BREAKING NEWS: M3 given go-ahead! Hill of TARA in grave danger!

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Nobody is surprised to learn that the Irish planning board, An Bord Pleanála (APB) has ruled the M3 motorway can proceed through the Gabhra Valley. The National Monuments that make up the Royal Demense of Tara will be destroyed. Unfortunately, the APB is a facilitator of development.
The public won't see the details of the decision-making process that led to the conclusion that the M3 freeway should go through "TARA". But, the campaign to protect Tara must go on. The EU Petitions Commission have ruled the destruction of the National Monument at Lismullin is illegal. The M3 motorway should be rerouted to the much shorter, more direct and cheaper route to the west of Tara. The European Commission will examine the legal basis of this order, and the World Monuments Fund is monitoring the issue since Tara has been selected to their 100 Most Endangered Sites List for 2008. We await further developments.

In the meanwhile, take a look at the following report by Dr. Ron Hicks, who nominated the Hill of Tara for the World Monuments Fund's endangered monuments list.

Brief Bio from his webpage at BSU:
http://www.bsu.edu/web/rhicks/research.htm

In broad terms, my research is concerned with the nature of the pre-Christian religion of Ireland and with the way this is expressed in myth and on the landscape. Basic to my approach is the assumption that the religion bore a close relationship to, and was reflective of, the way of life of the ancient Irish, which was dominantly transhumant pastoralism. Thus one would expect both the mythology and traces of the religion on the landscape to be concerned with the annual agricultural cycle. In conventional terms, this means my research tends to fall within the areas known as cognitive and landscape archaeology and archaeoastronomy, although it also involves interpretation of myth more broadly.
After Greece and Roman, Ireland has the largest surviving body of early literature of any culture in Europe. And much of that early literature consists of myth--tales of the deities and their activities. Places are also very important in these tales, so important that there is a large compilation made up entirely of tales explaining how places got their names. This compilation, the dindshenchas, provides the body of data that is the starting point for my research, which involves analyzing Irish myth in an attempt to gain an understanding of its underlying meaning, determining the geographic locations of the hundreds of places mentioned, determining the nature of any prehistoric remains surviving at those places (through fieldwork), and looking at the relationships among the places in the context of the myth. Often site orientations or intersite relationships reflect calendrical or other astronomically related concerns, such as the seasonal festivals and significant movements of the sun and moon. Thus the landscape was seen as sacred and intimately related to the belief system."

Archaeological Method and Theory and the M3
by Dr Ron Hicks

It seems to me that certain issues important for understanding the opposition archaeologists and other scholars have displayed toward the M3 highway project have not really been clearly explained in the debate so far. From what I have read in the newspapers, it is apparent that the public, and perhaps even those in the government, have a rather limited and out-of-date conception of just what archaeology is all about. This is probably the fault of archaeologists, for we do tend to be rather too involved in talking to each other rather than communicating as we should with the public, who in the end provide most of the support for our work.

Consequently, I will try here to clarify

1) the objectives of archaeology,
2) the reason for our concern with “landscape” rather than just sites, and 3) what is today considered good archaeological practice. If I succeed, it will also clarify the vehemence of our objections to the planned highway routing.

Many seem to think that the goal of archaeology is to retrieve
artifacts, and the more spectacular the artifact, the better. This is simply not the case. An artifact in and of itself has little value for archaeology, although it may make for an interesting museum display. What is of utmost importance is information. For archaeology, this comes in four major types of data that must be recovered and analyzed: artifacts (things–usually portable–made or modified by humans), features (modifications to the site itself–monuments, pits, hearths, post-moulds, etc.), ecofacts (floral and faunal material ranging from pollen to charcoal to animal bones that provide evidence of the local environment, human use of it, and the date of that use), and, probably most important of all, context (the relationships among all of the other sorts of data and between the site itself and the surrounding
landscape).

What are archaeologists trying to do with these data? Four broad objectives are now widely recognized. The first, and oldest, is that archaeologists are expected to reconstruct culture history (the sequence and chronology of cultures). Once one knows what culture belongs where in time (and geographically), the next step is to reconstruct that culture–their way of life–as fully as possible. That will then allow us to gain some understanding of the culture process (i.e., why things were done as they were and why they changed, or didn’t). Finally, and most difficult of all but certainly vital for a sacred site such as Tara, we must try to gain some understanding of the way the people of the past thought about their world (their religion,cosmology, ideology, iconography, and so on).

From the last of the types of data listed above, context, you should begin to suspect the reason for our concern with the landscape beyond the site. While archaeologists used to focus solely on sites, over the past few decades they have come to realize that sites do not exist in isolation and that their creators did not think of their world primarily in terms of their house or village. People do not simply occupy a structure, a farmstead, or a village; these have meaning only within the larger landscape.

