 Welcome to our session today. It's a whole day session with the title Stairways to Heaven, Mountainous Landscapes as Spiritual and Ritual Topographies. And the session has been organized by three of us, Thomas Reitmayer, Constanza Ceruti, and myself, Martin Kallner. And I must say that, Thomas, you've done a lot of the of the hard work until now, so you can sit and relax a bit and and was trying to help you get through the day. The aim of the session that we've set up, as it says in the text, is to explore the nature of sacred and ritual topography in mountain and upland landscapes and to form a more coherent picture of the different rituals, their archaeological signatures and common characteristics. As a start to this theme, I thought I'd show you a little example of a holy mountain. And I think that this helps start focusing us for the day ahead. The mountain I'd like to show you is on the west coast of Ireland is called Kroak Patrick. As you know, St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland. 740 meters, 760 meters high, coastal mountain. And it's a very interesting case from our perspective for the course of our session today. It's a pilgrimage mountain. It's one of the, it's the premier pilgrimage site in Ireland. The numbers are quite staggering. There's a million people climbing Kroak Patrick every year. The main focus of the pilgrimage is the last Sunday in July every year. When it's rick Sunday, it's called, the mountain is also called the rick. And on that day, there's between 15,000 and 25,000 people climbing the mountain on a single day as a part of the pilgrimage. You can see here the actual traces of the pilgrims of this as a ritual and religious action is carved out on the side of the mountain. And you can see this, the traces of it from miles around. We're out on the far west coast of Ireland, in the county of Mayo, outside the big town of Westport. You see Kroak Patrick. It's quite one of the main features in the landscape. The pilgrimage is, of course, a Roman Catholic in his current version as a Roman Catholic pilgrimage. But it has much deeper roots. One of the things that it's known for is that one of the practices, the local practices is that to do the pilgrimage barefoot. It's quite a, quite a surprising thing. And that continues on till today. At the top of the mountain, there is a chapel and a part of the rick Sunday is, of course, a celebration of mass. There are, on the way up to the mountain, there are all sorts of different structures and you'll find structures on the surface as well. Recently visited the mountain and it's very interesting to go around and see these kind of, the kind of offerings or the votives that are placed there even today by people. It's pictures of people that are dead, pictures of unknown people, the statues. They're placed discreetly inside the currents as you see here on these small little discreet currents. And there are formalized places for offerings and it was very interesting to sit and look at the type of objects that people are offering at this little site today. Among other things you can find socks tied onto the railings of the offering place. And this maybe has some connection with the barefootness or something. I don't really understand why it should be so. There were other very interesting things there. There were the small bottles for urine samples. You can see one here. Why would people be offering that? Is it, is it to do with fertility or to do with sickness or something? This is, this is Easter. This is April this year. On the way up to the top of the mountain and you're making the pilgrimage, there are a series of sites on the way. And there's like a prescribed practice of what you should do. You should place a stone, you should throw a stone, you should go around certain objects seven times in a certain direction, say certain prayers. So the whole pilgrimage itself is ritualized in a form of praxis and there is like a formalized way of approaching the mountain. Other aspects that I'd like to highlight about this, about Croke Patrick is its placement in the landscape. It's, as I said, it's a coastal mountain. But it, and it has a wonderful view, of course, out over, over this clue bay is called here on the west coast, but also out over the sea. But also from the land side, it's, it's the dominant feature. And if you're in, from Westport and so on, Croke Patrick is, it has a monumental presence in the landscape in front of you. This is it in its winter coat. And you can see the pilgrimage route. How the, how the years, the thousands of years of pilgrimage have actually etched themselves into the mountain. In the area around Croke Patrick, as away from the mountain itself, there are other, there was also a series of monuments and archaeological sites that are very interesting that, but relate back to the mountain itself. Here is a, a megalithic stone alignment that, there are different interpretations of it, but it can line up with the peak itself on certain dates. And there are quite a, there are a number of these in the district. Another more well-known monument that is far from the