A farmer’s hunch led to a lost monastery and a Neolithic surprise | Hacker News Reader

A farmer’s hunch led to a lost monastery and a Neolithic surprise

atlasobscura.com

108 pointspepys27 comments

As someone who grew up on a farm in Ireland there is an embarrassment of archaeological sites. The general philosophy is they are safer in the ground and we’ll excavate them when we get round to it. That said there is a real danger of sites being destroyed before they are properly investigated and I think more should be done to chronicle them properly otherwise you are relying on people to work against their self interest when developing sites (an archaeological dig can seriously impact the owner or developer of a site)

I think one of the issues is that there's just so much of it. In many part of Europe you can find archaeology pretty much anywhere outside of cities and other areas that have been developed in modern times. The article mentions "250,000 monuments in the Republic". I went hiking around Co. Cork a few years back and you can find neolithic monuments all over the place if you pay a bit of attention.

This is surprisingly true of much of the world, though a little more evident in Europe than most places. One of the (few) fun things about fieldwalking as an archaeologist is how dense archaeological sites are. I've done very few surveys where there wasn't something every few dozen meters. You're usually within sight of a habitation site or 3 as well.

We don't see it because our built environment tends to hide it and we're not usually looking closely, but it's there.

You can hardly throw a rock without hitting an archeological site in Meso, central, or South America.

Sometimes the rock is the archeological site.

>In many part of Europe you can find archaeology pretty much anywhere outside of cities and other areas that have been developed in modern times.

I can assure you that you can find plenty archeology within cities as well. Probably even more than on the countryside. It's just that it's all covered by several layers of development.

> In many part of Europe you can find archaeology

In the US the layer of soil where Clovis man was found has been used to determine a lower limit of where we can expect to find artifacts. But in many construction discussion groups you can find plenty of talk about stuff that has been found far deeper than the Clovis layers. Human civilization is far far older than we are led to believe.

for context, a pre Clovis society wuold mean that human came before the 13k yrs ago mark, the problem is ths the bering strait and a giant ice sheet in NA are believed to have been traversable 14k yrs ago and 40-50k yrs ago. if true, it would meand that human came to NA 40k yrs ago or that there were other ways to come to the new world. A bold theory is that polinesians/Austronesian "could" have developed some sea faring tecnique before tha proven date of 1100s AC.

Reminds me of an anecdote from my wife's uncle, who has a such a site on his land (also somewhere in Ireland, I'll not get too specific!), a burial site covered with a large stone. He told some researchers in the university about it and they had a field trip to study it. The professor was very excited about it as the orientation of the stone confirmed some theory of his, to which my wife's uncle whispered to one of the students that out of curiosity he had actually lifted and replaced the stone with a JCB not necessarily in the same place at all. The student's advice was 'don't tell him, it would only disappoint him.'

> The general philosophy is they are safer in the ground and we’ll excavate them when we get round to it.

it seems so!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32402373

the travesty is actually that these religious cults are being remembered instead of the natives who they committed genocide against.

Wrong part of the world and wrong period.

A monastery built atop Neolithic structures clearly points to the mostly-forgotten invasion of the pixies’ domain by human settlers. They didn’t always live in the barrows and the standing stones, you know. Those are simply their last retreat into holdfasts that humans do not know how to enter. As with most territory wars, it was far from bloodless. I agree that calling it a genocide is a stretch.

But the pixies remember. That’s why they sometimes lead unwary travelers astray. The humans who live there now, some of them anyway, are aware of the pixies’ presence if not the full history, and try to keep relations friendly by offering gifts. An uneasy truce has been maintained this way for millennia.

Personally, I think they’re biding their time until the humans go virtual, uploading our minds into our own rune-carved megaliths; running on silicon and freeing up space. At that point the situation will be poetically reversed: the pixies will re-inhabit their ancient lands, this time without any bloodshed or battles. We will retreat of our own free will. There are, however, whispers of rumors that the clever, headlong rush towards the singularity is not driven by human minds alone…

There is a really good government site for showing the location of all these ancient things. (you have to zoom in quite far before the dots appear)

https://maps.archaeology.ie/HistoricEnvironment/

Its interesting how you get to know the land below you as a farmer. We had prehistoric chalk below our soil at my brothers farm, from ancient corall reefs. Over that were some sanddunes, and on top of that the actual soil layer.

Add to that some forgotten "landfills" of the 70s and you got a interesting underground plowing experience.

There's a fairly detailed blog about the 2021 dig with lots of pictures:

https://beaubec.home.blog/page/5/

For those interested in the archaeology of early Medieval Ireland, I would highly recommend this survey: Early medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100: the evidence from archaeological excavations (https://www.worldcat.org/title/early-medieval-ireland-ad-400...). The second edition has an updated bibliographic essay as well as some other updates in the text.

How did so much become buried in such a short (geologically speaking) amount of time?

Organic matter collects and degrades into basically soil. I have bush that constantly sheds leaves. If I don't keep up with sweeping, they pile up. One pile I didn't get to for a very long time, and at the bottom of that pile was basically leaf dirt. Other things can get almost absorbed into the soil. Walk around an old neighborhood in your city, you will notice the edges of the sidewalks are being actively absorbed into the dirt along the sides unless the property owner is keeping up with edging.

I see this happening on a gravel road on my own property no longer in use, now thinly vegetated, but it boggles my mind that the same action could swallow a settlement or the remains of a settlement in such a short time period. That’s quite a lot of earth building!

Charles Darwin showed that it was the action of earthworms. He actually wrote a book about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Formation_of_Vegetable_Mou...

I want to know too. Are the landmasses becoming thicker over time, at least the relatively uninhabited portions of it?

To an extent. Plant life captures carbon from the air and turns it into leaves and stalks. It dies and ends up in the soil where it gets degraded, and some carbon returns to the atmosphere but this occurs slowly and other plants will sooner grow in the vacant space left by the dead plant. Local effects change this of course and it could shift the other way. When I hike among the chaparral, I certainly see a lot more dust blow off the mountain tops than there are plants growing and shedding leaves and adding in more dirt at that instant for sure. The removal process from the prevailing wind is higher in this case than the adding process from plant matter and these mountains are therefore eroding away. If you live somewhere with trees that drop leaves that just stick around in the forest without blowing away, that area is probably adding dirt over time which can be noticeable sometimes if you live in an area for a long time.

Not only does life thicken the continents and seafloor on Earth, all planets grow from in-falling matter from space, mostly comets and meteors. I've read that house dust is primarily human skin and powdered meteorite.

I think there are a lot of "hidden" things under people's feet like this, but it is especially neat when it is somewhere "far away".

It's also interesting that the family basically "knew" what it was, but the warnings were thought to be legends.

The visible remains of ring forts in Ireland are commonly referred as “fairy forts”. In many areas of the country there is a taboo associated with interfering with or disturbing them.

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