County: Roscommon Site name: GORTTOOSE
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 96E0073
Author: Charles E. Orser, Jr. Anthropology, Illinois State University
Site type: Settlement cluster
Period/Dating: Modern (AD 1750-AD 2000)
ITM: E 599451m, N 779517m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.765255, -8.008323
Research at the Murray Site took place during an eight-week period from 10 June to 2 August. The object of the research was to facilitate discovery of the material aspects of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century life on the Mahon Estate, a somewhat typical agricultural holding in the Irish midlands.
The archaeological research was preceded by preliminary field reconnaissance and historical research in 1994 and geophysical surveying in 1995. The research team excavated 34 excavation units, encompassing 134m2 of the site, or 15% of its surface area.
Over 6000 artefacts were recovered from the site. As an assemblage, they provide an excellent view of the material culture of a head-tenant's household. Included in the collection is an abundant sample of locally made redwares. These utilitarian wares were the preferred ceramics of the countryside, and may hold the key to understanding the outside connections of the people who lived at Gorttoose.
In addition to the artefacts, we also uncovered significant structural remains from the immediate post-Famine period. These remains-including one corner of a farmhouse and a well-made French drain-indicate that the landlords moved quickly to 'improve' the landscape once they had evicted their so-called 'unproductive' tenants in 1847.
Analysis of the artefacts is continuing at the Laboratory of Historical Archaeology at Illinois Stare University. Several students are planning to prepare advanced papers on the materials, and research on the Mahon Estate will continue in 1997.
Further information about the research appears in 'Can there be an archaeology of the Great Famine?', in Fearful realities: new perspectives on the Famine, ed. C. Morash and R. Hayes (Irish Academic Press, 1996), and in 'Great Expectations: poor Irish farmers, the Great Famine, and archaeology', in Archaeology (March/April 1997).
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