Neolithic agriculture on the European western frontier: the boom and bust of early farming in Ireland

The Changing Face of Neolithic and Bronze Age Ireland: A Big Data Approach to the Settlement and Burial Records

“…A large number of developer-led excavations took place in the island-especially in the Republic-between the late 1990s and 2008, the timeframe of the most recent economic boom. A large number of prehistoric settlements of all kinds were discovered by this work (Armit et al 2013;Ginn 2011;Whitehouse et al 2014). In the wider context of Neolithic Europe, Ireland has a special place, being situated at the endpoint of a series of cultural, economic and demographic transformations which are among the most intensively studied in world prehistory (e.g.…”

“…For convenience, the Neolithic period is divided into transitional, Early, Early/Middle, Middle and Late periods, following conventions already established Whitehouse et al 2014). We also explore the presentation of spatial-temporal trends in the data without recourse to categorisation by time period, via animated mapping and presentation of overall trends using summary statistics and summed radiocarbon probabilities.…”

“…A comparison between the sum of all dates, and those instances where only one date per phase is considered (see supplementary data) indicates that there is little significant difference between the results. We do, however, follow an overall chronological framework for the Neolithic derived through Bayesian approaches already published elsewhere (Carlin 2011b;Cooney et al 2011;Schulting 2014Schulting , 2015Schulting et al 2012;Whitehouse et al 2014). We follow archaeological convention and present Bayesian modelled phase boundaries in italics.…”

“…By contrast, meta-analyses of large radiocarbon datasets and of archaeological sites using Bayesian chronological approaches (e.g. Whittle et al 2011;Stevens and Fuller 2012;Feeser and Furholt 2013;Armit et al 2013;Whitehouse et al 2014) appear to indicate a past that was highly punctuated and dynamic. This applies both to particular phenomena and to entire societies, with the latter emerging, flourishing in certain regions, and then undergoing decline, collapse or a radical restructuring as in decline-and-fall accounts of classical civilisations.…”

“…These meta-analytical approaches provide a useful means of directly comparing human cultural dynamics with climatic and landscape palaeoecological data (e.g. Whitehouse et al 2014;Woodbridge et al 2014) and thus have great potential for exploring human environmental impacts over the Holocene, and the creation of the cultural landscape.…”