NO ARCHAEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 05/11/2020

Ireland is fortunate to have a national (cross-border) database of virtually every excavation ever undertaken on the island since 1969. Included in this are sites where archaeologists were given watching briefs to monitor topsoil stripping in advance of development, but where nothing was found. Indeed, of the 22,000+ licenced archaeological excavations undertaken on the island of Ireland from the period 1969 to 2014, over one third of these were classified as being of ‘no archaeological significance’. Most studies in predictive modelling attempt to find parameters of the landscape that correlate with the presence of archaeological features. In this paper I take an alternative approach, and study the landscape of negative evidence in Ireland, aiming to find factors that can be gleaned from comparative spatial datasets that heighten the likelihood of not finding archaeology at a given site. Using a GIS, the factors examined were soil type and wetness, topographical setting (aspect, slope, etc), geology, hydrology, distance to coast, among others. The results however indicate that although some physical parameters do bear influence on the presence or absence of archaeology, they are not the dominantly important ones. Instead, the more important factors include the kind of development that funded the excavation; road projects are particularly successful in ‘finding’ archaeology. The results imply that modern day development pressures are far from independent of the networks of the past, whose remains are encountered wherever the past and the present intersect.


Author(s): McLaughlin, Rowan (Queen’s University Belfast)