Prehistoric Irish Monuments May Have Been Pathways for the Dead

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-04-prehistoric-irish-monuments-pathways-dead.html

Archaeologists have used advanced lidar technology to discover hundreds of monuments in the famous prehistoric landscape of Baltinglass, Ireland, revealing insights into the ritual activities of the farming communities that occupied the area.

Baltinglass is famous for its Early Neolithic and Late Bronze Age monuments. However, evidence for occupation and activity between these periods was almost non-existent.

As such, it was thought that the area could have been abandoned for around 2,000 years, despite having one of the densest concentrations of Neolithic monuments in Ireland.

"While we know that this was an incredibly important, and in many ways, unique landscape in Early Neolithic Ireland, there was very little evidence to suggest that this area continued to be as important again until the Late Bronze Age," states author Dr. James O'Driscoll from the University of Aberdeen. "Did the early farming communities of Baltinglass abandon this landscape after a few hundred years of use?"

To answer this question, Dr. O'Driscoll created highly detailed three-dimensional models of the Baltinglass landscape using lidar technology. The results are published in the journal Antiquity.

"We used the same technology that some self-driving cars use to map terrain in real-time-but instead attached to an airplane," says Dr. O'Driscoll.

The majority of the monuments have been destroyed by thousands of years of plowing, but the lidar was able to pick up minute topographical traces of hundreds of monuments.

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