7.

Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500

Brendon Wilkins

As an archaeologist, I occasionally have to excavate human remains, and it can be vivid and
unsettling. I sometimes wonder whether the ethical professionalism surrounding me on site
(not to mention the unruly gallows humour in the site hut) is also an attempt to insulate
our modern sensibilities from what would otherwise be a truly frightening experience
to face the dead and, by reflection, our own mortality.
The M6 Galway to Ballinasloe motorway scheme was 56 km long, and metre for metre
that equates to one of the largest archaeological projects anywhere in the world. Thirty-six
sites were excavated in total, and these ranged in date from the prehistoric to the early
modern period. I directed excavations on a quarter of those for Headland Archaeology Ltd,
and for some reason nearly every site I excavated was of a funerary nature (Illus. 1).
I suppose it was to be expected. If archaeologists study the material remains of the human
pastthe things that people left behindthen it stands to reason that sooner or later they
will come face to face with the mortal remains of the people who created that past in the
first place.
The funerary sites excavated on the M6 included one Late Neolithic and Early Bronze
Age cremation site, four Bronze Age cremation sites, one Bronze Age funerary pyre, one
Iron Age cremation, one multiperiod cemetery, one early medieval transitionary burial, two
early medieval cemeteries and one post-medieval childrens burial ground.

Learning from the dead

In a moment we will discuss two of those sites in detaila Late Bronze Age pyre at
Newford1 and an early medieval cemetery at Carrowkeel2 (Illus. 2)but before then Id
like to pose the question of how we learn from the dead. One of the great paradoxes of
funerary archaeology is that human skeletons often reveal more about the life of an
individual than about their death. Osteoarchaeology uses scientific techniques developed in
modern medicine to assess how long people lived, their sex, diet, stature and whether they
suffered illness or disease. This is valuable information in itself, but the scope of funerary
archaeology is much broader. Mortuary behaviour is concerned not just with the dead but
also with the living people who buried them, and this evidence is harder to obtain. A
funeral can involve many activities whose traces are ephemeral and fragmentary, such as
ceremony and feasting, and which may have held more significance for the contemporary
mourners than the single moment when the remains were deposited in the ground.
To broaden the scope of their analysis and offset the potential for biases, archaeologists

1 NGR 149078, 226736; height 26 m OD; excavation reg. no. E2437; Ministerial Direction no. A024.
2 NGR 159326, 223949; height 45 m OD; excavation reg. no. E2046; Ministerial Direction no. A024.

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Bronze Age

Late Neolithic /
Early Bronze Age

Late
Bronze Age

Ballykeeran

Iron Age

Deerpark

Multiperiod
cemetery

Cross

Early
medieval

Treanbaun II
Carrowkeel
Ballygarraun West

Illus. 1The distribution of funerary sites excavated on the M6 motorway scheme (Jonathan Millar, Headland Archaeology Ltd).

Treanbaun II
Rathglass
Curragh Moore
Newford

Treanbaun I

Post-medieval

Mackney

Past Times, Changing Fortunes

Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500

!
(

!
(

Newford

Carrowkeel

!
(

4 km

Illus. 2Location of the funerary sites at Newford and Carrowkeel, Co. Galway (based on the Ordnance
Survey Ireland Discovery Series map).

use anthropological models to understand the diversity of funerary remains. These concepts
have been developed by carefully observing funerary customs in different types of societies
all over the world. This breadth of knowledge is vital because we study the past not to
mirror our own behaviour but to understand past societies in terms of their own lived
experiences. By developing a nuanced understanding of what has been called a structured
choreography common to all mortuary rituals, archaeologists can breathe life back into
mortuary remains from both the near and the distant past.

Modern sensibilities
Perhaps this can be illustrated by comparing the differences between how the dead are
treated in modern Britain and Ireland. Cremation is the usual funerary rite in modern
Britain, practised by 72% of the population (Parker Pearson 1999, 41), with a memorial
service in church followed by burning in a crematorium, usually zoned at the edge of town.
But in Ireland burial is the usual funeral rite. In its traditional form this is preceded by a
wakea mourning custom requiring the corpse to be constantly attended. Beginning at
the time of death and continuing throughout the night, there is music, food and drink, and
stories are told to celebrate the life of the deceased. During the crucial hours of darkness,
the superstitious may insist that all mirrors be turned around, that windows are opened for
two hours and then firmly closed, and that the women of the house maintain their
keeninga vocal lamentation over the corpse. The following afternoon the body is

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Past Times, Changing Fortunes

