The Ancients - The First Irish

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Over 10,000 years ago, many believe Ireland was a place where hunter-gatherers roamed. A place where the earliest human communities exchanged prizes of the hunt and crafted primitive tools to aid their survival. But what if their interactions with each other were more sophisticated? What if hunter-gatherer is a misnomer?In the episode of the Ancients, Tristan Hughes speaks to Professor Graeme Warren about Ireland's rich prehistoric archaeology to discover how the earliest communities lived their lives. What do we know about these first people who made the island of Ireland their home?They also discuss how the remnants of Ireland’s distant Mesolithic past shed light on the shared practices between Ireland and other parts of Mesolithic Europe and how the Irish Sea played a significant role in the exchange of culture between those regions.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, well, we're heading to prehistoric Ireland, finally. I have become fascinated by Ireland's archaeology in recent months, and many of you have been requesting that we cover this island's distant past, exploring what archaeology has been revealing about some of the earliest communities who made

Ireland their home, how they lived and survived on the Emerald Isle. Joining me to explain all about this, I was delighted to have Professor Graham Warren dial in from Dublin. Graham has written extensively on Ireland's prehistoric archaeology, with a particular focus on the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age that began roughly 10,000 years ago. This was a time before farming, when we popularly labelled people hunter-gatherers, but there are some issues with that labelling as you're going to hear in today's episode. I really do hope you enjoy, and here's Graham. Graham, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.

Well, thank you very much for the opportunity. I'm looking forward to the chance to chat. I've been fascinated by prehistoric Ireland for so long now and finally getting around to do an episode on at least part of it. And we're going back

to the Mesolithic, so like Stone Age, before farming. And Graham, this is a really exciting but also an ever-evolving field. More information is being revealed

about these very early people who made Ireland their home, about their lifestyles and so on. It's exciting at the moment. Yeah, there's been loads happening and loads changing. We've got a good team of people working on the university research side of things, but there's also always material turning up on excavations in advance of infrastructural development. So compared to where we were 15 or 20 years ago, we actually have quite a good body of evidence to try and tell the story of those people's lives. Well, we will definitely get into exploring all that material as we go. But first things first,

no such thing as a silly question. Graham, what do we mean when someone says the word Mesolithic? So the Mesolithic literally is the middle stone age, Paleolithic, old stone age, Neolithic, new stone age. And in Europe, it's a slightly slippery term and it has had slightly different meanings. But generally speaking, and particularly in the British and Irish Isles, it would be taken to refer to the hunting and gathering communities who lived here after the end of the last Ice Age and before the appearance of farming. So there's a funny mixture. We start with a geological definition or a climate and environmental definition, and we end with a historical or technological definition. So again,

in the British and Irish Isles, the change from the end of the last Ice Age into the Holocene, what we used to say was our present geological epoch, but we don't say this anymore because of the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, about 9,700 BC down to about 4,000 BC would be the general span of that. So it's a long period of time. And does the Mesolithic in Ireland, does it also align with the Mesolithic the other side of the Irish Sea in Britain? Yes, in large parts, although there are some things which are a little bit different. And here, the terminology is quite interesting because the way archaeologists began to subdivide the periods, that developed in Britain and that developed separately in Ireland,

and you end up with quite a confusing overlap of terminology. So the early Mesolithic that's present in Britain, and some of your listeners think of a famous site like Stark Har as an exemplar of that, is completely absent in Ireland. And what was traditionally called the early Mesolithic in Ireland is actually the same as the later Mesolithic in Britain. And then Ireland had a later Mesolithic, which doesn't appear in Britain. And people get quite confused by that. And they then treat Ireland as somehow different and weird compared to Britain and the rest of Europe. Myself and Chantal Cannella have been working on something trying to realign that terminology overall, because it does match up

really nicely. The early Mesolithic here in Ireland is actually exactly the same as the middle Mesolithic that Chantal defines in Britain. And some of the other changes that take place here are more extreme changes. It's more extreme versions of changes that are taking place in Britain at the same time. But there's a particular, I think there's a mindset of looking at islands and seeing them as isolated and different. Obviously, that relationship between terminology and Ireland and Britain, there are some legacies of the complicated history of these islands in there as well. But you can see them as being very, very closely related. Historically, I think people would have seen

