The Prehistoric Settlement Landscapes of Mayo The Evidence and Impact of Development-Led Archaeology

This thesis provides an extensive examination of the evidence and impact of three decades of development-led archaeological work in county Mayo on the western Irish Atlantic seaboard. The research makes a significant and original contribution to knowledge, creating a new baseline dataset for prehistoric enquiry in Mayo. The work involved rigorous, systematic research, sourcing, evaluating and contextualising a vast body of development-led data, distributed within ‘grey literature’, unpublished excavation, monitoring and testing reports, archives, radiocarbon certificates, specialist reports and information held privately by archaeologists.

The research examined how development-led archaeology came to dominate archaeological practice in Mayo, Ireland and globally. Taking a historiographical approach, the path of scholarly enquiry in Mayo was charted through an evaluation of myth histories, pseudohistorical narratives, scholarly antiquarianism and early scientific archaeological investigations. Understanding the evolution of development-led archaeology necessitated a global perspective, demonstrating how when faced with threats to the finite archaeological resource archaeologists adapted, evolving from concepts of ‘rescue’ and ‘salvage’, to structured, mandated archaeological mitigation. This research is the first stand-alone prehistoric examination of Mayo as a region. The results show that development-led archaeological activity in Mayo has been transformative, providing a critical mass of well-dated settlement evidence, impacting every period of Mayo’s prehistory. It provides the first indications of Early Mesolithic activity in Mayo, refining Neolithic periodisation and expanding domestic settlement evidence. It reveals empirical Chalcolithic data, a vast and varied range of Bronze Age settlement indicators and the first block of datable Iron Age settlement evidence from Mayo.

The information in this PhD thesis is a research contribution of broad interest especially to those working on the prehistory of Mayo and the west of Ireland. The data contained in this volume can be used and built upon into the future, feeding into wider prehistoric research in Ireland and beyond.