Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscapes of North Mayo: Report 2011

New Research and Researchers
Over the last decade, new research projects have been carried out in the Belderrig area. Dr. Lucy
Verrill completed her doctorate in Edinburgh University on the analysis of the soils and pollen of the
Belderg Beg farm site. Other research by Dr. Erica Guttmann Bond on the Neolithic soils at Céide
Fields and Belderg Beg is to be published in the near future. Verrill and Dr. Richard Tipping have
published on the Bronze Age farm at Belderg Beg (Verrill and Tipping 2010).
When the writer retired from the Department of Archaeology in University College Dublin in 2000 it
severed the strong direct link between research by members and students of the Department and
North Mayo which had started with Professor de Valéra and had lasted for almost half a century.
The appointment of Dr. Graeme Warren to the staff of the Department, now the School of
Archaeology, whose main research interest was in the Mesolithic period provided an opportunity to
introduce him to the site at the seashore in Belderrig. In an eroding gully at the low gravel cliffs on
the east side of Belderrig harbour Patrick Caulfield had noted the high concentration of chipped
quartz and some other struck pieces. Professor Peter Woodman had confirmed the Late Mesolithic
assemblage on a visit some years previously. Warren’s excavation of the site in Belderg More
townland has yielded and enormous quantity of late Mesolithic, mainly quartz artefacts with
fishbone and hazelnut surviving and dating to the fifth millennium BC. Earlier research on the field
systems in Belderg More townland had located walls in close proximity to the Mesolithic site on the
cliff edge. Warren’s excavation trench running inland from the cliff site intercepted one of these
walls within metres of the Mesolithic material.
The Warren research programme has led to significant spin-off research with Killian Driscoll
completing his doctoral thesis on the quartz material from the Belderg More excavation. The
potential of Belderrig valley to provide a sharply focussed picture of environmental conditions and
change over the period of the Mesolithic Neolithic transition/replacement has led to collaborative
research between Warren, Dr. Steve Davis and Dr. Naomi Holmes into late glacial and post glacial
lake deposits at the southern end of Belderrig valley five kilometres from the seashore. Surprisingly
early Radiocarbon dates and the crinoid evidence raise issues about the limits and nature of
glaciation in North Mayo. In the last two years, research by Davis on a small lake in Belderg Beg
townland close by the excavated fields and within a kilometre of the seashore has yielded an
environmental sequence which commences before the Mesolithic settlement and continues to the
present.
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