Two Late Bronze Age Roundhouses at Ballyprior Beg, Northern Ireland

'The Excavation of Two Late Bronze Age Roundhouses at Ballyprior Beg, Island Magee, County Antrim', by Ian Suddaby, Ian Armit, Mike Church, Mike Cressey, Sarah Gormley, Eiméar L. Nelis, Catherine M. Dunne, and Eileen M. Murphy, was published in the third series, Volume 62 of the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 2003.

In 1997, Edinburgh University’s Centre for Field Archaeology, CFA's predecessor, excavated a series of test pits and trial trenches at Ballycronan More, Island Magee, Northern Ireland, along the route of the Moyle Interconnector cable. This cable route was designed to link the electricity grids of Scotland and Ireland and the project was commissioned by Northern Ireland Electricity. This early team recovered an impressive 1,006 pieces of flint – although only 10 of them were identified as having been manmade.

CFA Archaeology Ltd, established as its own company in 2000, undertook later phases of work at the site. Between July and September 2000, CFA excavated the remains of two Late Bronze Age roundhouses at Ballypriorbeg, within the wayleave of the Moyle Interconnector electrical cable route.

Roundhouse 1, below, was almost circular in plan with a diameter of approximately 9m. Its walls were 2m thick and it had an entrance to the southeast, as well as a paved yard outside of this entrance. Roundhouse 1 was constructed with ‘mass’ walls composed of stone faces with a clay core – a unique type of structure not previously recorded in Bronze Age buildings.

Plan of Roundhouse 1

Roundhouse 1

Deposits and artefacts in Roundhouse 2 were similar to those in Roundhouse 1 and, given the overlapping radiocarbon dates, it was assumed that concurrent occupation took place, although evidence suggests that Roundhouse 2 was abandoned first.

Among the artefacts recorded were 548 small finds, around 3,624 pieces of flint, 1,611 sherds of pottery, a broken Palstave Axe, a lead bead, two polished stone axes, and a variety of coarse stone tools.

Palstave Axe

Bronze Age Pottery

The Bronze Age witnessed a new dawn of monumental house building as morphological, technological, and organisational improvements drove the changes seen in the settlement and artefactual record. Increasingly large and complex houses, and groups of houses, appeared, making the Bronze Age ‘a world of villages’, the construction of which drew on a greater range of resources, materials, and human effort than ever before.

CFA's discovery of a structurally well-preserved pair of roundhouses at Ballypriorbeg, which aligned more with the Scottish tradition of ‘hut circles’ and ‘unenclosed platform’ or ‘scooped’ settlements than with the Irish building tradition, was an important and unusual addition to the archaeological record of this period and further expanded our understanding of this diverse and complex period.