New Pastures will investigate the Irish Iron Age through the lens of animal husbandry practices. Having traditionally been hampered by a lack of site evidence, new sites, mainly derived from developer-led excavation, now provide the opportunity to tackle some of the central issues of the period. While this newly emerging record includes houses and small settlement sites, these are still so rare that they raise questions about settlement and subsistence modes. Settlement modes are often a strategy of, or intimately tied into, livestock management practices. This interdisciplinary and multi-partnered project is combining stable isotope analyses, ancient DNA, and traditional zooarchaeological techniques to explore the domestic herbivore faunal assemblages in one of Ireland’s most important Iron Age landscapes – Counties Laois and Kildare – and to build models of human mobility and settlement and subsistence modes

Funded by: Irish Research Council

First published: 11 October 2023

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  • Katharina Becker (University College Cork)