Pre-l iminal r ites

Liminal r ites

Post-liminal rites

Rites of separation

Transitional stage

Ceremonies of incorporation into

the new state or world

Death and preparing

the corpse

Wake and removal

Burial

Primary burial rights

Secondary burial rights

Physical death

Social death

Illus. 3The ritual process (Jonathan Millar, Headland Archaeology Ltd).

removed to the church, where it spends the night before burial, bringing to an end a cycle
of grief with what psychologists would call closure.
At face value these differences could be explained as a consequence of different
religious beliefs, but history shows that cremation was only legalised in Britain in 1884. The
widespread adoption of cremation was driven by social changes related to industrial
urbanisation, awareness of hygiene and medicalised attitudes to the corpse. Whilst it may be
possible to identify these trends from a range of historical sources from the recent past, how
are we to explain deeper traditions like the Irish wake, whose origins stretch further back
than our records allow? What connection could this possibly have with the sites we will be
discussing laterthe Bronze Age pyre at Newford, or the early medieval cemetery at
Carrowkeel?

Rites of passage
In 1908 Arnold van Gennep published The Rites of Passage, and this was a turning point in
our understanding of the ritual process. His assessment was that there are rituals common
to all culturesinitiation, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth and deaththat follow a
distinctive pattern. These rites of passage are in effect social milestones, marking the
otherwise intangible crossing of biological thresholds (such as the passage from childhood
to adulthood). Applying this model to funerary archaeology enables us to extend the scope
of our analysis beyond the moment when physical remains were deposited in the ground.
Rites of passage conform to a tripartite scheme (Illus. 3) characterised by pre-liminal rites

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Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500

(rites of separation), liminal rites (transitional stage) and post-liminal rites (ceremonies of
incorporation into the new state or world). In a traditional Irish funeral, the burial would
be performed as a post-liminal rite, but the wake takes place during the transitional or
liminal phase. The word liminal derives from the Latin limin, meaning threshold; it
signifies a dangerous and ambiguous period, perhaps explaining why it is customary during
the wake to maintain a constant vigil over the corpse. Excluded from the society of the
living but not yet included into the society of the dead, the deceased individual is separated
from their past but not yet established in their future identity. They are free from all social
categories, and this draws forth a crucial distinction for funerary archaeology between
physical and social death.
To the modern mind this may sound fanciful. In this age of science and scepticism
ghostly apparitions can be explained away to nothing, but, as the prehistoric sites discovered
on the M6 demonstrate, the origins of our modern-day funerary behaviour lie in a world
where manifestations of death were experienced as profound encounters with another
world, seldom seen and never entered by the living.

Prehistoric death
As we turn now to the archaeological evidence, remember these two concepts (primary and
secondary burial rites, and physical and social death) and we shall examine whether they
can help to bring the data to life. The prehistoric sites excavated on the M6 show that
cremation was the usual process of disposal of the dead.We usually only find cremation pits,
where remains were collected from the pyre and deposited into pits in the ground or
funerary vases as part of secondary burial rites. But at Newford we also discovered a Late
Bronze Age funerary pyre, one of only a handful of such sites found in Europe. This was
really significant for usthe pyre was part of the primary burial rites, and as such it
represents a real breakthrough in our understanding.
It had been constructed above a large pit, 3.5 m long and 2 m wide, that may have aided
in the updraft of flames (Illus. 4). The pyre superstructure would have consisted of stacked
firewood, with the body laid on top (Illus. 5). This had then collapsed into the pit after
burning, and about 700 g of human bone were foundfragmentary remains of finger
bones, teeth and skull bones. There were also funerary features more typical of this period
in Irelandcremation pits or token cremation burials dating from 1114918 cal. BC (UB7401; see Appendix 1 for details) that contained such small quantities of bone that
researchers have begun to question what was happening to cremated remains if they were
not all ending up in the ground (Illus. 6). Here, too, the Newford pyre can shed some light.
Modern cremation techniques result in the production of between 1 kg and 3 kg of
human bone from an adult body, and from this it has been estimated that archaeological
contexts should yield a similar quantity of burnt bone. Using these modern correlates we
can infer that at Newford bone had been removed from the pyre following burning. If only
a token quantity of this material was then deposited into cremation pits on the site, the rest
of the bone may have been destined for what we now assume to have been non-funerary
contexts.
Cleary (2005) outlined the evidence for the occurrence of human bone on Irish
Bronze Age settlement sites, in house foundations and ritual pits, suggesting that it was

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Past Times, Changing Fortunes

Illus. 4The pyre

at Newford, Co.
Galway, following
excavation, showing
the large pit on
which firewood
would have been
stacked (Headland
Archaeology Ltd).

cooler
(body)

direction of airflow

direction of airflow
hotter

ash and slag formed here

Illus. 5A reconstruction of a pyre, constructed of stacked firewood, with the body laid on top (Jonathan
Millar, Headland Archaeology Ltd).

