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Archaeological Assessment
(developer & land/house-owner)
Master's Dissertation (Peter Wise)
Northern Linear Earthworks: Reassessing their Function in the Irish Iron Age Landscape Using GIS Techniques
The dissertation challenges the long held, but increasing untenable interpretation that the Iron Age "Travelling Linear Earthworks", which were once thought to stretch from sea to sea across both sides of the Ulster borders area, were for constructed for boundary defence or control. It suggests the novel interpretation that many were constructed as portage routes joining rivers (and lakes), the probable highways of the Iron Age. Using a GIS allowed the author to examine the landscape through which the linear earthworks travelled and so to "test" all the well known "Northern Linear Earthworks" against three hypotheses:
(1) defence and control,
(2) portage and
(3) ritual.
A few do come out strongly as having ritual significance and, indeed, these may be "processional" rather than "travelling" linear earthworks, but the rest come out strongly as supporting a portage hypothesis. The main reasons are:
[a] They almost always travel from one body of water to another, often across bogs, rather than closing the gaps between them.
[b] They do not take the defensive or dominating "high ground".
A good example of [a] is the Worm Ditch or Black Pig's Dyke between Lough Melvin and Lough MacNean in County Leitrim. A good example of [b] is the Worm Ditch or Black Pig's Dyke in west Monaghan which, though it does often face south (as if to defend against Connacht), it does not keep to the high ground with visibility to the south, but rather climbs valleys towards passes on its journey between the Finn River and the Bunnoe River.
The full dissertation is available on this website. The MS Word (2000) version has the original formatting, but is almost 50 MB in size, so it is slow to load over anything but a fast broadband connection. On the other hand the alternative Adobe PDF version is 23.8 MB and, though image quality is reduced to 50%, it is adequate for most purposes.
Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland (IAI)
Irish Organisation for Geographical Information (IRLOGI)
Irish Institution of Surveyors
Association for Environmental Archaeology
Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland
Archaeology & Development: Guidelines for Good Practice for Developers