 space, creating place. Yeah, defining agglomeration, which we heard of all day, and I think also defining settlements. And I think that we have a very good example of that. And I think that what it's all about is that people gather, or gathered, and people gather in various ways for various reasons. And we have various remains from those gatherings. And what I'll be talking about today is a site that might exemplify a couple of the aspects that we have been talking about in the previous papers. So first a few words on the settlement context of prehistoric Ireland. Even though it might be a bit simplistic, prehistoric houses in Ireland can roughly be divided into rectilinear and round houses. The former, dating to rather brief period around 37, 300 BC in the early Neolithic, clusters in small groups, two to four houses, most likely representing farmsteads scattered over the landscape. In the later part of the Fort Millennium, the house record consists mainly of a few dated round houses, which consist either of simple stakeholders indicating rather simple constructions, or they consist of round stone-built wall footings quite often in upland locations. What concerns houses from the Bronze Age, the vast majority, are post-built round houses, often found in small clusters, again, two to four houses representing small individual farmsteads. Some of the round houses from the mid-Neolithic or late seems to be characterized by their location in ritual context, such as in close proximity to passage streams, and then often in upland locations, as in this example, the 15 houses on Nocturne Mountain in Countess Lago, fairly close to the very summit in the large passage stream. Few of these type of houses can be seen as representing the ordinary farmstead in the mid-Neolithic, and it's likely that the road was to a certain degree removed from the daily routine. And this brings me then to the House Foundations at Malikfauna, which I'll mainly be talking about, and that is in South Countess Lago, the Brickley Mountains, best known for their about 20 passage tombs, indicated with the red dots on this map, found on the different summits. And they constitute the Kerakil-Kerskoren Passage Tomb Complex, one of Ireland's four large passage tombs clusters. And to the very right on the image, you have the gray area, which is Malikfauna, a conspicuous ridge in the east, the most part. The northern half of that ridge consists of an extensive plateau bounded on three sides by vertical cliffs, and that's the one closest to the camera here. And this plateau in the town of Malikfauna seems to have been a place of significant activity in British history, today indicated by a large number of roundhouse foundations and enclosures. The nearest passage tube, you could just see it as a white dot just above the plateau to the left. And it's really literally overlooking that plateau in the background. The remains on the plateau, since they were discovered in 1911, been assumed to be the dwellings of the passage tomb builders. The site is without direct counterpart in Ireland and has occupied a unique position in Irish prehistory as a possible Neolithic Bronze Age settlement or village. To give you an idea, this is from a recent survey. And the cliff faces just to the left of the cluster and just to the right. So it's a very dense cluster of various type of house foundations. Trial excavations a few years ago revealed that the return Neolithic as well as Bronze Age dates and showed that the activity on the plateau was, to some degree, contemporary with both the primary use of the passage tombs in the Middle Neolithic as well as with the continued use well into the Bronze Age. Malikfarna, or the cluster of house foundations, has often been treated as a rather uniform group of round houses or house foundations of various size, though. What the survey has shown is, however, that the remains represent an extraordinarily complex collection of stone built, rounded, oval, irregular sites constructed in a variety of ways. And the first detailed survey was just completed so that we had about 160 round house foundations, some 10 enclosures, and about 100 what we call auxiliary spaces linked to the houses. It's worth keeping in mind that the plateau consists today of a deeply fissured limestone pavement with no or extremely little soil covered. So a large part of the plateau is just bare bedrock with the stone built structure sitting directly onto the surface. The majority of the sites consist of relatively well-defined round stone built, what we could call wall footings, something between 8 and 12 meters in diameter, not extremely large, while some reach up to about 20 meters. These are with the arrow, and that's nearly impossible to photograph, but you could get an idea of the clear space. And the well-defined circular space with three house foundations on that image. A link to those house foundations is also then what we call auxiliary spaces, and they are in yellow. So those will be areas with no evidence of being foundation for any kind of building or superstructure. These areas could be quarried area in front of an entrance, a stone-cleared space between two houses, or an annex connected to a house foundation. So a number of varieties, but still well-defined and created spaces. Besides the house foundations and about 100 spaces, we also have a number of enclosures, mainly in black on this image, and also some linear features, but there are no major land divisions on the karst landstone, or karst plateau. One characteristic aspect of the construction