was somebody crossing the river when they fell in?
Was it buried in a big treasure chest by the edge of the river
and got washed in?
And the answer is that we don't know.
Our next story takes us to Cork,
to a Victorian prison where Irish convicts were worked to the bone,
carrying out manual labour.
It is a story of ruthless treatment
and a harsh existence,
but it also shows us how the inmates were able
to eke out a degree of respect towards each other - in death.
Spike Island is known as Ireland's Alcatraz.
Opened in 1847,
it once served as a holding centre
for prisoners being transferred to Australia or Bermuda.
This year, researchers from University College Cork
have been digging up the grounds of the former prison.
We know historically
that just under 1,200 convicts
who were held here at Spike Island
died between the years of 1847 and 1883.
Between 1850 and 1855,
Spike Island was the largest convict depot
in what was then the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland.
And we have these catastrophically high death rates,
where they were losing one tenth of the prisoners in any one year.
These high numbers mean that Barra and his team have been very busy
excavating graves of nameless convicts
who died while imprisoned here.
This is how the graves initially appear.
So we mattock off the first, say, 25 centimetres of soil,
once we've removed the sod,
and then we begin to get these voids appearing,
where the soil just falls away
from the much denser surrounding subsoil.
And these graves are uniform size
and they're also roughly in line with one another.
Examining the skeletons,
Barra is already able to deduce important details
of what life was like for the people here.
And he's found that it was far from easy.
With this particular burial,
we can see, while it's still in the ground,
that it is the skeleton of a male.
We can see the beginnings of...
well, actually, fairly advanced degenerative changes
in his vertebrae,
which are a reflection of two things - age and lifestyle.
So it's probably an older individual,
and then one who has spent his life
engaging in physical labour.
The kind of labour that these guys were engaged in
was lifting and carrying heavy loads.
The convicts on Spike Island
were worked to exhaustion,
a common practice in Victorian prisons.
But as Irishmen, the inmates also experienced extra prejudice.
One of the interesting things that occurs
in the annual reports
is the unsuitability of the typical Irish convict
to learning trades and crafts and so on.
And there's this kind of racialised understanding
of the convict prisoners,
which is typical of the Victorian era.
The Irish are characterised
as being more suited to general labouring
rather than to learning particular trades and crafts.
For many of those men,
English would have been a second language,
and that might have made it more difficult for them
to be taught certain trades and crafts and so on.
During their lives, then,
these men would have been viewed as inferior.
But they were treated with respect in death,
as the archaeologists are discovering
as they carefully excavate the graves.
So here we can see
this really well-preserved coffin.
We've removed the human remains from this coffin
and, at the moment, we're just excavating out
where the floor of the coffin will be.
And in a few moments, we'll remove the coffin timbers.
These coffins would have been made by fellow inmates,
so obviously by somebody who had been trained as a carpenter.
The prisoners had been through hell during their often-short lives.
But in death, their fellow inmates gave them a proper burial.
Archaeology is a complex jigsaw puzzle,
drawing together everything from the skeletons of dead convicts
to Spanish gold off the north coast.
Amazing stories which are helping to rewrite our history.
Matt, it seems to have been a fantastic year
for archaeology in Ireland.
We've seen some amazing discoveries,
and there have been some real insights
and real revelations as well.
I think my favourites have been all the underwater ones.
The log boats from Lough Corrib -
they're absolutely amazing, amazing preservation.
And also the Armada wreck as well.
I mean, it's gold and it's treasure, but it's absolutely stunning.
Amazing to look at and see right in front of us,
and it fitted in absolutely perfectly with our historic knowledge as well.
What about you? Well, it might be a bit predictable,
but it has to be the bog bodies.
I mean, they're just extraordinary, the preservation of those bodies,
and what we're learning as well about those prehistoric rituals,
I think they're extraordinary finds.
Well, it has been a fantastic year,
and we hope that next year will be equally great.
We wish all our archaeologists good luck
as they continue digging for Ireland.