them as quite different. But I think we're at a stage now where we can recognise the common trends that are running through that. The later Mesolithic in Ireland, for example, has often been considered to be something very, very distinctive and unusual. So in Ireland, at that time, the types of stone tools which are often associated with the Mesolithic, something called microliths, they're quite small pieces of flint or other materials shaped into very particular forms and used in composite tools. They're characteristic of the Mesolithic across most of Northwest Europe. In Ireland, what was traditionally the earlier to later Mesolithic change sees microliths drop out of use, which doesn't happen anywhere else. And this was treated as a significant problem. What's going on in Ireland? Why are they different than everyone else? But now,

Chantal's work on the British stuff, we know that at the same time this is happening in Ireland, you're also getting an awful lot of regionalisation in what's happening in Britain. So the Irish version is a more extreme playing out of those trends, but it's not just a problem that needs to be, how do we explain what's happening in Ireland? It's part of a broader context. Part of a broader context and a wider world. And we'll definitely get back to those connections as this podcast episode goes on. But before we really explore these people who made Ireland their home in the Middle Stone Age, if we briefly take a step further back, because Graham, Age. If we briefly take a step further back, because Graham, I know it's quite murky and we don't know too much quite yet, but do we have any idea as to when humans, people first started

arriving in Ireland? Yeah, it's another really interesting question. And for a long time, one of the things that was distinctive about Ireland compared to Britain was that we had no Paleolithic presence here at all. So in comparison to Britain where now we can push back to about a million years and Britain hasn't been continuously occupied since that time. There's waves of people arriving and leaving when it gets cold and nasty, but that wasn't present in Ireland at all. And Ireland's human story only appeared to begin in the Mesolithic. And lots of people writing and thinking about that, and one of the arguments, or a couple of related arguments, one is that Ireland was completely glaciated at several points recently, and that literally wiped

the landscape clean. So if you did have evidence of someone here from a million years ago, it's been scoured, it's gone. Whereas in Britain, all of that really old stuff is coming from south of the limits of the ice sheets. But then some of the more recent stuff towards the end of the last ice age, which still seem to be absent from here, one of the most common arguments was that Ireland, because it had been an island for quite a long time, had a very restricted terrestrial form, and that that meant it might not have been an attractive place for people to come to. And there's a certain logic in that. Over recent years, there was a very exciting find of a bare bone from a cave in the

west of Ireland, the wonderfully named Alice and Gwendolyn Cave, which Ruth Carden and Marion Dowd published recently, where that bare bone has, it's a patella, it's part of the knee bone. It has cut marks on it, which they suggest could only have been made when the bone was fresh. And that radiocarbon dates to about 10,800, 10,500 years ago. So towards the end of the last ice age. And they suggest that's good evidence for people being present in the last ice age. Now, it's an isolated bare bone with a few cut marks on it. And some people are very sceptical that you can use cut marks like that as evidence of human activity. That's not my speciality. I leave it to others to have those arguments. If it is genuine, then it's really interesting because the climate story at the end of the last

ice age, you have a warm period which runs from about 12,500 BC down to about 11,000, 10,900 BC. And there's really strong evidence in Britain of hunter-gatherers being present. So lots of the sites at Creswell Crags, for example, there's really clear evidence of people in Britain. And those people, they're doing exactly what hunter-gatherers do in Northern Europe at the time, in France, in Belgium. And no surprise there because this was connected. It was all part of the same landmass. So lots of hunter-gatherers in Britain at that time. And then you get a cold snap from about 10,900 called the Younger Dryas. Glaciers re-advance in the mountains of Scotland and Ireland. And actually, at that time, humans seem to retreat from Britain. So it's really surprising that it's right at that time when people are kind of moving out of Britain that we seem to have this little piece of evidence

for human activity in Ireland. It's almost one of those things where you think if it was a thousand years earlier, it would actually make more sense. In the book I published recently on this, one of the things I kind of speculate is maybe this is at a time when it is really tricky to be doing what those hunter gatherers normally were doing. They're having to experiment with different things. And that's why they end up not being reindeer or horse hunters on the kind of rolling plains of Northern Europe, but they end up in a cave somewhere in the west of Ireland eating a bear, which doesn't immediately seem a very logical choice on that. But because there's so little evidence, it's hard to contextualise that.

