 Good afternoon, everyone. I'll be speaking on behalf of, as you can see, a large team, our research team. It's a diverse team, which is a collaboration of people working in Ireland, in the university sector, in the public sector, and in the private consultancy sector. And we came together because we wanted to find out more about agricultural and environmental change in our age, Ireland. So the focus of this session is the our age in Roman, but we're going to cheat by bringing us slightly back to the late Bronze Age also, because we see very big changes in Ireland in the our age. So I think it's useful for us to think about the context in which they're happening and what's happening in the late Bronze Age in Ireland. So in Ireland, it's suggested, as we see in many parts of Europe, that you have a strong agricultural basis, and people sometimes suggest that's the basis for economic power and growth and social power and perhaps increasing complexity. And then certainly in the case of Ireland, which is perhaps different to other regions in Europe, in the our age, it's a much more mixed picture. So I'll be showing you how you often see in the literature stories of dark ages and downturns. And you have this talk about sometimes the invisible peoples of the our own age in Ireland. And what I'll be bringing you is new scientific data from excavations. So these are excavations that have been undertaken in Ireland, particularly over the last two decades. And we have lots of new environmental data from that. So that's what I'll be bringing you is mainly our cubitannical and zoological data. And in terms of the our cubitannical plant macro remains and also some pollen data. And then also the animal bone. And it's for this project that we all came together to work on settlement and landscape and later prehistoric Ireland, seeing beyond the site and funded by the Heritage Council in Ireland. And in this, we're looking at the Lake Bronze Age and the Iron Age in Ireland. So the Lake Bronze Age that takes for us in Ireland are 1200 to 800 BC. And then in the Iron Age, it's 800 BC. And as you can see, we don't have what we would call a Roman period in Ireland because there was never Roman occupation on the island of Ireland. Yes, there was lots of contact, but no full occupation. So our Iron Age stretches right up to AD 400. And in this, we'll be looking at farming strategies in this project and then broader landscape interactions. So in the Lake Bronze Age in Ireland, there have been several general reviews, but they're quite out of date, I think at this stage. There's no recent comprehensive overview of animals and plants in Ireland. And what we see in the existing surveys is there's significant variation in the strategies. And so for example, in the zoo archaeology, often cattle are dominant at many sites in terms of the animals. But there are some sites where you get pig are dominant, for example, Lockerr in County Limerick in the west of Ireland, other sites where you get sheep, such as Dunengas and Ireland off the west coast of Ireland. So there is variation in the strategies there. What people sometimes look to is objects and also so object to do with food. So I've shown you here that a very beautiful flesh hook from County Antrim. You can imagine someone going into their big old cauldron and fishing out their meat out of that. And these are indicators of the types of foods people are engaging with and creating. And also in terms of traction and transport. So things like withers that you might put on the shoulders of animals for plowing, and also wheels and tarnaces, all these kinds of things. In terms of archaeobotany, the general picture that we think it's suggested that barley is often dominant, but it's not very well known just how dominant and our extensive that is, and also evidence for wheat and flats at this time. So then for the Iron Age, overall in Ireland, we have much less evidence for human occupation. We have much, much less settlement evidence in particular. And you have these ideas of these downturns in these dark ages, and sometimes trying to find the people of the Iron Age in Ireland because we can't actually see where they are in the archaeological record. It's been suggested, you get it quite suddenly at around, I suppose, 800 BC. And sometimes it's suggested that maybe this is a response to climate change. But colleagues such as Jill Plunkett and others have shown, no, these aren't synchronous changes when you get, we do get changes in climate change. We can see quite clearly, but it's not happening at the same time as you're seeing those social changes, or those changes in activity in the archaeological record. But often in the literature we see a suggestion, there's an adoption of mobile lifestyle, so people moving around the landscape, more perhaps mobile pastoralists, and in trying to piece together the story of Iron Age people in Ireland, often looking at the artifacts, because we didn't have so much of the settlement and other type of evidence. What we have been looking for, for example, is sites like this, where you've got environmental data from the ceremonial and royal sites in particular. So they're not really that informative on the kind of everyday engagements with food that people might have had. So here's a site, Dunolan County Kildare, and it's telling you about the zoo archaeology and saying the majority of the identical species are Catalan pig and some sheep and horse and deer. But there are not the remains of your everyday food. There are remains of feasting of certain types of activities, certain engagements with food. So now what we have is much more environmental data from other sites, other than those ceremonial and those royal sites that we've collected over the last 20 years and that have been lying there in excavation reports and the research team brought together that we have. So what I'm going to show you is the data from, we've been focusing on the southeast of Ireland just for the moment, for the start of this project, and I'll show you some of the results from that. So in terms of the recovery of plant and animal remains from these sites, you can see that we do get them, not in very large numbers, which I think reflects to some extent the type of archaeology we're dealing with. So the data is showing here is from 243 features. So a feature is something that we would suggest is a single phase of activity and it's something like a roundhouse. It's a group of contexts that are associated together in potentially one phase of activity. So we have 243 and you can see that it's a not very large number, less than a third you're seeing the animal present and the plant remains present. Sometimes you're getting both at one site, more often it's just plant remains or just animal bone at an excavation. In terms of, I'll start with the animal remains before I get on to the goodies, the plant remains. The animal remains, you see cattle and pig