Burial, Cill Mhuirbhigh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Sites
Two young people were buried in a doorway.
Not beside it, not near it, but directly within the entrance passageway of Dún Aonghasa, the great Iron Age cliff fort on Inis Mór in the Aran Islands. The choice of location alone sets these burials apart. Rather than a churchyard or a field, whoever interred them used the threshold of one of the most imposing prehistoric structures in Ireland, wedging the graves into the backfill at the north-west corner of the passage through the fort's middle enclosure, with a large stone slab laid over them and a second smaller slab placed on top of that.
The burials came to light during research excavations focused on the north entrance of Dún Aonghasa's middle enclosure. A crouched inhumation is one in which the body is laid with the legs drawn up tightly rather than extended, and both individuals here were interred in this fashion. The more complete skeleton, belonging to a young person aged roughly twelve to fourteen, lay on its back with legs tightly flexed and the skull absent. The second individual, possibly slightly older, was represented by only three incomplete bones and what may have been teeth, and was not even identified as a separate burial during the dig itself but emerged only through later post-excavation analysis. No grave-goods of any kind accompanied either body. Radiocarbon dating placed both burials somewhere between approximately AD 770 and 970, well into the early medieval period, centuries after Dún Aonghasa was first constructed. The grave was partially defined by the revetment wall of the passage on its western side and by the threshold slab to the north, but there was no deliberate boundary along the eastern or southern edges, suggesting a pragmatic rather than ceremonial arrangement of the space.
What remains difficult to interpret is the intention behind the placement. Burying juveniles without grave-goods within the structure of a much older monument, tucked into existing backfill and sealed beneath stone, does not fit neatly into any single early medieval funerary tradition. Whether the site still carried significance for the community who placed them there, or whether the passage simply offered a convenient, bounded space, is something the bones alone cannot answer.