And there's really important work being undertaken by Ruth and colleagues, including my colleague Helen Lewis, which we hope will give us a bit more information about that. But at the moment, it's very hard to say anything in detail about the lives of those late glacial hunters in Ireland, if they were present in Ireland at that time. Now, when we're thinking about people in Ireland at this time and we label them all as hunter-gatherers, is this sometimes maybe a bit too simplistic a label to give them all? Yeah, I'm very glad you asked that question. The term hunter-gatherers is a difficult one. And it's a difficult one because it carries a whole series of associations and stereotypes.

And it's often quite hard to talk about hunting and gathering communities in the past without evoking lots of those stereotypes in people's minds. And there's a very powerful image of hunter-gatherers as people who just live in small societies, who move around a lot, who don't have very many material things, who perhaps in a slightly more positive light are considered to tread lightly on the world. They don't damage or influence their environment overall. That's true of some hunter-gatherers, but there's an awful lot of diversity within the range of societies who subsist on wild food. That's one way of thinking about hunter-gatherers. Their subsistence base is based on wild food. But

probably more interesting is thinking about the types of societies that hunter-gatherers live in, and there's a lot of variation in there. And unfortunately, there are very, very powerful stereotypes about that very small, that very mobile group of people, which we imagine very strongly as kind of the ancestral human condition, that that's how we lived in deep time. Wherever we're thinking about that being, we think of humans living in those groups. And again, there's much, much more diversity in how hunter-gatherers organise themselves. And we see that in the Irish record as well. We can talk in more detail about the chronology in a bit, but we have 4,000 years of decent evidence for hunter-gatherer life in Ireland. And it's not all the same. It changes. What people do changes. So the term, it has great power, it grabs people's attention,

but you also need to kind of unpick it a little bit to stop us having some of those more problematic assumptions. And it also has a big place in quite evolutionary models of thought, that hunting and gathering was a stage of human organization, which we we then moved past. We've had the agricultural revolution, we've had the industrial revolution. And certainly, if you go back into the 18th, 19th century, labeling a group of people as hunter-gatherers, be it in Tasmania or America or Australia or wherever it was, that labeling allowed you to say that in some way, they weren't as modern as us, that they didn't have the same claim to land as us. It was directly implicated in genocide, in colonial context, and in the removal of people from their land overall. And it's really important

that when we use the term, we're critically aware of those histories. Now, you mentioned how we have evidence available spanning that whole timeframe of the Mesolithic in Ireland. But what is this evidence that you have available? What is this source material that archaeologists like yourself study? A range of different things. We have sites which include the evidence for hunter-gatherer architecture. So we have a range of different buildings, and we can talk about that. Those sites sometimes contain pits or fireplaces. They often also contain ancient material culture. So the stereotype would be to say that, as you said at the start, this is the Stone Age.

Of course, it's only the Stone Age because in most contexts, the generally acid soils of the area mean that any organic material culture has gone. So a lot of our sites do have stone tools and that's Stone Tools Erbio. They're close to my heart. I work with stone tools. But we also have in a place like Ireland where there's lots of bogs and there's lots of wet contexts, we also have some nice organic material culture. So we have, for example, wooden fish traps, both baskets and stakes. We have what is probably, there's different options here, but it's probably a toy boat as well. So we have the material objects that people worked.

