Newgrange, Archaeology, Art and Legend.

Reviewed by Michael Herity in 1984.

Newgrange, Archaeology, Art and Legend is a description of the site and its history, a report on the excavations carried out by Professor O'Kelly between 1962 and 1975, a discussion and interpretation of the evidence uncovered and a statement on the subsequent conservation and restoration of the monument. The book is elegantly designed and is very fully illustrated with thirteen colour plates, eighty-seven black and white photographs and fifty-nine drawings. Excavation evidence is supplemented by forty-six pages of appendices written by experts on subjects ranging from human and animal remains to pollen, molluscs and radiocarbon.

The presentation of excavation evidence in the smaller format of this book is to a large extent justified by the excellence and breadth of the illustration made possible by the wider market appeal of the publication. One penalty is the smaller scales at which plans and sections had to be reproduced. Sections of the spill outside the kerb at a scale of 1/100 are adequate except to demonstrate the detail of the occurrence of finds. Fig 13 at a scale of about 1/175 is barely sufficient to show important details of structural and intercalary walling especially in the sections. This point is underlined by the author himself (p. 83): mentioning possible axes of symmetry running through the mound, he makes the point that plans at a scale of 1/50 gave significantly different answers to those at a smaller scale.

Some of the major discoveries merit more detailed review. Possibly the most fascinating is the roof-box, a kind of fanlight over the entrance which admits in dramatic fashion the rays of the rising sun at mid-winter. A reconstruction of the passage at this point to allow for the straightening of the orthostats entailed the replacement and reconstruction of the roof-box. In 1967, after the restoration had been done, it was discovered that the rays of the mid-winter sun reach across the chamber floor at dawn as far as the end recess, lighting up the chamber for seventeen minutes before disappearing (pp. 123-4). Suppose, however, that the roof-box had been restored differently, would this phenomenon manifest itself in a significantly different way?

One feature of this roof-box deserves further exploitation by experiment. Professor O’Kelly discovered a quartz block in one side of the box. Wearmarks on the block and on the upper and lower stones of the roof-box suggest that it had been inserted and withdrawn repeatedly (p. 96). There was evidence suggesting the presence of a second similar block. Could these represent a device to narrow the beam of light passing through the roof-box, thus focussing it more exactly? This would presumably reduce the time during which it shone into the tomb but might achieve an even more dramatic result.

An interesting set of problems arises from the information recovered in the large area, roughly 110 by 22 meters, at the facade of the tomb on both sides of the entrance. A great deal of material, most of it plausibly interpreted as slip from the tumulus, had fallen on a surface of subsoil which had been recently stripped of its sods (p. 127). On the subsoil underneath were three disc-beads of Late Neolithic/Beaker type. The lowest layer near the kerb was apparently wedge-shaped in section and was composed of many angular pieces of white quartz mixed with a few rolled grey granite boulders. Kerbstone 96, which had fallen outwards at an early stage, had no quartz under it, so it was deduced that the layer of quartz had fallen from above. On the basis of this and experimental evidence a near-vertical wall of white quartz was reconstructed to a height of 3m above the kerbstone at the facade (pp. 72-3).

The Oval Structure

Above the quartz layer and extending for an average of 14 meters from the kerb was a layer of ordinary cairn-stones in a matrix of soil, apparently slip from the cairn. At all levels this contained over 250 sherds of pottery and almost 1,000 flint artifacts (p. 74) apparently of Late Neolithic/Beaker date. This material indicated that the layer of cairn spill is significantly later than the building phase several centuries earlier, which is dated to the full Neolithic.

Two curvilinear structures were set in the subsoil within 4 meters of the tomb entrance. Problems are raised by the information from one of these 2.5 meters outside kerbstones Kerbstone 97, an oval setting of thin upright slabs, 3 meters by 2 meters, enclosing a pavement partly cobbled and partly flagged. On the floor were an oval-sectioned length of sandstone interpreted as a representation of a phallus and a broken flint knife of the so-called petit tranchet derivative class ascribed to the Late Neolithic/Beaker tradition. A heap of quartz with granite overlay the setting and the finds and appears therefore to date to the Late Neolithic/Beaker tradition or later. As this was in turn overlain by the main quartz-granite layer, this layer presumably also dates to as late as Beaker times or even later. This hyphothesis is strengthened by the fact that a second flint knife of the same type and tradition was found nearby under the quartz granite layer (p. 188). As these layers, finds and structures are all on subsoil, it is necessary to postulate that the sod layers were stripped off the subsoil layers on more than one occasion (pp. 127-8).

Thus one reading of the evidence presented suggests that the quartz-granite material represents a layer placed around the facade of Newgrange in Late Neolithic/Beaker times rather than collapse which took place after the finishing of the tumulus. Three other sets of structures belong to the same general period, the so-called Great Stone Circle, the multiple arc of pits between the tumulus and the eastern boundary fence, and the yellow clay bank running inside the Great Stone Circle on the southern side of the entrance. These and the material from the later strata outside the tumulus are fully documented in the BAR volume reviewed here.

The exact relations between the three proved difficult to decide but Sweetman's excavations subsequent to 1982 appear to have established that at least one standing stone of the Great Stone Circle is later than the multiple arc of pits. The BAR volume also documents other structures and hearths of the Beaker occupation, cereal grains of naked barley and emmer wheat, flints including discoidal knives, concave scrapers and rounded scrapers, Bann Rakes and arrowheads of various classes. It also documents a large quantity of Beaker pottery, thin-walled and decorated bowls, flat based classes. It also documents a large quantity of Beaker pottery, thin-walled and decorated bowls, flat-based bucket-shaped pottery, rilled and lug-ornamented pottery, Grooved Ware and Food Vessel sherds.

These volumes are a tribute to the builders of a great monument and to a great field-man, Brian O'Kelly. Both are splendid additions to a growing archive of Irish archaeological information. The BAR volume reproduces in Plate I an evocative picture of monument and excavator by Pehr Hasselrot which deserves better reproduction. It is a truism to say that the evidence from every archaeological excavation is a blend of the unique and the recurring. No good excavation of a major site produces results which can be interpreted without problem. Approaches to the resolution of some problems can be made from stratigraphical and other observations of context on the site but in many cases, probably in most, the compelling evidence derives from the comprehensive information available in the wider context of the archive.

Michael Herity.

Source: http:www.jstor.org/stable/25508871.