Revealing the Past 2023: ‘One day, all of this will be yours’: the Moynagh Lough Excavation Project

In this presentation, Michael Potterton, Maynooth University, discusses Moynagh Lough, County Meath which is among the most significant archaeological sites ever discovered in Ireland. One of the Royal Irish Academy’s legacy projects, it has been funded by the Academy over three centuries. In 1888, W.G. Wood-Martin was awarded £10 to investigate the newly discovered crannog in Co. Meath. Almost a century later, in 1980, the Academy recommenced funding the excavations, then directed by John Bradley. The exceptional wetland excavation became a flagship project for the Academy, yielding a rich artefactual assemblage from Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age and medieval contexts. John published several articles about the findings, but when he passed away in 2014 the final excavation report remained incomplete. Thanks primarily to the Royal Irish Academy and the National Monuments Service, the Moynagh Lough Project was re-established in 2018. The hiatus after 1998 has one silver lining – science and technology have progressed so much that all kinds of new analyses and research are now possible. Fundamentally, the core goals remain the same: to get Moynagh fully published and to transfer the archive to the National Museum of Ireland. Today’s paper summarises some of the research recently funded by RIA and NMS grant schemes.