Our skill sets & interests complemented each other and Helen& I started to work together.
We applied for different funding and were succesful on a small grant with The Heritage Council, Ireland in 2010. This allowed me to work fulltime for 3 mths, to start with Co. Clare cave complex, where all the bones were mixed together, so not only did I use traditional zooarchaeological analysis and techinques, I also had to do basic sorting cave by cave, species by species
The Co.Clare cave complex consists of 5 caves worth of bones, all mixed together & with an est. count of c.20,000 bone fragments. First excavated by RJ Ussher and his team in 1902-04. What secrets do they hold?
Listen to their whispers ... I did!
The Clare cave complex or Edenvale Cave complex (just outside Ennis) holds a diverse species mix of pre-Ice Age and post-Ice Age (or LGM).
There were some worked bone artefacts like the bone pin below found amongst the bones. Don't forget these bones had not be looked at in years at any length, not since their original excavation in the early 1900s.
All in over that 3 month period funded by The Heritage Council, I handled, sorted, measured, recorded some of the Edenvale Cave complex bones (c.11,700 bone fragments), and corrected the mis-identifications made in the past by Scharff et al. (1906).
And then the funding ran out. Helen and I applied for more grants but were unsuccessful and I just continued on in my spare time and on holidays where I could - sorting, recording, measuring, identifying. Listening to the bones whispering their secrets to me over many long days.
Helen Lewis (UCD) & I remained in contact, still eager to continue our collaboration on what Ireland's past through the use of the caves' and their faunal remains could tell us.
But who cared for a pile of old bones sitting forgotten in the stores?
Time passed on, I continued coming back to the stores to continue the work but could only do so much per year given other (paid) work commitments.
But what I found in this box below in 2015, changed my thinking of Ireland's fuanal past. :)
Cliffhanger, more tomorrow!
Now where was I...ah yes, a certain bone from this box told me their special secrets which changed Irish archaeology and made me dismantle any boxes in my thinking about Ireland and its colonisation of animals and humans ... it was ...
this bone, 👇 I identified as an adult male brown bear patella, or knee cap, that show (eroded bone and) human modified cut marks. I got the cut marks independently verified by Emeritus Prof. Terry O'Connor
& Prof. Alice Choyke 🥳
to give up in due time. Full paper is nearly ready of all of our combined efforts and contributions and there are possiblilities there too..... but I won't spoil them here....yet
Tune in tomorrow evening for more on origins story of the #IrishCaveBones project. I saw this view across from the desk in the Museum stores for many many years - beautiful in late afternoon golden light - where the magic happened & the bones told me their secrets!
Right, apologies this is a bit later. I have my coffee in hand, so lets go back to 2011-the timeline jumps a bit but such is the nature of the work :) The late Prof. Peter Woodman (UCC) got in touch with me & we set up our first F2F meet in Dublin.
Peter &I hit it off from the getgo in our mutual interests & quests for knowledge in how Ireland got it's fauna/flora, when& the human interactions. We had many more meetings &our friendship grew, along with mutual respect. #IrishCaveBones
Many long chats over coffee over the years both in Dublin and Cork city. I can't state enough how refreshing and exciting it is to talk about your interest subject with someone who also has that excitment and thirst for it, as well as knowledge level.
Peter asked me to collaborate with him on many projects, including the faunal assemblage of Killuragh Cave, Co. Limerick - a cave on the banks of the Mulkear River.
Peter excavated this cave himself in the 1990s. It's a multiperiod site ranging from c. Late Glacial period (some 11,000 years ago) to historical times. The 14 dates from the human bones - min. 6 individuals (3 adults, 2 juv & 1 infant)... ..showed human presence (based on 229 human bone fragments) & use of the cave from the Early Mesolithic to Middle Bronze Age.
The faunal remains consisted of 10,615 bones and bone fragments. Including many many wood mouse and Arctic lemming teeth and bones...
The stratigraphy of Killuragh Cave is difficult due to the influx of water flooding events and disturbance by rabbits and badgers (bones of both species identified among the assemblage). Also the lack of radiocarbon dates on the remains is an issue. But there were some usual suspects identified - giant deer (dated c.11,598 yrs BP), red deer, pig/wild boar, and ...
The pig/wild boar bone was dated to Middle Bronze Age too (c.3,285 yrsBP), along with cattle around similar time. This is not unexpected.
Pine marten bone was dated to Late Bronze Age (c.2,716yrsBP), a species' history which needs to be explored further in Ireland.
or could it be a recent introduction to Ireland? Though we would expect to find more of them or reports of them by now if a population was here? Until it's dated we can't even begin to tell its story.
So the weasel shall remain a mystery until it's radiocarbon dated, hopefully in the near future and as part of the #IrishCaveBones project (more on that later in the week). The importance of dating is essential to the when part of our questions in Ireland's past.
Killuragh Cave has so much to offer still, there are many species' stories in that one cave still to be told &Peter's spirit will come with us. But interestingly, this cave has post-LGM fauna, whether dating more bones changes that remains to be seen.
But Killuragh Cave faunal remains will help us discover more secrets about Ireland's faunal species and their interactions with humans. And so, another cave assemblage was assessed, identified, catalogued.
