Dún Ailinne, on the hill of Knockaulin in County Kildare, is known primarily as a ceremonial enclosure, one of the great prehistoric ritual sites of Ireland, comparable in status to Navan Fort in Armagh or the Hill of Tara. But the archaeological excavations carried out there produced something less expected: the quiet, material trace of people who had simply lived nearby, or perhaps on the very same ground, long before any monument was raised.

Among the finds were sherds of Western Neolithic pottery, a scatter of arrow and javelin heads, and several polished stone axes. Polished stone axes are characteristic of Neolithic communities; the labour involved in grinding a stone tool to a smooth edge is considerable, and such objects are typically associated with woodland clearance and early farming activity. Together with the pottery, these objects are read as possible settlement debris, the kind of low-key domestic and practical material that people leave behind in the course of ordinary life. A pit burial was also excavated at the site, adding a funerary dimension to what was already a layered and complex picture. The evidence points to activity at Knockaulin reaching back into the Neolithic period, well before Dún Ailinne took on its ceremonial character in the Iron Age. The finds are discussed in detail by Johnson (1990) and Waddell (1998).