 So today I'm going to give you the world's quickest overview on Irish transport studies and by doing that I'll give you a really quick idea of the really diverse but limited So I'm going to look at the diverse but somewhat limited evidence that we have for reports in Ireland that has been used to interpret hill forts in various different ways from defensive to ritual communal places, central places and so on and by the end Hopefully I will try and bring that all together in one cohesive narrative That tries to make sense of all the different strands of evidence But before we go into that, I'll give you some stats. So in Ireland we have about 108 hill forts Generally occurring in isolation. We have a few examples of pairs One famous group of nine hill forts within seven kilometres of one another But other than that usually in isolation We define hill forts as being on a hilltop and over one hectare in size So this cuts out prom tree forts, which there are about 400 prom tree forts in Ireland It also cuts out the really smaller scale sites and in Ireland We have the problem of having about 40,000 small early medieval enclosures And I just don't really want to look at those because there's too many And then we look at size of sites. So on average we have Hill forts being about five hectares in size. We have a few much larger examples Particularly the largest is finance hill, which is about 131 hectares in size Which is the equivalent of 187 foot pocketches. So a very large fortification But it wasn't until the 1960s that we have our first excavations in Ireland Not even undertaken by an Irish man. We brought over a German, Hugh Heikin And he excavated Freestone Hill. And very soon after we have the excavations at Down Patrick and County Down And unfortunately These really confused the matter because at Freestone Hill Heikin found a considerable assemblage of rolling material, which we now know is later a reoccupation of the fort But back then It was suggested that hill forts because of this excavation were Irish and very similar at Down Patrick We had very clear evidence of the late Bronze Age pottery In stages underneath immediately underneath the bank and in the basal fill of the ditch Suggesting its construction of the Bronze Age, but later radar carbon dates from samples heighten the ditch fill returned early legal dates and It got into the literature that we have an early legal hill fort. So really this just confused the matters over the past Couple of decades We've started to dig a bit more and we've got much more secured dates all of these late Bronze Age and age But this is really where we started our project myself and Professor Brian from UCC in Cork Ireland and it was Really trying to find the chronology of Irish hill forts and really figure out are these really late Bronze Age? Are there any iron age examples? So we went about digging We dug Clash nine mud late Bronze Age then bad late Bronze Age I don't even a bronze age for my late Bronze Age to more late Bronze Age Raftery middle Bronze Age Sean middle Bronze Age storming bars at Bronze Age. You get the picture We've come to the rather uninspiring interpretation that for Except for our accidental discovery of tree of the largest or any of the conlosures in Ireland All of our dates are middle late Bronze Age so Although this doesn't seem very exciting from our point of view, it's very helpful because until this point Most researchers would have grouped Ireland with Britain in Britain most hill forts are Constructed around the end of the early iron age to middle iron age You do have a few late Bronze Age examples. You do have some very medieval examples, but in Ireland We now have a quite clear chronology Hill forts have been built from around 1300 to 900 BC and did this fits much more Much better with the continent where one of the major phases of the full construction occurred around 1300 to 1000 BC so even back in prehistory Britain was trying to be different from your second prehistoric present So now we can start thinking a bit more about function, so we now know these are Mostly late Bronze Age indeed So are they defensive are the ritual central places? What are these things? So first off, let's quickly look at the fence One of the sites we estimated was flash an i-mode in cork We found that it consisted of a very large bank Rockland external ditch a large timber policy Incorporated into a bank and then 15 years outside that another enclosure same thing bank ditch Policy and this would have created a defensive barrier about six seven meters in height. So this very much could have been Defensive it had a perimeter of about 1.5 kilometers total perimeter and Geophysical survey has showed that this has been comprehensively destroyed by fire so every single meter of this been destroyed And we have similar evidence that two or more into a Kenny same thing to I explain some closing elements Excavation showed that this consisted of a palisade bank rock hot external pitch David to the late Bronze Age again. This is comprehensively destroyed by fire every single meter of this so this destruction although I would think is associated with An attack on the Hillfort It doesn't necessarily mean it is you could also look at some of the Early Neolithic large wooden structures in Scotland and some cases on the continent as an example of the the ritual destruction of Large-scale sites by the communities that built But regardless this conference destruction is a communal event that would have taken a lot of resources a lot of people a lot of forethought Then at the other end of the scale we have sites that are clearly of no Practical defensive purpose, so we have badly for example. We exited this very large site 21.5 hectares Consisting of a bank no more than 35 centimeters in height and an external ditch No more than I think 0.8 meters deep. This is something that literally we could jump over So when you think about this site it has a composite perimeter of something like two and a half kilometers So although it's not practically defensive. It certainly is monumental in size so now we have to start thinking about Are some of these Hillfort's ritual in nature? and we actually have a Good bit of evidence Far ritual at Hillfort's in Ireland the best example is how he's for it In Northern Ireland, so this is a large tributary Hillfort Excavated data to lay bronzage In the interior of the Hillfort you have a large wooden structure about 30 years in size Divimiting a series of pits in those pits you have craft work and debris little bits of gold Pottery and you have a lot of Carbonized grain so Marilyn McClatchy has actually studied that crane and she suggested that it came from four distinct Regions in the local landscape. So clearly what's happening is people are coming together from a disparate community surrounding the site possibly for for trade or communal feasting or