Context 153 - March 2018

C O N T E X T 1 5 3 : M A R C H 2 0 1 8 19 A new project currently being carried out with Leicester and Newcastle Universities is re-evaluating the 200 or so known substantial ‘roundmounds’which cover the burials of this period.These new practices, emerging around 3600 BC, are influenced once again from elsewhere – probably by a movement of people from Ireland to the Scottish islands. In parallel with current fieldwork, re-examination of cremated bone from bronze-age sites excavated in the last century is telling us more about the population itself. The period described as the iron age on the Isle of Man is difficult to characterise. It was largely domestic, with people living in farmsteads but at times wanting to defend themselves and if necessary moving to coastal locations, which could be fortified, or to inland hilltops. Houses were mainly timber, as were defences, with earthen ramparts and ditches providing protection. Metalworking took place locally but trade within the wider Irish Sea is identifiable, if not intensive. Most of the archaeological excavations of key sites took place in the mid-20th century but recent work by the Liverpool University Centre for Manx Studies has confirmed the overall picture of the period 500 BC onward. One of the major unanswered questions is the relation- ship with the Roman Empire and the 400 years of the Roman Province of Britannia.The Roman navy and army were firmly in control of the Irish Sea, which became a highway between the breadbasket of Anglesey and the moving frontier zone between northern England and Scotland. The island was effectively surrounded on three sides by Romanised communities and an imperial infrastructure, but there is no archaeological trace of this here, apart from a few metal items which confirm occasional contact. At the very least we should probably be looking for lighthouses or signal towers at key navigation points, but it is hard not to draw the conclusion that the island was poor and harmless, and therefore a largely ignored backwater. This lack of contact leaves the period between AD 50 and AD 500 very short of material which can be used to date settlement activity, so few excavated sites can be reliably assigned to the period. It is also difficult to see the transition in archaeological terms to a Celtic and Christian early medieval period, which happened sometime between AD 500 and AD 800.The evidence is in the landscape – we see the first written records on carved stones in Ogham and Latin, which confirm later references to the conversion of the island by followers of the Irish Saint Patrick. The origins of later religious structures are in this early period but our knowledge of domestic settlement is flimsy, and made more complex by the reuse of earlier structures such as hill forts and promontory forts, which are themselves hard to date. One clearly Celtic Christian phenomenon may have its origin at this time – namely some 170 small chapels or keeills.These may be single- cell monasteries, mortuary chapels, chapels for holy wells and sacred sites, or the precursors of later religious houses. Like so many other monument classes, the lack of modern scientific excavation and analysis means that dating is unclear. The Irish Celtic Christian and Gaelic tradition was sufficiently strong, however, to be distinguished from Viking trading and subsequent settlement, which took place from the end of the 9th century. Pagan burials with Scandinavian grave goods appeared – sometimes in Christian settings but including the ‘typical’ Viking ship burial. The settlers adopted Christianity but with a substantial legacy of Scandinavian belief and legend displayed on stone carvings across the island. This corpus of carvings, which includes funerary markers in the form of crosses and runic inscriptions, is one of the most significant outside Scandinavia, highlighting the wealth and strategic value of the island. The island is at the end of the Viking sea-road from Norway, but at the centre of military incursions and civilian settlement around the Irish Sea. Manx history shows a substantial divergence from England in the period after the Norman conquest, and the archaeology continues to show Norse and Scandinavian influences overlaying the Celtic landscape Part of the Manx Heritage Trail,The Braaid is the site of an ancient Celtic-Norse era community. Remnants of a roundhouse in the foreground, c650 AD and remnants of two longhouses in the background, c950 AD can be seen here situated on the rolling hills of Marown in central Isle of Man.(Photo: Gregory J Kingsley - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?curid=7565521)