are the dominant that you're seeing for this long period. Some sheep go to horse and dog, not much wild animal. That's something you see in Ireland from the introduction of farming is that shift away from wild animals much more towards domesticated animals and that continues throughout all of prehistory in Ireland. We don't have chicken so we have no good evidence for fowl at this stage in Ireland, probably not until the early medieval period we're seeing it within Ireland. But one of the difficulties in terms of the bone is that we can't tell what lots of it is because it's very small, it's fragmented, it's very often burnt and we can't identify it even beyond sometimes a human or an animal category which is quite difficult and that's the only type of bone at 46 features of the features where animal bone was found, it's almost two thirds of those features. So that's quite difficult but we are seeing the picture of cattle and pig in particular being dominant. In terms of the plant remains categories, so where you do get plant remains, you do get cereals at quite a lot of them and also other types of plants as well. In terms of the types of cereals, barley is often dominant but as I'll show not at all times we do get some temporal patterning it seems in the data. You get hulled and free threshing tweets, also the hull tweets, mainly spell tweets a little emmer and some free threshing tweets not very much and also some of the identifications are based on grain rather than shaft which as we know is unreliable. And a little oat as well which I'll talk about later, it's not clear if that's a cultivated species of oat coming in at this time or if you're still dealing with the wild oat and it's just a weed of the wheat and the barley crops. In terms of the fruits, we're still wild in Ireland and so there's no evidence clearly that we can see for domesticated fruits in Ireland in the RNH, not we're seeing them until probably the early medieval period. You can see a variety of rubus type of ones and prunus and different things like that. In terms of legumes also we're not great at them either and so what you can see is there's a couple of possible identifications of pea and broad bean, I would be suspicious of them so we went and we dated that broad bean and it's medieval and any peas that I have dated, I've dated several peas now from prehistoric contexts older when sometimes in Ireland always hoping we'll get something in every single time for early medieval or medieval so I'd be a little suspicious about these legumes that they are actually either late Bronze Age or RNH. Lots and lots of nuts so in contrast with the animal remains what you see in Ireland continuing is you see lots of wild plant foods continue and you see that right in record in Ireland until about a couple of centuries ago and then other wild plants also. So in terms of the timing just for the last few minutes to show you some of what's happening at different times, you can see in the late Bronze Age you can see there that cattle in the blue is dominant but you're getting a decent amount of pig and sheep goat also at that time. Coming then into that period so that's the beginning of the RNH 800 BC where we have far less evidence for activity and of course because we have less archaeological context we can recover less agricultural remains as well but there is stuff there and this includes directly dated animal bones we're very happy that these belong to this period and there are fewer data but the domesticates aren't absent. What's interesting is sometimes in the pollen records that we've looked at is sometimes you see people in these perhaps more climatically challenging times moving down into valleys and then other people going up to the uplands with their animals for pastoral activity so different responses in different locations and then as you get towards the later iron coming in towards the middle iron age in Ireland from 400 BC when you start seeing more archaeological activity in Ireland you see pig coming up and perhaps a special status of pigs to do with feasting it suggested and you see more evidence for horse as well. Horse is there earlier but you see much more of it in the RNH then. Then in terms of the plants you can see the prevalence of wild plants and throughout so the wilds are the grey ones and the nut and the green and the other wild plants you can see them throughout the period and then coming into the one we're particularly interested in in the RNH again fewer data but the cereals aren't absent and we have directly dated cereals from this period so we're very happy that we still have domesticates they're not being completely abandoned at this time. You can see the legumes there I'm a bit suspicious of them I think we need to directly date those and to make sure they're definitely RNH and then what you can see is this big jump up in cereals and that we see in Ireland from 400 BC and that's when we see drying kilns coming in as well so there's other things happening in the archaeological record other ways of interacting with plants that we're seeing around this time. So many minutes do I have? Too perfect. So this is the last slide. So this is to show you which may be very difficult to see within this diagram but just to run you through it what we're seeing very broadly is in the the lake there's the lake Bronze Age activity I showed you and then in the early RNH from around 800 BC to 400 BC we're saying that's changing climate and that reduction in agricultural evidence but what we were very interested and pleased to see in the project it's not completely disappearing and sometimes people suggest that that if you're moving towards this mobile pastoral economy people are almost abandoning cereals that's not what's happening it certainly goes down but it's not disappearing and then from 400 BC we see much more evidence for cereals and other cereal related evidence in the archaeological record and it seems this reflects broader activity change and this is recognized so what you're looking at here is sundra your cotton dates and you can see here so you can see at the radar at the red arrow that's the lake Bronze Age when you see a peak connectivity there and then you can see it jumping back down again so between 800 and 400 BC and you're seeing in Ireland relatively lower activity levels and then at 400 BC increasing again quite sharply and broadly stable until about the Roman periods until about say AD 1 if you call it in Ireland and then in that Roman periods which might be of interest to people here generally what we're seeing are declining activity levels continuing at a low level until about 8400 and then you have the early medieval period kicking in but within these broad changes we can see agricultural production persisting rather than abandonment and potentially in some of the periods in the R&H which we hadn't really realized before potentially thriving also thank you for your attention