Significant places in a prehistoric landscape may actually be natural features that contain no evidence for human activity. For example, a
hilltop–and plenty of those besides Tara and Skreen are mentioned in Irish myth–may be seen as the dwelling place of a god. Ritual complexes, of which Tara is the premier example from later Irish prehistory, typically cover an area of several square kilometers within which are found a cluster of monuments recognized as being of a ritual or ceremonial nature–passage tumuli, earthen enclosures, and so on–as well as a variety of lesser elements that are nonetheless important. To the people of the past, they would have been seen as a unit. The complex surrounding Newgrange, for instance, covers approximately 16 square kilometers. That at Tara undoubtedly includes Rath Maeve, whose far edge lies 1.6 km to the south, and the Riverstown enclosure and linear banks lying nearly 2 km to the west and northwest. The northern and eastern limits are less clear, which of course means we have less information in precisely the area to be affected by the proposed
highway. In my own professional opinion, it is nonetheless highly likely that the complex incorporated elements at least 2km to the north and east, such as Rath Lugh. To the east the closest prominent feature that might have marked a boundary to the district is, in fact, the Hill of Skreen, some 3.4 km away, well within the likely limits for
such complexes. The presence on that height of an early monastic site
is another indication that it is likely to have been a pre-Christian sacred site and thus part of the complex.

To turn to the issue of methodology, the use of 22-tonne mechanical excavators in stripping topsoil to expose archaeological features is, at best, highly questionable. Stripping the topsoil is acceptable only if there is strong reason to believe that any deposits in that layer have been thoroughly disturbed–through long-term plowing, etc.–and even then it is not a good idea because experimental work has shown that plowing tends not to move things very far, meaning that one can still learn from the material in the topsoil. If such stripping is done, great care must be taken not to disturb deposits below that depth–which is difficult given the damage the earth-moving equipment itself is likely to do just by virtue of its weight, particularly the large machines they are using. In any case, a representative sample of the removed soil should be screened to determine what, if any, artifactual or other data it may contain.

Furthermore, while rapidly removing recent historical deposits to get to the “real archaeology” underneath was considered acceptable to many three or four decades ago, it certainly is not now. There is just as much to be learned from those layers as from older ones, because documents and the history books are very selective in what they record.

Carrying out an archaeological excavation is comparable to performing medical experiments on animals. One often has to destroy the subject to recover the data. Archaeology is by its very nature highly destructive. And any data not recovered in the process are lost forever. As a result, modern archaeologists dig only when essential and typically only in a limited portion of a site–no more than is necessary to answer the particular research questions that are of interest at the moment. Not only data bearing on those questions but also all other recognizable data must be collected and recorded.

The reason for this limited approach to excavation–and increasingly heavy reliance on remote sensing–is that we have learned over the past century or so that our ability to recover information continually improves. What appeared to be useless material to an excavator a hundred years ago, fit only for the spoil heap, we now know to have contained information vital to our understanding of the sites. A simple example would be charcoal. Who in 1907 would have thought that a few grams of charcoal held the key to dating a site? What early investigators of caves in France took to be waste flakes from tool production, we now know to have been utilized as tools themselves in many cases. Edge-wear analysis using high-powered microscopes simply did not exist. Nor could we recover DNA of the animals or plants being processed from residue in the pores of the stones, as is often the case now.

Unfortunately, highway projects such as the M3 do not allow us to preserve parts of the sites for future excavators. And the additional information the sites undoubtedly contain will not be recovered because we do not yet know what to record, recover, or preserve, so it is permanently lost. The thirty-eight sites that are said to lie in the path of the highway through the Gabhra Valley represent a very large potential loss of information about the Tara complex. The much touted “preservation by record” is an illusion.

I hope the above comments provide a bit more context. If any readers have questions or require additional clarification, I can be reached at rhicks@... or Ronald Hicks, Department of Anthropology, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana 47306, USA.
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International Expert Report Calls for Preservation of "Unique"Lismullin Amphitheatre

NRA assessment contradicted

An international archaeological expert has issued an independent report which contradicts many NRA findings and recommendations regarding the
newly discovered national monument in Lismullin, and calls for full
preservation of the "unique" national monument.

The report, entitled 'On the Significance of Lismullin', by Dr Ronald
Hicks, will be submitted to Minister for the Environment, John Gormley;
the NRA; Meath County Council; and An Bord Pleanala, who are currently
considering whether the demolition of the site will be in breach of
planning permission.

The report is also being sent to the European Commission, who are
currently examining whether the legal basis of the order to demolish
the site is in breach of EU law, as well as the World Monuments Fund,
who are monitoring the situation now that Tara is on their 100 Most
Endangered Sites List for 2008.

TaraWatch is calling on the Minister to examine the independent report
and halt any demolition works until An Bord Pleanala have reached a
decision, which is due shortly.

Dr Ronald Hicks, Chairman of the Anthropology Department at Ball State
University, Indiana, endorsed the TaraWatch nomination of the Hill of
Tara to the World Monuments Fund List. He recently inspected the
Lismullin henge and has issued a report which states:

1. Rather than being a delicate wooden 'henge', which is extremely
delicate, the site sits in a natural hollow to form an ancient
amphitheater. That structure is very much intact, and could and should
be preserved in situ.

2. The site is comparable to ceremonial enclosures found on the hilltop
at Tara and other royal sites in Ireland, but is twice as large as any
other.

3. The site is part of a larger complex of monuments associated with
Tara, forming a single national monument, with many component parts,
all of which are national monuments. The NRA have consistently denied
that the site is part of a larger national monument.

FULL REPORT - On the Significance of Lismullin, Dr Ron Hicks
http://tarawatch.org/?p=470

Profile of Dr Ron Hicks
http://www.bsu.edu/web/rhicks/research.htm