About the project...

The role and significance of marine resource use has been the focus of much debate in European Neolithic studies, fuelled by archaeological evidence that Neolithic communities in some Atlantic coastal regions continued to exploit marine resources after the introduction of agriculture.

Evidence from Europe's Atlantic coastal regions demonstrates that marine resources such as shellfish and seaweed were utilised at various times during the Neolithic. These may have served as supplementary food sources, fish-bait, livestock fodder, or agricultural fertiliser, although the magnitude and geographic extent of these activities is not well understood. Important questions remain unanswered as to whether the exploitation of the marine environment by coastal farming communities represented a local and sporadic response to climate change and resource shortage, or ought to be considered of part a long-term strategy to mitigate environmental constraints in remote island and coastal settings.

Sediments from coastal shell middens are uniquely well-suited to addressing these questions and can provide a rare window into prehistoric lifeways and past environmental changes at the local and regional scale. Unfortunately many of these sites are critically threatened by ongoing erosion and accelerating climate change effects.

NeoMarE is an Irish Research Council (IRC) funded project which aims to mitigate the loss of these vulnerable archives by applying a suite of geoarchaeological and organic geochemistry techniques to eroding coastal shell middens in the north-west of Ireland, immediately adjacent to some of the most important Neolithic monumental centres in Western Europe. This approach will offer fresh evidence to critically re-evaluate and test competing hypotheses about Neolithic marine resource use, shining new light on the development of agriculture in marginal coastal regions.

The project sets out to accomplish four key research objectives (RO):

RO1: To produce a microstratigraphic characterisation of site-formation processes at selected coastal shell midden sites, establishing the suitability of sediments for lipid biomarker analysis and the recovery of materials for radiocarbon dating.

RO2: To exploit sedimentary lipid climate proxies from coastal shell middens to reconstruct palaeoenvironmental conditions during the Neolithic.

RO3: To review, reassess and reconsider regional marine resource exploitation during the Neolithic and to test competing hypotheses about the role of climate.

RO4: To mitigate the loss of archaeological information to coastal erosion and accelerating climate change impacts.

Grant awardee: Dr Rory Connolly

Funding body: Irish Research Council (IRC)

Project ID: GOIPD/2021/228

Duration: 2021 - 2023