There are a small number of skeletal remains from the period, which we can look at and try and understand how people treat the dead. But also because we are what we eat which we can look at and try and understand how people treat the dead. But also, because we are what we eat, we can look at that chemically, we can look at that at a molecular level and say stuff about people's lives. And then we also have the landscape as well. We can reconstruct the paleoenvironment overall. So effectively, the normal kind of range of archaeological evidence that you would have for a number of periods. And do you find evidence of these Mesolithic communities in all parts of Ireland, or are they more concentrated in particular areas? It's a mixture. So in general, we can talk about Mesolithic communities being found across most of Ireland. There are some exceptions. We don't find Mesolithic material in the high

mountains of Ireland, whereas we do in many other parts of Europe. But in terms of the frequency of where we find stuff, that's been heavily biased by a few things. Part of it's the history of research. A lot of these sites were initially found through finding stone tools. So a lot of those sites were initially found in the northeast of Ireland, partly because you've got big urban centres there, so you've got people who go out and collect, but also because you've got lots of decent quality flint up there. So people are a bit more careless when they're making stone tools. There's more rubbish, there's more waste, and the stone tools are bigger. In the south-west of Ireland, there's not such good raw material, so they're understandably a little bit more parsimonious. And also, where there's not flint, people might

use different raw materials that it's quite hard for people now to identify. So I excavated a site up in the northwest of Ireland on the Mayo Coast, which was based on the use of quartz. And quartz for a long time archaeologists didn't think could be worked. It can, it's just quite hard to identify. So there's that bias. But the other real problem is landscape change, and particularly sea level change since the Mesolithic period. And in different parts of Ireland, that's played out differently. So in the southwest of Ireland, generally speaking, sea level has risen since the Mesolithic. So your early Mesolithic shorelines and even some of your late Mesolithic shorelines are

now underwater, and sometimes under quite a lot of water, 20 or 30 meters. Whereas in the northeast of Ireland, which is close to where the ice mass was centered in Scotland, that landscape was literally way down by the ice of the Ice Age. And when that was removed, it's very slowly bouncing back up. So in those parts of Ireland, you actually have late Mesolithic shorelines now above the current sea level. So again, you're more likely to find material in those locations. So our distribution of where we find Mesolithic sites is very much where we find Mesolithic sites. We have to work from that to actually think, well, what does that mean in terms of where people actually lived or visited? But we know they're in the Midlands, along lake edges. We know they're on rivers. We know they're in the lowlands. We know they're

on sandy coasts. We know they're on rocky coasts. So that's all very diverse. The extent of that landscape change is, for me, one of the real joys of Mesolithic archaeology, is the fact that you then need to go and work with the geologists, the geomorphologists, the landscape people, and trying to deal with understanding the human use of a Mesolithic location. First of all, it means learning to strip away how you see that place today and try and imagine what processes have shaped this landscape over the course of the last six, seven, eight thousand years. It's also really interesting what you said, Graham, that there is an opportunity potentially in the future for more underwater archaeology to also happen to

find these settlements that, as you've mentioned there, that are now underwater. Can we imagine that there is actually a lot of Mesolithic archaeology off the shore of Ireland, let's say in the Irish Sea? Absolutely. And colleagues such as Kieran Wesley at Coleraine Ulster, they've been working away on sites off the north coast of Ireland. If memory serves, it's about three or four metres of water there. And they have Mesolithic sites, which they're being able to collect off the seabed. So there's great potential for that sort of material as well. Some of the fish traps I mentioned earlier on were found in Dublin, deep in intertidal muds as well. So that material can be quite transformative. I'd like to ask about stone tools. I mean, what types of stone tools

is the Irish Mesolithic defined by? So the Irish Mesolithic, there's a kind of high-level answer to this, but then the details begin to break down a little bit. So the earlier Mesolithic in Ireland, which is the same as the Middle Mesolithic in Britain, that is mainly based around the use of reasonably high quality raw materials. So flint's quite important there, and quite a structured way of removing blades from cores. So blades, removals from cores, are quite nice parallel sides and some of those blades are then snapped and modified in quite distinctive ways to make microlifts, these little insets for tools. So you might put a row of microlifts along the edge of a knife or a few of them in as barbs of an arrow. There's other tools as well. There are scrapers,

