County: Down Site name: DRUMADONNELL
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: —
Author: Cormac McSparron, NAC
Site type: House - early medieval
Period/Dating: Early Medieval (AD 400-AD 1099)
ITM: E 724404m, N 839173m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.286186, -6.089304
At Drumadonnell townland, Co. Down, as part of the construction of a primary school, monitoring of topsoil-stripping revealed the existence of a small Early Christian house c. 7m in diameter. A central hearth, with a stone setting within it, was excavated, along with a subcircular setting of post-holes around it. A second hearth was found nearby, but it was not associated with any post-holes. There were no traces of an enclosure.
Finds included souterrain ware pottery and burnt bone. Soil samples from the excavation were processed by John Davidson of The Queen's University of Belfast. Burnt bone fragments as well as seeds and grains were recovered, mostly from the hearths and from a pit to the north of the rest of the archaeology. Analysis of the bone was carried out by Dr Eileen Murphy, and analysis of the seeds and grains by Dr Dave Weir. Most of the bone was too fragmentary to be identified, but cattle and sheep bone were present in the assemblage. The seed and grain assemblage was mostly composed of oats, barley and a much smaller amount of wheat. 14C testing of samples from the two hearths provided dates of AD 705 to 1005 and AD 680 to 980 calibrated at 2 sigma.
Unit 6, Farset Enterprise Park, 638 Springfield Road, Belfast