More about Peter and mine collaborations tomorrow evening...which changes Irish faunal history yet again from previous knowledge! I'll try to be earlier tomorrow evening with the next installament of the long running #IrishCaveBones project - thanks for reading!
If you're still reading daily, thanks for your interest. This thread will finish up on Friday evening, just FYI.
There was more to be told than I anticipated at the start...but I guess this project has been running since 2007!
And we are back for the next installment on the evolution of the #IrishCaveBones project. Hope ye have a suitable beverage (or two!) to hand.
There are gaps of my time on this project, since apart from 2010 for 3 months, this project has been unfunded. Thus my other contracts ...
This new piece of research also teamed up with Prof. Tom Higham @tommyhigham
(then Oxford ORAU, now at Univ. of Vienna, Austria).
The background was the large paper by Peter (Woodman et al., 1997 https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379196000376) 'The Irish Quaternary Fauna Project'
In this paper, Peter et al., radiocarbon dated 100 different animals bones, majority of which were from Irish caves. But this was in the early 1990s, when radiocarbon dating did not use ultrafiltration methods to rid samples of contamination (which alters results)
Although this paper was a phenomenal amount of work (and costly), and at the time provided the first important step, at a relatively large scale, of the 'when' part of the Irish faunal story....sadly as we found out, the results were severely flawed.
In our new collaboration from c.2016, we subjected the same bones (or their left over samples from previous early 1990s) to the standard radiocarbone dating method using ultrafiltration, removing contaminates. As we got the results we realised all those dates in..
...the 1997 paper must be written off and ignored going forward. Those dates, were sadly, wrong and should not be used or cited. We started drafting the early part of the first draft late 2016, but sadly Peter passed away in late Jan. 2017.
But Peter knew the enormous consequences of the new dates and we continued to write the paper, Covid delaying things slightly and also I did not want to diservice Peter with a substandard paper. It was published in Boreas in 2020 ....
(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/bor.12451)
So.... what we found from four caves with selected bones used for redating (where original bones/samples were available), the 1997 published dates were not accurate. There are questions of the extent of the Last Glacial Maximum ice sheet (Ice Age) across Ireland.
We have new dates of the original species' bones from Castlepook cave (Co. Cork), Shandon cave, Ballynamintra cave & Foley cave (Co. Waterford). In Castlepook cave, firstly, we have 14 new dates from reindeer, fox sp., giant deer, brown bear, wolf, woolly mammoth ...
& spotted hyena (the only cave in Ireland where this species been found, so far) & Arctic lemming. Some substainally & some got younger (note calibrated ages used in figure below, which are not same as years BP)
In terms of the wolf and the woolly mammoth, both these got younger new dates than previous, 'moving' them through time to when the whole of Ireland was covered by the large ice sheet during the LGM or the Ice Age.... 🤔
We also have a reindeer than moved through time from c. 12,500 yrs BP to c.20,200 yrs BP (these are not calibrated years)....again when Ireland is meant to have been covered entirely by the icesheet - So 3 different species ... refugium is a possible in this area
Giant deer bones found in Castlepook cave dated between c.32,000 to c.45,000 yrs BP & seemed to have disappeared from Ireland around the 32,000 yrs point, which may time with the ice sheet in it's early days of extension from the North. Story for next year.
Spotted hyena dated from c.45,000 yrs BP to c.33,200 yrs BP. Another interesting timing of the colder weather coming with the extension of the Ice Sheet ... another story for next year :) (think of these research papers as stepping stones across a wide river)
That wolf which moved from c.23,400 yrs BP to c.19,600 yrs BP, may have either been a survivor in a refugium (which evidence is mounting for), or at least the first of (many?) species reaching Ireland after the icesheet retreated but prior to island formation?
Shandon cave new dates, resulted in woolly mammoth, reindeer, horse, hare, brown bear moving to older dates approximately a few 1,000 yrs before the Ice Sheet extended from North & Ireland became to inhabitable. One exception is fox sp. that remained approx same.
Foley cave gave a new hare result of greater than 45,000yrs BP - has been in Ireland a long time & through thick and thin has stuck with us all the way to present day. This is interesting and shows species highly adaptability in various climates and environments.
Foley cave also gave us a reindeer tooth at about 31,000yrs BP ... Ballynamintra cave has reindeer at c.35,000yrs BP too.... so reindeer were here pre- and post-LGM (Ice Age) too... again refugium survivor? earlier recoloniser after LGM?
So many questions to be researched and investigated further, which we are currently doing, more on this on Friday when we finish this long thread (longer than I thought it would be). This 2020 paper is really important with it's new dates.
on many levels, the 1997 paper is gone, written off, torn up, burning in the ancient fires. The 2020 paper sets the start of the 'new' story for Ireland's fauna and their 'whens' on our island. It also presents evidence to question the icesheet models for Ireland
But there is lots of food for thought in this 2020 paper and we are barely scratching the surface of what was there and when. Dating is crucial to the basics of ecosystem functioning and what our island fauna/flora were present.
a snapshot, limited snapshot, of what species was present (or their absence) here. Something we must always remember. We will continue tomorrow evening with some of our more recent research & finish up on Friday evening. Thanks for reading & I'm sure lots of Qs!
More tomorrow night. If you have gotten this far, thank you for taking time to read the journey, and origins story of this project.
Ruth Carden 🦴