2021:584 - BALLALEASE NORTH AA6, Donabate, Dublin

Excavations revealed a circular ditched enclosure less than 20m in internal diameter whose eastern arc had been truncated by a ditch that was part of an 18th- or early 19th-century field system. A juvenile human burial had been interred in the enclosure ditch and was radiocarbon dated to 650–780 cal. 2ẟ AD (UBA 48273; 1309 +/- 27 BP), in the early medieval period. Orientated in the traditional east-west manner, no significant illness or violent trauma could be identified from its skeleton.

Two smaller concentric curvilinear features, possible slot trenches for a palisade fence, were traced along the interior of the southern and eastern arcs of the enclosure ditch. Charcoal from one of these possible slot trenches was dated to 1620–1510 cal. 2ẟ BC (UBA 48274; 3298 +/- 28 BP), in the Middle Bronze Age.

The remaining features from the excavation comprised undated pits and furrows alongside the early modern linear and curvilinear field boundaries. Finds included a residual Grooved Ware pottery sherd dating from c. 2800–2500 BC in the enclosure ditch fill alongside a granite rotary disc quern stone, which are generally dated from anytime in the first millennium AD. A number of flint artefacts were retrieved from across the site including a flint fabricator from the enclosure ditch fill and an unfinished barbed-and-tanged arrowhead from an early modern field ditch. A modest faunal assemblage was retrieved from the excavation and the range of animals from the enclosure ditch fills, cattle, sheep/goat, deer, pig, horse and dog, indicated food waste and a probable domestic purpose for the enclosure.