there are a variety of axes at this time. And one of the things that's distinctive in Ireland compared to Britain is polished and ground axes are present in the Irish Mesolithic from a very early period and run through, whereas in some parts of Britain, the axes aren't present at that time. Again, we often think about axes as a Neolithic invention. It's the farmers turning up to clear the forest, but no, in Ireland, they're there long before that. And some of those axes are used in very elaborate ways. We might talk about burial a little bit later on and think about how these tools were used for that. And then as you move into the later Mesolithic, and it's not an overnight change, it takes hundreds of years to take place,

the diversity of raw materials increases and the focus on producing those very, very tightly controlled blades changes. So you get people using raw materials which are available locally and they start making much bigger blades and flakes, some of which are retouched into distinctive shapes but rather than those quite large and often they can be five or ten centimetres long, rather than those being the insets in a knife blade it's often assumed that those tools themselves were used as knives maybe for working wood or something like that. You still get the axes, you still get ground material, you get a range of other stuff as well, but you get that. Classically, the shift is talked about as being from microliths to band flakes, river band. That's where a lot of these were found.

Band flakes, there's a very tight technical definition, which I won't worry you with, but they're these large leaf-shaped flakes and blades which are quite common at the time let's explore the people themselves and the wider communities that they are living in. Do we have any evidence alongside these tools, alongside these fireplaces and so on, of actual Mesolithic settlements of where these people were living for considerably long periods of time? Absolutely. And there's probably a couple of examples we can talk meaningfully about at the moment. probably a couple of examples we can talk meaningfully about at the moment. So one is one of the classic images of the Irish Mesolithic is a location called Mount Sandal in the north of Ireland, which is a, again, in Irish terms, it's early Mesolithic. But actually, the type of site here, things exactly like it are found in Northern Britain at this time. But Mount Sandal is a hut,

approximately six meters in diameter with a central fireplace. Some of the posts from that hut are kind of 10, 15 centimeters in diameter. So it's a substantial structure and seems to have, if you look at the, this is Peter Woodman's excavations in the 1970s, if you look at the post holes and the stake holes and the fireplace, it seems to have been rebuilt four times or more or less the same position. It kind of just shuffles a little bit over the course of a couple of centuries immediately after 8,000 BC. And that seems to be somewhere, and if you think about the British ones as well, that

seems to have been somewhere that this isn't a transient location that people are turning up in for a few days and then moving away. This is somewhere that could work as a base for six to nine months of the year. It's a substantial commitment of resources. We made one at the UCD Centre for Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture. I think at one point we had 25 people in there for a kind of celebration. And we used straight birch poles to construct that from. That building's seven meters high. It's a huge architectural intervention in the landscape.

So at some stages, people are building those sorts of things. And that's quite early in the period. At other times, however, that's not what we find at all. The sites are characterized by spreads of material, a few stone tools, some charcoal, maybe a pit, maybe what archaeologists often call an occupation soil. I'm never sure what we mean by an occupation soil, but lots of stuff which is really very ephemeral and kind of hard to work out at first because you're looking to go, well, there's no evidence of architecture here. How are people actually living on these spaces? And one of the things it's interesting to think about is if hunting and gathering communities are relying on tents as a form of architecture. One of the characteristic aspects of tents is that actually they'd hardly leave any archaeological trace. All you have to do is put a few small stakes in the corner,

and then you're letting those soil processes develop for a very long time. It's only in exceptional circumstances that you'll find evidence of a tent. Most of the rest of the time, if people were living in tents, what you'd find would be a spread of occupation soil, some stone tools, some fireplaces, all of those sorts of things. I try to argue in the book that all of these sites that we've been finding on road schemes, which are those sorts of things. I try to argue in the book that all of these sites that we've been finding on road schemes, which are these spreads of material, very ephemeral, very quiet archaeology, is because they're the places that people were living in in tents, and often coming back to the same location. So you're jumbling and you're merging and you're

mixing things up. To an extent, that doesn't sound very exciting. Wow, Graham has just said hunter-gatherers live in tents. Isn't that just what hunter-gatherers do because they move about? Well, again, to an extent. But we've just said that, you know, for Mount Sandal, they could build big buildings, substantial buildings. And it's really interesting if you look at the comparative ethnography of mobile hunter-gatherers, those that do move around a lot.