of these house foundations is that about half of them have been created by quarrying about half a meter down into the bedrock, while the rest have been built on top of the bedrock, which is clearly visible on this image. And that further complicates the complex construction modes. No reason to go into detail, but just indicating the variety of construction modes. So anything from the lowest part, we just literally rounded quarried space into the bedrock, or the double lines of slabs set on edge, forming the base of some kind of wall construction, or different kind of combinations of stone rubble, or even single line of slabs. Even though many houses contain relative uniform construction, some of these that I showed here, a surprisingly large number of them have a combination of the various kind of walled constructions or categories, making it hard, sometimes impossible, to envisage what kind of wall or superstructure that it would originally have supported. A number of the sites also have defined entrances, either by slabs set on edge, framing defined entrances, or as a gap in a bank, or as a quarried gap in the bedrock, leading into the quarried song and floor. Furthermore, there seems to be a clear correlation between complexity in the construction and sites, since nearly all of the larger sites show construction significantly more complex than the smaller sites. And one interesting feature is that all the larger sites are not round, they are oval, and they are by purpose egg-shaped or oval, while the smaller sites are nearly always rounded. So oval sites are not as easy to roof if they were roofed. From the general distribution, it's evident that the houses are not evenly distributed on the plateau. It's also evident that most of the houses occur in tight clusters, while others are clearly detached with no next-door neighbors. Clustering does not indicate the contemporaneity per se, but since most of the house foundations show the same level of preservation, they do seem to have been used abandoned roughly at the same time. It's also hard to see the rationale to construct a new house if there was one readily available to be reused just beside it. With only very few possible examples, there's no clear evidence of destruction of any of the buildings or house foundations. Based on the preservation and distribution, the remains reflect, I think, a high degree of contemporaneity, with very limited evidence for a chronological sequence. So how are we to understand these dynamic and complex remains on the plateau? Is it a village or a prehistoric farming community? Is it a settlement of special high status? Or is it a temporary settlement to use in times of unrest? Or is it maybe something else? The term settlement becomes suddenly rather blunt. It's reasonable to interpret around foundations as spaces where people acted and possibly dwelt, which is also supported by the fines from the excavations. But the extent and the character of the use is, however, harder to pinpoint. Based on the dates that continued use from the elliptic into the Bronze Age, cannot be ruled out. To understand the site as an ordinary settlement from either of these periods is, however, an interpretation that will be very hard to sustain. From a simple logistic point of view, it's also hard to see that the rather inaccessible plateau would have functioned as the ordinary daily homes for an entire community. Since the only access would have been through the narrow gap, narrow and steep steps, sorry, at the northern extreme of the plateau to the very, very left of the immature. And it's literally steps cut into the bedrock leading up to the plateau at that very point. Besides the very complex range of house foundations, their number and their clustering, I think the main characteristic of the site is undeniably the place as such. The ridge would have been a well-known landmark, a place apart with its own identity. The presence of the passage streams on the surrounding ridges show that the mountains were of high rituals and ideological significance in the Neolithic and thereby strongly contributed to the sense of place. The remains of Malikvarna form in this context an integral part of that place-making process and make active use of the drama of this landscape in a way very similar to that of the passage streams. Instead of seeing Malikvarna as a year-round settlement, I would suggest that this was a place for seasonal gatherings, probably including activities linked to the nearby passage streams. The varied and often rather unorthodox constructions would therefore not have been primarily directed by strict domestic needs, but by other requirements, which may explain the extraordinary range of construction modes that we do see among these remains. The clustering of the houses into various groups might in this scenario represent different groups defined by maybe kinship or the geographical domicile. Even though the chronologically and geographically very distant comparison, one way of looking at the role of Malikvarna reminded me of the church villages in northern Scandinavia. Here the Sammys from far afield gather a few times a year for various celebrations and resides in their family hut clustered around the church. Food for thought. So to conclude, I think the Cospicius Ridge was a highly charged place with a strong ritual significance, and the remains on this plateau should probably be understood in the context of placemaking and temporal gatherings in the ritual context, rather than in aspects of domestic daily routine. Thanks.