Cist, Jamestown (Rathdown By.), Co. Dublin

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Burial Sites

Cist, Jamestown (Rathdown By.), Co. Dublin

Somewhere beneath the manicured fairways of Stepaside Golf Course in south County Dublin, the dead of the early Bronze Age were quietly disturbed by a sand quarry.

The site at Jamestown, in the old barony of Rathdown, is low-lying and unremarkable to look at today, its prehistoric significance entirely invisible from the surface. What the quarrying operations revealed was a cist burial, a form of interment in which a stone-lined box, typically just large enough to contain a crouched body or cremated remains, was set into the ground. The dead do not always stay hidden when the ground is commercially useful.

The find comprised at least three separate burials. The first was a cist containing an inhumation, the unburned body of an individual, accompanied by a Food Vessel. These ceramic vessels, small and often decorated with geometric patterns pressed or incised into the clay, are closely associated with funerary practice in Ireland and Britain during the earlier Bronze Age, roughly the second millennium BC. They are thought to have held offerings of food or drink placed with the deceased. The National Museum of Ireland accessioned the associated ceramics under the references 1927:45 and 1927:64, which places the discovery in 1927. A second burial nearby was also a cist inhumation with a Food Vessel. A third was a cremation, the burned remains of an individual likewise accompanied by a Food Vessel. The clustering of these burials suggests this low ground at Jamestown formed part of a recognised funerary landscape, though precisely how extensive that landscape may have been is unknown. The site is recorded in the work of Ruaidhri de Valera and others and is cited in Kavanagh's 1973 catalogue and Waddell's 1970 survey.

The golf course setting means the site itself is not publicly accessible in any conventional sense, and there is nothing to mark the spot above ground. The ceramic finds held by the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin represent the most tangible connection to what was uncovered here. Anyone with an interest in the Bronze Age burial record of the Dublin area would find the museum's collections more rewarding to consult than the fairways themselves, which give no indication of what lies, or once lay, beneath them.

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