One of the key decisions they make is to live in communities that are only small groups of people, but they live in very, very tightly packed communities with very, very much shared space. The houses are open. People can see each other all of the time. People are aware of who is around them all of the time. And that sense of openness through not having elaborate architecture is really important to the development of trust in those communities, and particularly to social practices like sharing. There's some lovely work in the ethnography here, which basically says sharing is on the side that is opposite to the house. So if you think about a key hunter-gatherer practice like sharing food, that's built on trust. And the suggestion is that because in the West we live in buildings that fragment us,

that break us away from other people, that's all about private space, that that actively erodes the generation of trust between people. So rather than just saying hunter-gatherers are living in tents because that's what hunter-gatherers do, I try to argue that hunter-gatherers at that stage were living in tents because that created the type of society that they wanted to maintain, one that allowed trust and it enabled things like sharing and it enabled things like egalitarian social relations. So that's not true of the whole Mesolithic in Ireland, but for some periods of it, it does look like it works.

So we can think not just about the buildings, but actually about how the buildings allowed people to live and their relationships with each other. That is so, so interesting. It's something you don't sometimes think of straight away. As you mentioned, Mesolithic people living in tents. I do remember doing an interview some time ago looking at cave art at places like lasco and then the people having a look and i

believe they've deciphered that some markings on the wall indicates like the time of year that particular prey animals were in an area and were ripe for hunting almost it leads me to this next question about you mentioned how many of these settlements are occupied again and again and again and again in the same place. Do we have any evidence, let's say, in those particular areas that that would have been where there would have been a rich array of megafauna, of prey animals that these communities would have hunted? And would that more explain why these people sometimes choose particular sites to go to again and again? Yeah. And again, landscape change is important here because some of these sites only appear to us at a certain point in the Mesolithic. But one of the nicest places to see this is probably

on the coast. So in a lot of areas dotted around the Irish coast in the later Mesolithic, in indeed the latest parts of the Mesolithic, we have sites that seem to have been occupied for 1,000 or 1,500 years. Now, I can't tell you that they were there every year in that period, but our dates span that period. So at the very least, they're frequently visited over that kind of time. And a number of those are ones in coastal locations where we see particular types of fish being important. So cod family fish are important. Ballan wrasse are important. Congareel can be important. Now, on any different site you go to, there might be one or two other resources which locally those fish were significant, but that's a common theme. In terms of the terrestrial fauna,

one of the things that is distinctive of Ireland is that terrestrial fauna appears to be quite limited. So in contrast to Britain, for example, Ireland does not appear to have red deer present in the Mesolithic period and does not appear to have auroch present in that period. So the main game animal really is the wild boar. There are some smaller mammals as well, but boar is important. And there's still discussion, and I still think more likely than not, that that wild boar was actually deliberately introduced to Ireland by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. That form of translocation of animals is a common hunting and gathering practice. We talked earlier about

everyone says they tread lightly, they don't alter the earth, but that's not the case. We know, for example, that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers brought dog with them to Ireland, and there's lots we could say about that. But in terms of thinking about the resources, these coastal places, you assume it's more likely than not summer activity, and on some sites we do have evidence for that summer. We don't know how long that lasted in the summer. We don't know how many groups of people gathered there. We don't know how often that happened. But some of these are what gets called in the literature, persistent places. And one of the interesting things about those persistent places is that when people came there, they encountered a landscape which had the traces of people who'd been there before.