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Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500

Illus. 6One of 14 token cremation pits containing minuscule quantities of burnt bone (Headland
Archaeology Ltd).

deployed as a social artefact. This sounds like a bizarre practice to us now, but think of all
the complex legal arrangements that have to be made when our own loved ones die. Death
ruptures the fabric of social relations, and it is vital after a funeral that bonds of inheritance
are maintained and extended. By using human remains as a social artefact, this could have
been achieved through ceremonial exchange between different groups. Land and
belongings could be redistributed, and claims to ancestral territory legitimised, through
deliberate deposition of these remains in specific locations.

Suffer the little children

Moving forward in time now to Carrowkeel, we encounter a cemetery site where
interpretation is much trickier. The site was in use for nearly 700 years, and the conditions
of founding were quite different from its eventual abandonment (Illus. 7). How will our
anthropological model fare with this site?
Carrowkeel was of a type of early medieval burial enclosure site generally referred to
as cemetery-settlements (Wilkins & Lalonde 2008). They are similar to ecclesiastical
settlements but differ in that they lack church buildings and were used for occupation as
well as for burial. It contained 132 burials (Illus. 8 & 9) and it was situated on the western
brow of an east/west ridge of higher ground overlooking a known area of early medieval
settlement, consisting of cashels, a souterrain, house sites and a field system approximately

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Past Times, Changing Fortunes

Illus. 7Sunset over the cemetery at

Carrowkeel, Co. Galway (Brian
MacDomhnaill, Headland
Archaeology Ltd).

Illus. 8Three intercutting childrens

burials dating from the earliest phase
of the site, cal. AD 650850
(Headland Archaeology Ltd).

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Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500

Illus. 9Excavating the

earliest burial in the cemetery,
an adolescent in a semi-flexed
position in the terminus of a
ditch partly enclosing the
cemetery (Headland
Archaeology Ltd).

150 m away. About two-thirds of the enclosure was excavated, with the rest remaining
outside the path of the road. The enclosure had been identified on the first-edition (1838)
Ordnance Survey six-inch map, though not on subsequent map surveys, indicating that it
had been ploughed away or levelled during agricultural improvement in the 19th century.
Precisely 89% of these burials were infants, juveniles and foetuses, barely buried beneath
the topsoil. We assumed during the excavationquite reasonably, given the lack of clear
grave-cutsthat these were cilln burials, and our working hypothesis was that Carrowkeel
was an early medieval enclosure that had then been reused in the post-medieval period as
a cilln (Illus. 10). In later medieval Ireland, and right up into the mid-1960s, unbaptised
children were not permitted to be buried in consecrated ground but interred in cilln
cemeteriesliminal, clandestine places often associated with physical and conceptual
boundaries in the landscape.
In fact the story of those burials turned out to be far more exciting. By radiocarbondating over a third of all the burials, we have found that the segregation of childrens graves
was happening right back in the earliest phase of the site, from about AD 700 to 1100 (Illus.
11). (For full details of the radiocarbon dating results see OSullivan & Stanley 2007, 1557.)

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Past Times, Changing Fortunes

Illus. 10The director and a

member of the excavation
team, with the earliest burial
on site in the foreground
(Headland Archaeology Ltd).

So what is going on here? Once we got our dates back we started to look again at our
assumptions. Cilln are sensitive subjects; some were in use into living memory and are
strictly off limits, while others have been forgotten, neglected and overshadowed by
modern development. The origin of cilln burial practice is often assumed to have been a
response to the 12th-century church reformations and the doctrine of Limbo Infantusthis
decreed that baptism was the threshold for entering Christian society and that without
passing this hurdle entry into the society of the dead was impossible (Finlay 2000, 4089).
Very few of these sites have been comprehensively dated and therefore they may be
much older than we think. Perhaps the conceptual tools we use to categorise cemetery
populations into foetus, infant and younger child are also blinding us to what is most
important about these sites. Medical technologies and modern attitudes towards
parenthood implicitly focus our perception of the person into embryonic stages, when it
was precisely the lack of definition of children as full social beings in the past that marked
them out for separate burial treatment. How can children join the society of the dead if
they have not been officially admitted to the society of the living? Cilln cemeteries are less
about physical death than social death, which is why they were also used for the restless
souls of individuals who had died a bad death (see below).

