Tara, the mound of the Hostages by Muiris O’Sullivan
Wordwell, 2005. 307pp, over 200 illustrations and
plates (some colour), 18 tables and 10 appendices, hb ISBN 1869857933 (€ 60)
We have repeatedly been exhorted in recent years to view Neolithic monuments not
as static artefacts but more as works in progress, subject to successive remodelling
and renegotiations of meaning and significance. Such monuments were also, from their
first foundation, powerful sites of memory. There can be no better illustration
of these two precepts than the Mound of the Hostages at Tara.
Tara has long been well-known as the famous royal centre of the proto-historic period.
The Mound of the Hostages (Duma na nGiall) owes its name to 19th century
scholars who sought to identify visible monuments with places mentioned in 11th
century manuscripts, associated with shadowy historical characters and events. In
fact, as the excavations reported here revealed, the Mound of the Hostages proved
to be several millennia older than this, and is indeed the earliest of the major
monuments on the Hill of Tara. The character and age of the monument were, however,
entirely unknown until Seán Ó Ríordáin, Professor of Celtic Archaeology at University
College Dublin, began excavations in 1955 and identified it as a passage tomb.
The Mound of the Hostages has featured prominently in subsequent discussions of
Irish chambered tombs, not least for the abundance of the human remains recovered
from the chamber, and the complexity of Neolithic cremations and inhumations within
and around the mound. Yet despite a number of preliminary reports, the full account
has had to wait for almost half a century. The circumstances of the excavation itself
were tinged with sadness. Ó’Ríordáin had planned three seasons, and began work in
1955 but fell ill and died before the third season could be completed. The baton
was passed to his successor at Dublin, Ruaidhrí De Valera, who directed the projected
third season in 1959. Thirty years later, Muiris O’Sullivan assumed the major task
of seeing the final report through to publication. The result is a volume which
reads partly as a window back into the 1950s, partly as testimony to the perseverance
of O’Sullivan and his team in working through site notebooks, boxes of finds and
specialist reports to produce a coherent account. Above all, however, in the author’s
own words, ‘it is a tribute to the careful excavation techniques and record-keeping
of the field-workers that so much information can still be retrieved from their
findings.’
The core of the volume consists of three chapters that take us through the key components
of the site: features beneath and around the mound; the megalithic tomb and its
associated cists; and the covering cairn and mound.
A hint of Mesolithic presence is furnished by a single Mesolithic flake, and there
is slight evidence of early Neolithic activity in the form of radiocarbon dates
on charcoal beneath the mounds (plus some sherds of possibly early 4th millennium
pottery) but activity begins in earnest during the second half of the millennium
with the construction of the passage tomb. This was covered by a stone cairn which
in turn was capped by a clay mound. Unlike other Irish passage tombs, neither cairn
nor mound were edged by an orthostatic kerb, but the monument was encircled by a
series of cremation deposits lying outside the edge of the cairn, many of them within
small settings of schist slabs. The chamber itself conformed to the tripartite plan
characteristic of many Irish tombs but was remarkable in two particular respects:
in the numbers of individuals represented (a total of around 200, both cremations
and inhumations); and in the presence, against the rear of the orthostats, of stone-built
cists containing a further 63 or more individuals.
The excavation and interpretation of these chamber deposits was considerably complicated
by the presence of Early Bronze Age burials accompanied by Food Vessels: for example,
two successive crouched inhumations had been made in a pit dug into the Neolithic
cremation deposit in the inner compartment of the tomb. A further series of Early
Bronze Age burials had been inserted into the clay mound overlying the stone cairn.
A small difference between the dates for Bronze Age burials in the chamber (four
dates 2281-1943 BC) and in the mound (fourteen dates 2131-1533 BC) lead the authors
to suggest that the burials in the mound may have begun only when the chamber itself
was considered to be full. (One small note of criticism here is that the calibrated
dates are quoted with 1-sigma intervals, although the 2-sigma intervals are provided
in appendix 7). Also from this period are some 30 fire pits around the base of the
cairn, which may have been ‘a sanctifying ritual associated with the expansion of
burial activity from the tomb interior to the mound.’
Two features of this sequence are especially interesting. The first is the complexity
and chronology of the Neolithic funerary activity in and around the chambered mound.
The three cists at the back of the orthostats are built within the bedding trench
that had been cut into the bedrock to receive the orthostats. They were sealed once
the covering cairn was built. At the same time, dates from the cists, from a sample
of bone in the orthostat bedding trench, and from Neolithic material within the
chamber itself were contemporary. This appears to indicate what has often been suggested
but can rarely be demonstrated, that the tomb chamber initially functioned as free-standing
funerary structure before the cairn was built around and above it.
The second feature of special interest is the rhythm of activity on the site. The
authors suggest that the Hill of Tara ‘may already have been a place to visit before
the Neolithic’ but what is particularly notable is the apparent lull in activity
between the last Neolithic deposits in the tomb chamber (c. 2900 BC) and the renewal
of interest in the Early Bronze Age, some six or seven centuries later, when a dozen
or so burials were inserted in the chamber and a further twenty or more in the covering
mound. What happened during these centuries? Did Tara lose some of its importance
for a while, or did activity switch to another area on the hill?
Another interesting suggestion is the possibility that the clay mound might have
been added during the Early Bronze Age specifically to allow the insertion of additional
burials. The original excavators rejected the idea because there was no evidence
of slippage around the edge of the stone cairn, such as might be expected had it
been left exposed for several centuries before the clay capping was added. Yet the
case is not conclusive and the possibility remains open that the Mound of the Hostages
was significantly altered during the Early Bronze Age by the addition of an outer
envelope. It is certainly clear that the ring of Early Bronze Age fire pits encircles
the foot of the clay mound fairly tightly.
As these comments make clear, the detail included in this volume allows the unusual
nature of the passage tomb and the complex sequence of constructional and depositional
events to be studied in some depth. Certain previously published conclusions, such
as the total number of Bronze Age burials in the mound, are revised. The confused
stratigraphy, especially within the chamber, has been greatly clarified by 58 radiocarbon
dates (both conventional and AMS) run at the Groningen laboratory. In sum, this
volume enables the Mound of the Hostages to take its rightful place as one of the
key sites for the understanding of Irish passage tombs, and to shake off the cloud
under which it has languished for the past 50 years.
The volume is also a pleasure to use. Coloured diagrams allow the complex phasing
of the site to be followed with exemplary clarity, and key finds, too, are illustrated
in a series of colour plates. It is all the more regrettable, given this generally
high standard of production, that the key cross-sections (pp.12-13) and overall
site plan (pp. 24-25) are so tightly bound into the gutter that they are largely
unusable. Against this, however, must be balanced the wealth of photos from the
original excavations that are reproduced here, and make this not only a key excavation
report but also a fascinating historical document.
Chris Scarre
Durham University
Review Submitted: October 2006
The views expressed in this review are not necessarily those
of the Society or the Reviews Editor.
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