So they would find scatters of stone tools on the ground. They would see woodlands that had been influenced by the activity of people. And that experience of place was probably quite significant. We tend to think we have this idea that people in the past, when they were making stone tools, every time they needed a stone tool, they picked up a core and they thought, what do I need? What do I need? Okay, I'm going to make one of these. And then they make it and then they go off and use it. We suspect that's not the case at all. Sometimes people were just generating lots and lots of flakes and blades. And some of those will be left behind. And maybe the next week, or maybe the next year, or maybe the next decade,

someone else who's coming back to that site would be looking around for something sharp to do whichever task they were looking to do. And they'd pick up that thing that was there. So that encounter with the past in those sites would, I think, have been quite significant. One other thing I'd like to ask before going on to burial and connections and wrapping up, Graham, is you did mention earlier, and it is really, really cool, is you mentioned that they had fish traps. Now, I'd like to learn a bit more about this. What do we know about the traps themselves and how they functioned? So we have a couple of types of fish traps, some such as the ones found in Dublin in the estuary of the Liffey. They are tidal fish traps. They are fences built out into the river itself where the actions of the tide are going to do the work for you.

And the other type we have are basket fish traps in lakes. So perhaps you're not working with the tide so much. Presumably you're weighting them down. You're putting some kind of bait in them and fish are getting trapped in those. One of the things that's really interesting about the ones in Dublin is they're made from hazel. And the really nice work by Lorna O'Donnell looking at that hazel shows that it's being cut on a regular cycle. It's over seven or eight years, I can't remember at the moment. And people have begun to think about, well, is this Mesolithic people deliberately managing their woodlands? Are they deliberately coppicing hazel

to get these nice straight rods, which would be ideal for manufacturing these fish traps? And again, hunter-gatherers are well known for managing their landscapes to increase the production of food resources and craft resources as well. So it's entirely plausible that these hunter-gatherers are influencing the structure of Ireland's wood plausible that these hunter-gatherers are influencing the structure of Ireland's woodlands through these small-scale management practices. The other thing you can think about there is perhaps a fish trap every six or seven years, perhaps it's beginning to wear out at that point, and perhaps it's at that kind of rhythm that you need to go and cut more hazel to do things. And actually, if you do that for a few times, you end up altering the

structure of the woodland. It's not deliberate management. You're not setting out to say, I'm going to do this in order to cut this and make this grow. But it's a product of your interaction with them, with those woodland resources. So again, you can think about these hunter-gatherers changing the landscape of Ireland. And the same thing happens with things like the introduction of boar and dog. That's going to significantly shift and change the landscape. So it's common to see in the Mesolithic of Britain and Ireland, people talk about this as a natural woodland. It is a natural landscape in which these hunter-gatherers lived and the transformation of that landscape into a cultural landscape happens when those clever Neolithic farmers turn up. It's not the case. Hunting and gathering communities are fundamentally changing the ecologies in which they live, particularly

in these types of island environments. Well, the British Mesolithic and the Irish Mesolithic, of course, you've got the massive Irish Sea between them. However, do we see connections between the two, between Irish Mesolithic communities and the wider Mesolithic world? Whether the Irish Sea is massive is a conversation we could have for a long time. You can see very clearly across it in a number of locations. And I'm not underestimating the difficulty of that crossing, but certainly in terms of the technologies that were available, the maritime technologies, it's not an insurmountable crossing in itself. Certainly compared to other periods of prehistory,

so if you were to look in the Neolithic, you actually see quite a lot of material which is crossing the Irish Sea. And clearly the nature of interaction across the Irish Sea at that time is probably more frequent, and it certainly involves those materials a little bit more. In the Mesolithic, that evidence takes a slightly different form. So we see some shared practices which seem to link the Mesolithic in Ireland and other areas. So funerary activities, for example, the ways people treat the dead has connections in other parts of Mesolithic Europe. We have particular forms of perforated shell beads, which turn up in the very final part of the Mesolithic in Ireland and the very final part of the Mesolithic in Scotland. It's hard to see how that's just a coincidence. It's much easier,

and this is one of the areas where you can look across the Irish Sea and see stuff on either side. It's hard not to see that as suggesting some kind of contact. The comparatively small amount of ancient DNA we have for the Mesolithic in Ireland is distinctive from the ancient DNA of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Britain. So that's suggesting that in terms of breeding populations, those are different groups. But of course, you can be in contact with people and not have babies. That is a possibility. So there may be forms of interaction across the Irish Sea. Perhaps they're not frequent.

