County: Kildare Site name: KILL HILL
Sites and Monuments Record No.: KD020-022002- Licence number: 03E1573
Author: Elizabeth Connolly, for Irish Archaeological Consultancy Ltd.
Site type: Flat cemetery
Period/Dating: Bronze Age (2200 BC-801 BC)
ITM: E 694730m, N 723429m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.252758, -6.580410
Site No. 4 at Kill Hill, Co. Kildare, was identified during centre-line testing for the N7 Naas Road Widening and Interchanges Scheme (No. 930, Excavations 2003, 03E1265) in August 2003. It was fully excavated in November 2003. The site was situated at the base of a slope to the north of Kill Hill, a Bronze Age enclosure. It was identified with three others in Kill Hill townland, two of which were also Bronze Age ritual sites, which with this one formed a line running roughly east–west.
The site was first identified as an amorphous pit with a charcoal-rich fill. An area measuring 15m by 15m was stripped of topsoil by machine around the site and it was revealed to be a roughly circular ditch enclosing several pits. The circular ditch enclosed an area 6.3m in diameter in which six pits were recorded, five of which cut natural inside the ditch and one of which cut the ditch itself. Five of the pits contained burnt bone. The pits were subcircular and measured c. 0.5–0.8m in diameter. The central or primary pit had been disturbed by a secondary burial, which was represented by an undecorated cinerary urn lying on its side. There were some sherds of pottery from a different pot to the urn recovered from the fill of the secondary burial.
Two pits were recorded just inside the ditch, one of which contained the base of a pottery vessel. Token deposits of bone lined the edges of the cut of the ditch. The fifth pit, which contained burnt bone as well as an unburnt animal tooth, cut the ditch to the north and was the amorphous charcoal spread noted earlier. Finds of both burnt and unburnt bone were recovered from the ditch. Four post-holes were recorded in a roughly square configuration, cutting both the ditch and the natural subsoil in the interior. One of these contained a small deposit of burnt bone.
Preliminary analysis indicates that this feature was a Bronze Age burial site, possibly the truncated remains of a cemetery mound or of a small flat cemetery. Further information will be available for the site following specialist analysis and dating of the pottery and the cremated bone.
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