Dún Ailinne Radiocarbon Chronology
With generous funding from the Rust Family Foundation, this project seeks to create a reliable chronology for the site of Dún Ailinne, a ceremonial center of the Irish Iron Age. Dún Ailinne is located on Knockaulin hill in the ancient region of Leinster and is one of several large ceremonial centers that emerged in Ireland during this period. These centers were places for ritual and ceremony, providing a space where community identity was created, expressed and maintained, particularly in the context of elite concerns. As such they played a significant role in the larger process of centralization that ultimately produced the political polities of the Medieval period. Their chronology is therefore crucial to understanding this process.
Excavations carried out at Dún Ailinne from 1968-1974 established that there was activity on the hill beginning in the Neolithic and culminating in a sequence of timber structures being constructed on the summit during the Iron Age (ca 600 BCE – 400 CE). While stratigraphy and material culture provide a general framework for the site’s chronology, radiocarbon samples submitted during these excavations proved problematic for a number of reasons. Because radiocarbon dating was relatively new at the time, greater quantities of material were required. The grant from the Rust Family Foundation will allow us to remedy this situation by using the abundant animal bone remains from these excavations to construct a more detailed and reliable radiocarbon chronology for Dún Ailinne. Using these remains will allow us to be more selective and more precise in terms of samples, overcoming the difficulties that produced the earlier flawed radiocarbon sequence The samples selected will be analyzed at the 14Chrono Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. By refining the timing of the site’s long history of use and its particular florescence during the Iron Age, we will be able to understand how this important site contributed to the history of Ireland’s social and political change.
Although this project was put on hold in 2020 due to COVID-19 restrictions making it impossible to travel to the National Museum in Ireland where the faunal collection is stored, we are hoping to visit the museum in the Summer of 2021 to pull samples and submit them for dating.
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