House - Neolithic, Earlsrath, Co. Kilkenny

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House – Neolithic, Earlsrath, Co. Kilkenny

At Earlsrath in County Kilkenny, road construction work in 2006 uncovered the remains of a house built somewhere between 3788 and 3659 BC, making it among the earliest evidence of domestic architecture in Ireland.

What makes the discovery quietly remarkable is not just its age but its detail: this was not a rough temporary shelter but a substantial rectangular structure, roughly 11.5 metres by 7.8 metres, with deep stone-filled foundation trenches and internal divisions suggesting distinct rooms. Its presence alongside a near-identical parallel house, only about four metres away, hints at a small community living in close proximity more than five and a half thousand years ago.

The site came to light during preparatory excavation for the N9/N10 Waterford to Kilcullen Road Scheme, carried out under licence in advance of construction. The two houses, orientated northwest to southeast, were both later cut by a large boundary ditch, meaning that by some point after they were built and used, the landscape around them had been reorganised in ways that eventually obscured them entirely. The southeastern house, the one examined here, was built using post-holes and stone-packed foundation trenches, with a possible entrance at the eastern end of the northeast wall. Internal post-holes may have supported the roof or created further subdivisions within the interior. Among the finds were sherds of carinated bowls, a type of Early Neolithic pottery with a distinctive angled shoulder profile common across Ireland and Britain in this period, as well as lithics, stone tools and flakes, some of which appear to have been placed deliberately rather than simply discarded, suggesting a ritual dimension to how the building was used or perhaps closed. The radiocarbon date of 3788 to 3659 cal BC was obtained from material associated with the structure and places it firmly in the Early Neolithic period.

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