something like that Then we have another site then down which we had dated the late Bronze Age and our chief is the survey showed Again, we have some very large structures wooden structures at the very stomach of the Hillfort You have a temper post structure. It's about 45 meters in diameter And you have a central dipolar anomaly which suggests that there's some sort of metal artifact right at the center of that And this truncates another very large earthen enclosure Which is about 55 meters in diameter and again, you have a dipolar anomaly which suggests there's some sort of metal artifacts But probably the best example of ritual at now side is the King stables just outside hockey sports about 200 meters outside the Hillfort This was dated to the late Bronze Age Sample excavation showed that it is most likely the only man-made ritual pool known in prehistoric Britain around This is cut into the ground almost immediately filled up with water sample excavation revealed a large number of dog bones Crucible fragments Molds for creating weapons and some horse bones as well and as well as the interior potion of a human skull So something strange and ritual was happening here And then let's go to more practical elements of these things are these settlements We have about 31 hillforts in Ireland that has evidence to have evidence for settlement Only nine of these have ten or more visible structures But we have to be quite wary when we think about places like the famous Dunangas That has no visible structures on the surface when they exited about a third of the interior They found ten structures. So obviously potential for structures to be there Strangely the the very highest hillforts in Ireland seem to have quite a lot of segment So carbon re which is about 700 meters above sea level It's the third highest hillfort in Britain Ireland has something like 2025 structures, and it's quite small for this only just over a hectare south But then you get hillforts where there seem to be absolutely nothing. So again, let's go back to clash nine mud Large-scale sample excavation here showed very little evidence for any activity Rathley hillforts, which amazingly At the inside of the little road true. So they happens to excavate thirty three percent of this fourteen hectares Site site they did it to lay Bronze Age. They didn't find a single stake pit Or are anything dated to lay Bronze Age within the interior of that site? So we know there is nothing happening in there for whatever reason and then we think about craft working there And things like that that could be going on inside these sites There's there's no evidence for that at some sites, but then if we go to the more famous Rathley hillfort We have literally thousands of examples of fragments of clay moles Crucicles they were making weapons the tools here. We have evidence for long distance trade With glass beads that probably came from northern Italy amber, which doesn't occur naturally in Ireland. So Very similar thing happening at the name is we're getting we have just over four hundred Fragments of clay crucibles and moles. So in Ireland The name that's in Raqqal are by far the largest collection of clay crucibles and moles that we know of so at this These centers certainly It seems that craft workers are coming to these places and settle Didn't we just think of these places as central places and again, like I said amber occurs at some of these sites glass beads that probably came from northern Italy occur at Locker, Rathgau, Freestone Hill And then we have various bronze artifacts that we find in and around hillforts like hot and sport Artifacts to mean from central Germany, Denmark and so on And then if we look at some GIS analysis It shows that hillforts are actually located Statistically the most visible place in the landscape. So many of the hillforts that we looked at for this project We did some Can use of you shed analysis, which means that we populated the Low regions of an area overlooked by hillforts with thousands of randomly generated your points and it showed that These hillforts are the most visible places even when we look at Sites like value in here, which is on the upper edge of a very expensive set of Rage our hills and ridges We have isolated hills here as well, which you think would be highly visible But again in this example by the latest the most visible place in that landscape And then if we start thinking about the pollen analysis and pollen evidence whenever there's pollen evidence Undertaken at an Irish hillfort it is shown Extensive land clearance, which means that these hills are being completely divorced so you can imagine them as Beacons in the landscape Areas of embarkation and destination that traders might have seen and they see this hill and they think okay, these guys Clearly have the the power and goods to trade So we're finally starting to get a little bit of a narrative But again, we have various different strands of evidence that seemingly don't fit well together So you have craftwork in current various sites possible centralization ritual defense settlement and so on Then if we think of sites like high sport high sport has elements of all of this high sport has a very large bank and ditch The ditches nearly three meters deep We have possible palisade on that as well we have rituals in the interior We pass in the craft working going on in the interior So something's happening here and can we fit all of this together one cohesive narrative and I would suggest in Ireland that we can So I think this is the life cycle of a hillfort We're at the beginning even though these sites might not be necessarily constructed as defensive fortifications The land clearance and construction of highly prominent area may have been used to attract traders and signal a community in elites ability to trade high status goods and this also brought together a disparate community to embed a common social identity So they actually build the hillfort and they view the hillfort as their shared Social structure in the landscape that binds them all together. It gives them a shared identity And then throughout the the mean life of the hillfort various activities for that community can be undertaken affairs trading and so on all This is happening while an elite is still signaling his power and authority of the landscape and his control of the landscape and ability to trade goods and this inevitably makes the fort a Target spur attack so rival communities the best way to take out an elite from this trading network is to go to that hillfort consequently destroyed by fire and that's a very visible way of Destroying the identity of a rival community while having the practical application of taking an elite and another community out of The very important long-distance trading works that were happening at the time So I think I'm gonna slip you over time. I better do that. So thank you