County: Sligo Site name: Tanrego West
Sites and Monuments Record No.: SL019-057001 Licence number: 22E0641
Author: Alan Healy and Rory Connolly
Site type: Midden
Period/Dating: N/A
ITM: E 559556m, N 832107m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.236228, -8.620385
SL019-057001 (Site B) was sampled as part of a wider research project, Neolithic Marine Resource Exploitation in Atlantic Europe (NeoMarE), which is funded by an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship (GOIPD/2021/228) under the direction of Dr Rory Connolly and Dr Jessica Smyth, based at the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, and Site Director Alan Healy of Archaeological Management Solutions (AMS). The project seeks to investigate a series of six coastal shell middens in County Sligo with the objective of assessing both timing and duration of midden deposition. The work aims to progress our understanding of past human occupation in Sligo’s coastal zone and establish how these sites relate to the wider archaeological landscape.
All of the sites included in the project are exposed in section and remain extremely vulnerable to substantial loss in the event of significant storm activity. Active erosion of archaeological material from the section faces is evident at each of the sites. The works carried out will mitigate against the loss of archaeological information to coastal erosion and accelerating climate change impacts.
SL019-057001 consists of a thin lens of shells, predominantly oyster mixed with occasional periwinkle, cockle, and limpet shells, visible in an exposed scarp which delineates a modest, grassy elevation at the edge of a rocky shoreline. The site is situated on the western side of Ballysadare Bay in the townland of Tanrego West, Co. Sligo. The midden material is set within a substrate of organic brown soil and can be traced intermittently for approximately 10-15m along the shore. The full extent of the midden is difficult to determine without excavation; it has been recorded as a single feature but there may be more than one midden here. This deposit was previously included in a limited pilot which obtained a C14 determination from an ex-situ oyster shell sample returning a calibrated date range of 3660 - 3440 BC (Woodman and Milner 2013, 39).
In total, four samples of oyster shell were collected from midden (SL019-057001)
Strokestown, Co Roscommon