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Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500

Legend

Phase 1 AD 650850
Phase 2 AD 8501050
Phase 3 AD 10501250
N

Phase 4 AD 12501450

5m

Illus. 11A schematic diagram of the cemetery, indicating the phases of burial based on radiocarbon dating
and grave-cuts (Headland Archaeology Ltd).

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Past Times, Changing Fortunes

Burials

Illus. 12Top panel: the cemetery-settlement at Carrowkeel, looking south-west, based on site plans, aerial
photography and geophysical survey. The excavated enclosure ditches are outlined in red and the unexcavated
sections beyond the road corridor in yellow, superimposed on a greyscale image of the geophysical survey results.
Lower panels AD: reconstruction of how the cemetery-settlement fell out of use and was reclaimed by the
landscape (Jonathan Millar, based on an original survey by Scott Harrison, Headland Archaeology Ltd).

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Excavating death on the M6: 3500 BC to AD 1500

Is it perhaps more likely that the infant segregation in the early medieval period at
Carrowkeel was a precursor to the more general, historically documented later medieval
practice of burial? And this cannot just be a response to the Christian doctrine of Limbo
Infantus. Suicides, shipwrecked sailors, strangers, unrepentant murderers and their
unfortunate victims were also interred in cilln cemeteries. To die a bad death led to the
restlessness of the soul, and these sites are saturated with superstition and folklore, the home
of fairy changelings, or the night washerwomana child-murderess destined to wash the
bloodied bodies of unbaptised infants (Garattini 2004). So let us reconstruct the site now,
overlaid with the aerial photos and geophysical data for the remaining unexcavated portion
of the site (Illus. 12).
Carrowkeel was founded in a predominantly pastoral economy based on a
transhumance model of summer grazing. In this period, burial within the cemeterysettlement would have secured tenure to the land. Choosing this ancestral site above the
official church was a deliberate strategy by a group, probably bound by familial and kinship
ties, to re-establish their relationship with their ancestors and guarantee connection with
the land. As the church established its monopoly on the salvation of the soul, ancestral burial
grounds (ferta) declined in importance, and sites like Carrowkeel eventually fell out of use.
The dead were taken instead for churchyard burial, where they could bask in the reflected
glory of the bones of the saint (OBrien 1999, 52).
The segregation of children within one part of the cemetery indicates that conceptual
divisions were being drawn between non-adults and other individuals even in the early
medieval period. As Christianity bedded down as the main faith, these divisions were
elaborated into doctrine. Later generations continued to use the cemetery at Carrowkeel
intermittently up until the late 15th century. Ancestral cemeteries were eclipsed but not
forgotten, and it is no coincidence that they were predominantly used for the burial of
children. Surviving at the edge of tilled fields and pasture, abandoned enclosures were
liminal, ambivalent places in the landscape. They were ideal repositories for the remains of
the troublesome deadthose who lay beyond normal social categories or who through
their own deeds had offended the very social order. And as Carrowkeel fell out of use, as its
ditches silted and became overrun with vegetation, its abandoned nature enhanced the
liminal status of infants as betwixt and between this world and the next.

Conclusion
As post-excavation work is finished and these sites are prepared for final publication, we
might conclude by asking what we gained by waking the dead from their eternal slumber.
In 2008 there were 279 road traffic deaths in Ireland, and the sight of bouquets of flowers
taped to railings and lampposts is now familiar to many motorists. The most compelling
argument for building roads is the number of lives that will be saved; there is nothing safer
than a long, straight road, so by acting intelligently death can be cheated. In addition to
building safer roads, perhaps another way in which death can be cheated is through
archaeology. Many hundreds, even thousands, of years after the final reckoning, we can use
scientific methods and theories to unlock knowledge about life and death. In excavating
the dead and forgotten, archaeology is one tangible way in which personal loss becomes
societys gain.

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Past Times, Changing Fortunes

Acknowledgements
The author is indebted to all staff at Headland Archaeology Ltd, particularly Susan Lalonde
and Carmelita Troy, who undertook osteoarchaeological analysis on both assemblages
mentioned in the text. Sincere thanks to NRA Archaeologist Jerry OSullivan and NRA
Assistant Archaeologist Martin Jones, who provided welcome comment and guidance at all
stages of the project. Thanks to the staff of RPS Consulting Engineers for their assistance
throughout the project: Senior Resident Engineer Tom Prendergast, Resident Engineer
Niall Healy and Resident Archaeologist Ross MacLeod. CRDS Ltd and Valerie J Keeley
Ltd also excavated sites on the M6 motorway scheme.

112