Three new items of grey literature added - archaeobotanical reports from Co. Cork

Links to a further three grey literature reports from sites in Cork are provided in this post. The archaeobotanical reports were from:

• Gortnahown 3 (E2477)
• Kildrum (E3971)
• Kilshanny 3 (E2432)

The site at Gortnahown 3 comprised prehistoric settlement remains, including a hearth and associated pits and stake-holes. The plant remains included small quantities of hazelnut shell fragments and barley grains. The radiocarbon dates from the site dated to the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

The site at Kildrum was an Early Bronze Age fulacht fiadh/burnt mound. As is common in samples from this site type, plant remains were rare. A single charred fragment from a hazelnut shell was the only plant material (aside from charcoal) found in the samples from this site.

Kilshanny 3 was a burnt mound, with radiocarbon dates from the Late Bronze Age. There were very few seeds from this site, including just three cereal grains identifiable to genus (a type of wheat).

I have now added all the archaeobotanical reports that I have permission to share to my data in the Figshare repository. In the coming weeks I will be adding data tables (as .csv files) for the sites with larger assemblages.

Reports uploaded this week (ending Friday 7 March 2014)

This week's plant remains reports:

• Ballybrowney Test Trench E2033
• Ballybrowney Ring Ditch 05E0233 
• Fermoy Townland 05E0078
• Scartbarry E2118

The sites at Ballybrowney come from Ballybrowney Lower in north Cork, a townland where many excavations have been carried out. The plant remains from the test excavation (E2033) came from an early medieval ditch fill. The remains included oat grains and a weed seed. The ring ditch at Ballybrowney (05E0233) was fully excavated. The plant remains included very small amounts of sloe stones, weeds and fragments of cereal grains. (This report was probably written in 2006, but the earliest copy I have is dated to 2009.)

The site at Fermoy Townland comprised a fulacht fiadh/burnt mound and two pits. This is a negative results report, as no plant remains were found. This is common with many samples from burnt mound sites.

The site at Scartbarry was also a burnt mound. As with Fermoy there were no charred plant remains from this burnt mound. Some waterlogged plant remains were recovered from the trough of the fulacht fiadh, including hazelnut shell fragments and common weed seeds from the surrounding environment (buttercup, nettle, etc.).

Technical reports uploaded to Figshare week ending Friday 28th February 2014

Sites added this week were:

• Gortnahown 2 plant remains report (preservation by charring)
• Garryleagh plant remains report (preservation by charring)
• Glenatlucky plant remains report (preservation by charring)

Gortnahown 2 was an early medieval settlement and metalworking site where plant remains included cereal grains from oat, barley and wheat. These were distributed across many samples from the site, but quantities were generally small, with only one sample containing more than fifty grains.

The archaeological site at Garryleagh comprised a substantial ditch, a smithing hearth pit, a series of cultivation furrows, a field boundary, a pit and two spreads. A small amount of oat and wheat grains and a few weed seeds (mostly Polygonaceae) were found. These were from three samples, from the fills of a ditch, a smithing hearth and an isolated pit, with the samples from the isolated pit being the richest.

Glenatlucky comprised a cremation pit, post-holes, a hearth, pits, one stake-hole and four linear features. Plant material was found only in moderate quantities, from post-hole and pit fills. It included cereal grains from barley and wheat. There was no direct association between the plant remains and the cremation deposit.


In addition....

As I have recently noticed that some of my cover pages contain typos (a by-product of creating and uploading these files towards the end of a long day?) I have also been correcting mistakes where and when I find them.

Technical reports added in week ending Friday 21 February 2014

This week's technical reports are:

• Ballynacarriga 2
• Ballinglanna North 1
• Ballinglanna North 3
• Caherdrinny 3

In two and half weeks the 12 reports uploaded to my Figshare profile have received 174 views (some from me linking to them from this blog).

Brief update: additional sites in prehistoric Cork collection

I've added four sites to my profile on Figshare this week. These are:

• Ballynacarriga 3 
• Caherdrinny 2
• Ballinglanna North 2
• Ballinglanna North 6

I've also added an note on the funding for each project on the front page of the report. All the reports I've done this to so far have been part of the same project (the N8 Fermoy to Mitchelstown road), but I will probably need to go back over the earlier reports and add this detail.

Providing access to grey literature (archaeobotanical reports from Cork)

This week I continued to add grey archaeobotanical literature to the online repository, Figshare. Two mostly prehistoric datasets were included from two separate (but adjacent) excavations at Gortore in north Cork.

The link for Gortore 1 is here, and for Gortore 1b the link is here.

It takes around half an hour to three-quarters of an hour to prepare the grey literature files for the repository. This is mostly because I spend quite a lot of time cross-referencing the reports, linking to them, and adding a template cover page with details of how to cite, and where to find further information on the site.

One of the issues that has arisen as I prepare these cover pages is the issue of when the reports were written. Most of my technical reports include a date of when the reports were finished, with a note on when they were updated, if this ever occurred. I adopted this practice more than ten years ago, as I found it difficult to keep track of when I had written everything based on memory alone. In some cases these details have been deleted out of the finished/edited text that is included as an appendix in the final excavation report. So, for example, I have suggested that the report for Gortore 1 is dated to 2009, as this is the date that I incorporated it into Google Drive. However, I know it was written earlier, sometime around 2006 or 2007, but I have no record of exactly when. On top of this, Figshare provides its own citation guidelines, based on date of “publication”. This means that all of the reports that I have uploaded are dated to 2014, even though they were written much earlier.

Archaeobotanical remains from Bronze Age round house sites in north Cork

The technical reports for arhcaeobotanical analyses carried out after excavations at two Bronze Age round house sites in north Cork have now been shared under a Creative Common By Attribution licence via Figshare.

The sites are Ballynamona and Mitchelstown.

Figshare automatically generates a citation, so these are as follows:

Johnston, Penny (2014): Analysis of the plant remains from Ballynamona 2, Cork, Ireland. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.923585

Johnston, Penny (2014): Mitchelstown 1 04E1072 plant remains report. figshare.

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.923586

The problem with these citation guidelines is that although the results were first published on Figshare in 2014, these reports were first written in 2010 and 2005 respectively. Because of this, there are guidelines about how to cite these as the original documents on the cover pages.

The two sites are plotted on a Google Map, with links to the original technical reports.

View Bronze Age Cork sites in a larger map

I subsequently got research funding to analyse more material from both sites, and some of the interpretations in the original reports have been changed in the light of these results. The research results are also available in open formats, with the datasets and a subsequent report also available openly under a CC-By licence, using the repository Zendoco.

The dataset for Mitchelstown is here, and the dataset for Ballynamona is here. A report looking at the combined findings has also been made available online, here.

The final excavation reports for both sites are also available online:

Hegarty, L. (2011). Archaeological Excavation Rport E2429 - Ballynamona 2, Co. Cork Neolithic and Beaker featyres, Middle Bronze Age structures and Iron Age industrial activity. Eachtra Journal, 10. Retrieved from http://eachtra.ie/new_site/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ballynamona2-journal.pdf

and

Cotter, E. (2011). Archaeological Excavation Report 04E1071 - Mitchelstown 1, Co. Cork Middle Bronze Age houses. Eachtra Journal, 10. Retrieved from http://eachtra.ie/new_site/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/04E1072-mitchelstownI-journal.pdf