 Thanks for the introduction. So I thought that this session would be a good place for me to present some of my results, and thanks very much for accepting me. I'm going to talk a bit about the site that I'm looking at, which is Drum Clay Cranout, but first of all I want to assess it in its historical, archaeological and chronological background in relation to Ireland. So early medieval Ireland, like most of Europe, was a period of great change and transition. We see a number of different sites emerging in the landscape during this period, from early monastic sites to a range of settlement sites including enclosed settlements like rocks and castles, and also cradogs, which are normally found in lakes. We also see from the documentary evidence, particularly in the form of the annals, shifting power structures and local territorial disputes in the 9th century, and an island-wide social reorganisation and the establishment of the first towns between the 9th and 11th century. In terms of our understanding of the settlement pattern of early medieval Ireland, Lisbeth Potter argues that we have a fixation on establishing the construction dates of sites, and this has been detrimental to a deeper understanding of how settlements developed and how they responded to social change. This disproportionate value that is placed on the origins and foundations of sites, in comparison to its evolution and story over time, has meant that particularly with dry land sites, our broader understanding is limited. While this should not be an issue for wetland sites because of the high levels of preservation, problems still exist in terms of our chronological understanding. So looking at cradogs, water that is basically an artificial man-made island or lake-edge settlement, they're almost exclusively found in Ireland and Scotland. There are about 1,200 known examples of this site type in Ireland, and while some have traced our origins, the majority of the dates date them to the early medieval and the medieval period. However, because only on a very rare occasion we get to investigate them to any great degree, the majority of this site type appears like the picture on the far right in the landscape. So this brings up issues of availability of temperates and accessibility. Considering this, our understanding of the chronology of cradogs is in reality based on the spot dates of available or accessible timbers. So drum play chronology itself is located here in the north of Ireland on the outskirts of Blackburn. Between 2012 and 2013 I was one of many archaeologists who excavated on this site. Only 29 cradogs of the 1,200 known examples in Ireland have been excavated to any degree. And this excavation at drum play is unique because while there's been a significant amount of work into cradogs in recent years, and these have included some small scale excavations, this is by far the largest scale excavation under modern scientific standards. The excavation itself revealed a wealth of waterlogged deposits measuring 26 metres by 18 metres with a depth of 7. Around 5,500 artefacts were uncovered from this site, ranging from amber, gold, glass, leather, metal, pottery, textile, so on. So it's a really good representation of early medieval material culture. The site was initially dated by artifact typology and a few wide-ranging radiocarbon dates. This suggested that the site has a long occupation from at least the 7th century to the 16th, 17th century. In terms of the structural components excavated, 57 platforms and 30 houses were initially identified. It was acknowledged that more would be identified during post-excavation. And I'll take, for example, the picture on the right, that's been regarded as a single platform, but it contains 12 layers of overlap around it. So this just goes to show the sheer volume of material that we're working with. Over 9,000 pieces of structural water were retained for post-excavation in Ireland, and these were predominantly alder. So alder, unlike oak, doesn't have massive nodule to prostate against. It's a very difficult species to work with because it's quite short-lived, but it's also very sensitive to local environmental signals. However, because of the sheer volume of material that we had from the site and that it was mainly alder being used, we were able to build a relative nodule for the construction episodes of the site. And by using a combination of tree-ring analysis, targeted radio-carbon dates and wiggle-match modelling, the chronology could be fixed to a model timescale of 800 to 880 AD for the end of the construction. This firmly places the construction of the site in the 9th century and not in the 7th century, which was previously believed to be certain. This discrepancy in dating has big implications for contextualising data, particularly in dealing with a period of such change as is the case with early medieval Ireland. So the site was originally excavated in six different zones, and this was due to practicality reasons and because of the scale of the excavation. But what it meant was that the alder canalty has now been able to tie these areas back in together both vertically and horizontally. So this resulted in what I'm calling a dendro matrix. So you see on the left side you have the relative timescale and these are the construction episodes, year by year. On the other side you have the model timescale and then the matrix in the centre. So you can see how the relationships are being resolved. So this is the wiggle-match model. There was poor arrangement between two of the samples. Now you can see that their high probability would make them go here, but that would make them overly young. What we think is actually after happening is that it's after the two samples were taken in five blocks of annual rentals from two different platforms, and we have a chronological overlap of three years. So what it looks like might have happened here is we've crossed intercepted a spike in radiocarbon curve, which if any of you know about it is 775. It's been used as chronological marker on both hemispheres now. And that's still quite preliminary. I've sent in a suite of dates, a single ring dates, around that period. So I'm waiting on confirmation that that's what we have. But what that will mean is that the initial construction date could be extrapolated out to 811 ED, which is an absolute date. So this also means that the platforms that are being resolved will get an absolute date and so will their material culture. So I'm just going to look at this in a more kind of visual way. This was the footprint of the chronology before or after excavation. So the chronology tells us that the first area was constructed here. This was on piles driven into the lake sediment. We got a natural progression into the central area. Both platforms walled up a bit on the first area to consolidate it. The following year construction ended to the west, and then the following year to the southeast. So it gives a quite logical progression of construction. I don't have any tempers from this area, but the stratigraphic information tells me that it happened sometime after the south west. The final area to be constructed was the northern area, and this was constructed 10 years after initial construction. And this can perhaps be used as an explanation for why this happened. Because at some point in antiquity it became detached and subsided, and this is what we found during excavation. So it's just helping to explain. So as my research continues, more and more platforms are being anchored to this time scale. And if I can confirm the 775 spikes in my chronology, these platforms as well as their related finds and material culture would be quite an absolute date. This work has already improved our understanding of some of the finds discovered on the site. The picture here to the left is of one of the platforms that has already been resolved, and we've dated it to the 9th century. As you can see, the rectangular shapes here on those two tempers represent mortise joints. And seeing as they don't serve any prior purpose in this platform, they've been torches as we use tempers. Considering this, the properties we've reused has been further confirmed. Because we dated one of these tempers, we took five blocks of five annual rails on where the match modeled them. And this produced a modelled filling date of 750 to 790 AD. As I previously mentioned, the earlier 7th century date suggested for the Argent was primarily based on wide-ranging radioparbon dates, and artifact typology, in particular this bird-headed bone comb, which on typologically direct route was dated between the 7th and 8th century. This artifact was also recovered from the lower levels of the site, and these are broadly contemporary. It's my opinion that they represent older objects being brought in from elsewhere, and we put this from the site. So here we're also getting an idea of activity in the local area before the construction of the premises. So, in conclusion, it's anticipated that the changes and developments of the site will continue to be revealed through the algebraic analogy, giving us a refined picture of the evolution of the site from the 9th to the 17th century AD. As further platforms are resolved, we will be able to answer questions like, was there continuous occupation through time, or was it abandoned and later re-established? This type of magical framework can be used to investigate periods of environmental or sociopolitical change on how this impacted the site's development. These results will then be viewed against the wider landscape context, and finally, in a broader sense, how this animal narrative can inform us about settlement and social change during the early medieval period right up to the later medieval period. In conclusion, I believe that this research will allow us to view this time period, not through the prism of deep time, but as a resolution relevant to the occupancy of the site. I just want to say thanks to my friend Jane Bobby and the HGD for granting me access to the materials and particularly Japanese tech.