Perhaps they're not every day. But I think they have to be considered to be there. It's not a case of Ireland being isolated and cut off from the broader trends. Even talking earlier on about the terminology and about how the Irish earlier to later Mesolithic is an extreme version of a trend to regionalisation that's taking place in Britain, well, that's not going to happen if there's not contact of some kind in there. Before we completely wrap up, you just kind of hinted it there about how the funerary practices of these Mesolithic communities in Ireland share some similarities with the continent?

I mean, what are these similarities? What do we know, therefore, about Mesolithic burials in Ireland? In some senses, it's a very, very small number of individuals we're able to talk about. But sometimes those sites give us really startling insights into moments in the past. Perhaps the best one to talk about on that is Hermitage in County Limerick, where in advance of a pipeline construction excavated by Tracy Collins and colleagues, a few small pits were found with cremated remains within them. And those were dated and much to everyone's surprise turned out to be Mesolithic. And we had no sense of Mesolithic cremations in Ireland before. But it's the detail of what happened on these sites is really interesting. So one of the pits has seen a cremation placed in the base of it, and that

cremation is propped up against a very large wooden post, presumably acting as a marker post itself. And lying on top of that cremation is a very, very elaborate polished stone axe. And detailed functional work by Amy Little has shown that that axe appears only to have been used for a very, very short space of time before it was deposited in the ground. And that the final thing that happened before it went in the ground was it was deliberately blunted. Someone has taken the blade and ground the blade down with a hard stone. And what's suggested is that maybe that axe, obviously you can't be certain on this, but it's plausible. It's a big and distinctive and unusual axe. And there's a couple of features of its manufacture that are almost as if someone's in a hurry with it. And what's suggested is that maybe that axe was manufactured to use for the funerary ceremony. So it was made to chop down the wood in order to construct the cremation pyre. And it's a very, very, you know, this isn't

someone who's just experimenting with cremation for the first time. This is someone who knows how to do this. It's a very effective cremation pyre. So they chop down the wood for the pyre, they burn the body, the axe appears to have been placed in the hot ashes, and then that's placed in the burial itself. It's another one of the cremations on site focuses exclusively on the head of an adult male. And all of this taking place next to a series of rapids by a river. And we could talk for ages about this because there's the aspects of the loss to a community of these individuals. Are we talking about a cemetery which is beginning to form along this riverside? But this cremation burial is paralleled in other parts of Europe. The use of an axe in this context is paralleled in Denmark, I think, but southern Scandinavia anyway. The use of a riverside rapid location is a very common

feature in funerary practice across Mesolithic Europe. The focus on the head is again very significant. There are sites in Germany which are literally caches of human skulls. So the Mesolithic practices in Ireland are clearly part of European traditions of how you deal with and treat the dead overall, and show us remarkable complexity in terms of those funerary practices. Well, Graham, this has been fantastic. As you mentioned there, we could talk for hours on so many different aspects of the Irish Mesolithic, but this has been a brilliant introduction into the story of some of these earliest people that we know of so far on Ireland. It also sounds very exciting for the future of this field of more archaeological work being discovered. But for people who want to learn more about the

Irish Mesolithic now, they can of course get your book, which is called? It's called Hunter Gatherer Ireland, Making Connections in an Island World. Fantastic. Well, Graham, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Not at all, Tristan. Thank you very much indeed for the opportunity. Well there you go, there was Professor Graham Warren talking all about some of the earliest evidence for humans in Ireland, the first Irish. I really do hope you enjoyed today's episode. Shout out to those who recommended we start to cover Ireland's prehistoric archaeology. Finally, particular shout out to my good friend Ken, who's been a loyal follower of the ancients

for a few years now and has definitely been pushing us to do Irish archaeology. So Ken, that episode was for you. Last but certainly not least, wherever you're listening to the ancients, whether that be on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from, make sure you click the subscribe, the follow button, so you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode. Thank you.