mountain, but associated with it is the Bowie stone. It's a site with neolithic arts, rock art, the same age as the Boine Valley monuments, but carved on it. And it has been reinvented in the modern Christian version. And it's known, or has been known recently as St. Patrick's chair. And it's a Christian site as well. And it's, there's masses celebrated there. And there's a discreet cemetery nearby. So it speaks to this continuity through time of these sites that are like proto to the mountain, but connected to the mountain in a very direct way. One of the interesting things about this Bowie stone site is that recently it was discovered, I mean, in terms of these alignments and, you know, the solar aspect to a lot of Irish monuments, as you may know from Newgrange and other sites. But it was recently discovered that there is a certain phenomena connected to this Bowie stone that has to do with two specific dates in the year, one in April, one in August. And the date split the year, the calendar, into three distinct parts. And what happens is that when you are standing on the stone and you look towards Croke Patrick, you will see this phenomena that's called the rolling sun. And it appears as if the sun is rolling down the side of Croke Patrick on these two specific dates. So it's becoming quite an event, this Bowie stone sun event. And people are hoping that they get clear weather to see the rolling sun. So this is an interesting feature. It's a site that's far away from the mountain, but the mountain is central to how we are interpreting and understanding it today. Croke Patrick is part of, of course, modern cultural inventions. There's all sorts of heritage trails. And these build on historical and perhaps even prehistoric pilgrimage trails in the region. Some of them are 40, 50 kilometers long. And the goal of the trails is Croke Patrick. And of course, there is the tourism aspect to it. There's a reinvention of identity going on in Ireland with the secularization of society and people are turning away in some respects from the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church. And this is an interesting feature of this Croke Patrick. It's probably never been as popular as it is now to climb the mountain. But somehow or other, people are reaching back past the Christian Catholic part to the prehistoric part and the Neolithic aspects and so on. So it's part of the modern contemporary negotiation of what it will say to be Irish and so on. And of course, there's a tourist, a very important economic tourist aspect to it. You see this people like this doofus here that has been visiting it the last couple of years. I think this is an interesting little case for us here today as we're going to discuss our session. It brings together a whole different, it shows some of the themes and some of the the meta themes that will bind us all together here today. We have quite the temporal spread with the papers that we're going to be presented today. It's from the Neolithic. We have papers from the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, historical times, we have ethnoarcheological and even modern, a couple of modern papers. In terms of temporality, there is this aspect where many of the sites, according to the abstracts, the sites are used through time. So this notion of continuity of these sites, of these religious and ritual mountain sites. There's a great geographical variation in the session. We have papers from Morocco, from Nepal, Poland, Scandinavia, the Pyrenees and of course the Alps. We have papers from India, the Himalayas and the Andes, Bhutan and Peru. This session is one of two today that are focusing on mountains. Unfortunately they're both on the same time and I think that there is also, we can talk about how mountain archaeology is like gathering strength as a sort of its own sub-discipline. We had the keynote speak last night talking about the emergence of mountain archaeology as a specialized subject and in recent conferences we've had a number of large specialized mountain of sessions that focus on mountain archaeology and different aspects of mountain archaeology specifically. I can mention, for example, the USPP meeting in Paris last year. It was three or four sessions. We've had sessions at WAC meetings and at other EAA meetings. I'd also like to advertise a little bit for the next USPP meeting in Morocco in 2020. There will also be mountain sessions. So the session that we have today is part of a broader sort of development within archaeology and I hope that we'll be able to also in our questions and we'll be able to go back to these themes that are bind the things together. The idea of the complexity of mountain ritual sites. It's some different objects that we're interested in, the individual votive offerings, the sites, the structures, the mountains themselves, their monumentality, the wider landscape. It operates on many different levels. We have this continuity and also these breaks and reinventions through time is another thing and I hope we have an interesting and fruitful discussion of these. Of these different themes together.