House - Bronze Age, Laughanstown, Co. Dublin

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Settlement Sites

House – Bronze Age, Laughanstown, Co. Dublin

What survives of a Bronze Age home in Laughanstown, on the southern fringes of County Dublin, amounts to a pattern of holes in the ground.

Yet those holes, carefully measured and recorded, are enough to reconstruct the rough outline of a domestic life lived perhaps three thousand years ago. The building they once held was small and oval, no larger than a generous modern sitting room, and the people who occupied it left behind a handful of objects that still raise quiet questions about who they were and how they spent their time.

Archaeological excavations carried out in 2001 uncovered a series of large post-holes at the site designated Site 40, defining an oval area measuring 4.5 metres by 4.12 metres. Post-holes are exactly what they sound like: the voids left in the ground where upright timber posts once stood, preserving the footprint of a structure long after its walls and roof have vanished. The interior posts were irregularly placed, suggesting a practical rather than rigidly planned construction, and the eastern side of the building was further defined by a slot-trench, a shallow linear cut that likely held a low timber sill or wall plate. Among the artefacts recovered from inside the house were a circular sandstone disc, a quartz tool, fragments of polished stone tools, and sherds of Bronze Age pottery, a finds assemblage recorded by Seaver in 2003. The polished stone tools point to a period when ground and smoothed stone implements were still in everyday use alongside emerging metalwork traditions.

Laughanstown today sits within an area of south Dublin that has seen considerable development, and the buried remains of Bronze Age occupation here are not marked or signposted in any obvious way for a casual visitor. The site is of interest primarily through the archaeological record rather than anything visible above ground. Those drawn to the area for its prehistoric context would do well to read Seaver's 2003 report and the compiled notes by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, which place the site within a broader landscape of early settlement in the region. The finds themselves, rather than the field, are likely where the most tangible connection to this particular house now resides.

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Laughanstown, Co. Dublin
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Ref: DU03745

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