Mesolithic Ireland

Mesolithic Ireland 8000 – 4000 BC. Ireland’s first settlers?

The glacial ice that shrouded Ireland up to 10,000 years ago has eradicated nearly all traces of earlier pre-Ice Age human activity in Ireland. Though exciting recent discoveries may hint that Ireland was occupied, at least seasonally, for much longer than we thought.

In this chapter we are going to look at some of the early evidence, with a focus on the Mesolithic Period that lasted from around 8000–4000 BC. The term ‘Mesolithic’ means ‘Middle Stone Age’. During this period people were generally believed to have led a nomadic hunter gatherer existence, and travelled along rivers and coastlines. We’ll take a look at some of the key sites from this period, and explore some of their material culture.
Click to Enter Fullscreen Mode

Materials

  • You can discover a deeper dive on Mesolithic Ireland with this episode of Amplify Archaeology Podcast that I recorded with Professor Graeme Warren of University College Dublin.
  • Mount Sandel is perhaps the most famous Mesolithic site in Ireland.  It was excavated in the 1970s by Professor Peter Woodman, you can find a short summary on the excavations.ie website. 
  • Lough Boora in the midlands of County Offaly can also be visited, again there isn’t much to see on site but there are interpretative panels where the site was discovered, and the bog is a lovely place to visit.  The story of the Lough Boora Mesolithic site also features in one of our latest audioguides.
  • You can find out more on the incredible work by Dr. Ruth Carden and Dr. Marion Dowd, who identified a 12,500+ year old butchered bear patella that had been found in the Alice and Gwendoline Cave in County Clare, in this Irish Times article. This is still an evolving story, and like most discoveries in archaeology it is one that creates questions rather than giving definitive answers. For example, was this indeed evidence of people killing and butchering a bear 12,500 years ago? Or could the cut marks have been left on an old bone that was found by people at a later time?
  • Of course, archaeology being archaeology, as soon as I had this recorded a new discovery by Dr. Ruth Carden appears to push the date back even further! Ruth found evidence of clear cut marks on reindeer bone from Castlepook Cave near Doneraile in County Cork. The bone is 33,000 years old! We eagerly await the published paper on this discovery that could be a real game changer in our understanding of Irish prehistory. Here’s a news article.
  • The National Museum website has an image of a flint flake from gravel deposits at Mell, near Drogheda, Louth, is the earliest known artefact found in Ireland. Fashioned elsewhere, it was deposited subsequently by an ice sheet near the Irish coast.
  • The remarkable discovery of a Mesolithic burial at Hermitage in County Limerick by Dr. Aimée Little is featured in this Irish Times article.
  • You can find a summary of Prof. Peter Woodman’s excavations at Ferriter’s Cove on the excavations.ie website.
  • The incredible Clowanstown Fishtraps feature in the 100 Objects series.  Their website has a great gallery of images and more information on this wonderful example of the skill and ingenuity of the Mesolithic Dubliners.  You can see the trap in the National Museum of Ireland, along with a number of stone tools and other artefacts from the Mesolithic period.
  • The newly published book by Professor Graeme Warren gives a brilliant insight into this period: Hunter-Gatherer Ireland: Making connections in an island world (Published 2021 by Oxbow Books). You can find it at a good price at Kennys Bookshop.