Encountering the Sacred in the Everyday; the Role of Mortuary Places in Irish Prehistory

A notable feature of the Irish prehistory is the recurrence of activity over long periods of time in specific areas. These persistent places or landscapes are also a feature of the wider world of prehistoric Atlantic Europe. This pattern of human activity has been long debated. Depending on the point of view of the researcher, it has been explained, for example, as indicating foci of long-term settlement in the broadest sense, as the repeated but unrelated use of areas improved by human modification in the context of technological constraints on land use or as indicating places recognised as being special; often as sacred places. The understanding of such sacred places and landscapes is important from a number of perspectives. For example, it raises questions about the applicability and relevance of cultural and chronological labels to places that may have been in human use over millennia. It also requires explanation in terms of how the sacred articulated with everyday life in the past and to those other postulated reasons for the long-term use of places and landscapes. Here these questions are approached by discussion of mortuary sites as sacred places in prehistoric Ireland, with particular reference to a number of case studies.