Cist, Cappagh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Sites
In 1958, a small carved model of a sword and part of a wooden mug turned up at a site in Cappagh, County Kerry.
The sword was fashioned from yew wood in the style of a Hallstatt-type blade, referring to a form associated with the early Iron Age culture centred on the salt-mining town of Hallstatt in Austria, whose influence spread widely across Europe roughly between 800 and 450 BC. A miniature wooden sword is already an unusual find; what makes this one stranger still is that it appears to have been made not as a functional object but as a deliberate model or votive piece, raising questions about why it was deposited and by whom.
Not long after the initial discovery, a cist was uncovered in an adjoining field during the digging of a ditch. A cist is a grave-like box constructed from flat stone slabs, typically used in prehistoric Ireland to inter the dead. This one, however, contained no bones at all. Whether it ever held a burial that subsequently vanished through soil conditions, or whether it was constructed for some other purpose entirely, is unknown. No visible trace of the structure is thought to remain today, leaving the site as one of those archaeological puzzles where the physical evidence has largely dissolved back into the landscape, and only the objects retrieved in 1958, now held by the National Museum of Ireland, preserve any record of what was once here.