58Brendon Wilkins and Susan Lalonde

Fig. 1 —Location of excavation area and overall site plan, with detail of cemetery area.

NATURAL DEPOSITS

The site was on a limestone ridge, covered with alimestone-derived till consisting of calcareous silts,stony sand and clays with a highly mixed and variablecharacter. A number of areas of dense silty clay and claywere uncovered during topsoil-stripping. These wereexamined and determined to be naturally occurring,constituting variations in the glacial till. The orangecolouration of the silty clays and clays suggests thatthese deposits contain more iron or have iron in a morehighly oxidised state than the majority of thesurrounding till. The topsoil in the cemetery area wasextremely shallow. Some loss of topsoil in this area canbe accounted for by soil creep and plough wash, butthe depth also reflects the fact that these graves wereoriginally topsoil burials placed just below thecontemporary ground surface. This also accounts for why many burials have no identifiable grave-cut, andwhy in other cases only a slight cut into the subsoil wasobserved. The absence of grave-cuts is explicable interms of ongoing processes of reworking in the topsoil,particularly through earthworm activity.

PHASE 1: FEATURES PRE-DATING THEMAIN ENCLOSURE AND CEMETERY

Though much less substantial than the main enclosureditch, an earlier phase was represented by a sequence of ditches. A number of discrete pits, one of whichproduced three pieces of undiagnostic but possibly lateNeolithic struck chert (Ballin 2007), were alsoidentified in the northern part of the enclosure andcould be associated with this phase. These artefactscould also have been residual finds indicative of ageneral ‘background noise’ of prehistoric activity, andalthough the sequence of phase 1 ditches weretruncated by the main enclosure, this could haveoccurred soon after silting, in which case both phasesmay be early medieval.

Phase 1 ditches

The early ditches 1015, 1020 and 1022 were located tothe north of the main enclosure ditch. Ditches 1015 and1020 may represent an enclosure ditch forming anentrance onto the brow of the hill, and ditch 1022 waspossibly associated with this phase of enclosure, forminga secondary barrier to the entrance ditches. The full

An early medieval settlement/cemetery at Carrowkeel, Co. Galway59

Pl. 1—Working shot of ditch 1023, looking north.