See below for Search Tips

Year
County
Site No.
Site Name
Site Type
Report Text Contains
Author
Grid Reference
Sites and Monuments Record No.
Excavation Licence No.


Search Tips


General
The search fields are cumulative: if you specify e.g. the year '1997', county 'Sligo', and report text containing 'bronze axe', only reports matching all three parameters will be found. Searches are neither case-sensitive nor whole-word-based: a search for 'king' will find e.g. 'Viking' and 'Kingston'. Placename and personal name spellings have varied between reports, and it might be helpful to use wildcards (*) in your search for names that you suspect have variant spellings: a search for 'C*ide Fields' will find both 'Céide Fields' and 'Ceide Fields'; a search for 'M*Sween* Quay' will find 'MacSweeny Quay', 'MacSweeney Quay' and 'McSweeney Quay'.

Year
Excavations carried out from 1977 to 1984 (published in the Irish Journal of Archaeology) are grouped under the two year spans 1977-79 and 1980-84. All other excavations are given under the year in which the licence was issued.

Site Name
This is given in various formats: townland ('Castleblunden'), street ('Barrack Street, Cork'), development scheme (Ballough-Kilshane Gas Pipeline'). City-centre Dublin sites are given as e.g. '43 Abbey Street, Dublin', and suburban sites as e.g. '84 Manor Street, Stoneybatter'.

Site Type
This field includes the type of monument ('fulacht fiadh', 'town wall', 'passage tomb') and/or the archaeological period ('Mesolithic', 'post-medieval, '16th century').

Author
The individual excavator is given, along with the company under whose name the work was done; the address of either the individual or the company is included ('Martin Reid, 37 Errigal Road, Drimnagh, Dublin 12, for ADS Ltd').

Report Text Contains
The report text is the largest field (up to 2000 words) and can be used to refine your search, for instance by specifying a find type ('ring-pin', 'flint scraper', 'Sgraffito ware'). Site Name and Site Type are often, but not always, repeated in the Report Text. Because of this, as well as the fact that reference is sometimes made to a site name or site type given in a different report, it is best to search for Site Name and Site Type in their respective fields, not in the Report Text field.

Excavation Licence no., Sites and Monuments Record no. and Grid Reference
Information such as Excavation Licence no., Sites and Monuments Record no. and Grid Reference is not given for all reports. Licence nos have been omitted up to and including Excavations 1992 and are not given for sites in Northern Ireland for all years; Sites and Monuments Record no. is, of course, not relevant for all sites; and Grid Reference may have occasionally been omitted. The information has been given in many different formats over the years, and there is also the possibility that it contains errors. Grid References have been given to various degrees of accuracy in all of these formats: 'O 157342', 'O1485033650', '06805 04617'; Sites and Monuments Record nos have been given like so: 'SMR 112:03401', 'SMR '46:01-22', 'SMR 67:20',' SMR 18-9/11'; and Excavation Licence nos like so: '97E45', '97E0045'. For these reasons, a search including these three fields may not be optimal.

Copyright for the database resides with the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government and the Department of the Environment, Northern Ireland, and for the individual reports with the authors.
Site designed by Aisling Flood, Wordwell Ltd. Database software and hosting by HostIreland.

Duchas logoHeritage Council logo