Interpreting Ecclesiastical Mobility: A pXRF Study of Medieval Gravestones in Ireland

Summary

Western Ireland’s early medieval (700-1200 AD) landscape—dotted with stone cemeteries and structures—provides an ideal setting for studying ecclesiastical lifeways through methods of raw materials characterization. Archaeological analyses and oral history suggest that people living in small ecclesiastical communities between the 6th and the 12th centuries exchanged and transported gravestones. While traditional archaeological analysis of the shape and stylistic design of gravestones from five cemeteries in western Connemara, Co. Galway, illustrates clear similarities, this analysis alone cannot define systems of gravestone exchange or transport.

Using portable X-Ray Fluorescence (pXRF), we seek to understand broad provenience patterns for over 200 medieval gravestones from five coastal monastic sites by comparing their elemental signatures with those of local bedrock lithologies. Preliminary data analysis revealed that several gravestone lithologies are non-local to the islands where they were recovered, suggesting that people likely transported gravestones between islands. In light of recent debates surrounding pXRF reliability, this project highlights pXRF’s utility as a tool for supplementing conventional archaeological and geological field methods. More broadly, this project offers a better understanding of medieval Ireland’s ecclesiastical communities, their mobility patterns, and their interconnected monumental landscapes.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Photons in the Field: New Approaches to the Use of Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) in Archaeological Fieldwork   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage