Urn burial, Liscahane, Co. Cork

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Burial Sites

Urn burial, Liscahane, Co. Cork

When the builders of a souterrain at Liscahane in County Cork set about digging their construction trench, they cut through something far older than anything they were making.

A burial, almost certainly from the Early Bronze Age, was disturbed in the process, its remains scattered into the fill of the trench where they would lie unnoticed for centuries.

The disturbance only came to light in 1984, during excavation of a ringfort at the site. Among the finds were fragments of an encrusted urn, a type of ceramic vessel characteristic of Early Bronze Age funerary practice, typically used to contain cremated remains and decorated with applied bands or ridges of clay. Alongside the pottery came an amber pommel mount, a small fitting of the kind associated with a dagger or knife handle, which adds a note of social distinction to whoever was once buried here. The souterrain itself, an underground stone-lined passage typically built beneath or beside a ringfort for storage or refuge, was the later structure that caused the disruption, though exactly how much later is not recorded. What the evidence suggests is a layering of use across this small patch of ground: a Bronze Age burial, then the construction of the ringfort and its souterrain sometime in the early medieval period, and finally the excavation that brought all of this to the surface. The find is noted by researcher O Donnabháin, whose analysis drew the connection between the disturbed material and the original burial context.

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