The archaeology of height –: cultural meaning in the relativity of Irish megalithic tomb siting

Robert Lloyd Praeger (1865–1953) was a renowned Irish field botanist, ecologist, and conservationist. In his lifetime, he traversed Ireland ‘from end to end, and from sea to sea’ to ‘appraise the many monuments of man’s industry and faith’. He encountered the numerous prehistoric hilltop cairns, the unusual nature of the island’s topography, and wrote how ‘ancient crumplings of the earth’s crust’ resulted in the formation of mountainous landscapes in the coastal perimeter and a ‘broad low plain in the centre’. His acute eye observed how the different landscapes would have affected patterns of human settlement in the prehistoric past, ‘tending to push pre-existing cultures not into an inaccessible centre, as in most islands, but into the mountain-fringe’. His journeys were described in The Way That I Went, first published in 1937. Between 2004 and 2007 I followed in the footsteps of Praeger. My journeys were to reappraise the island’s much-studied Neolithic passage tombs, similarly distributed from ‘end to end’ and ‘from sea to sea’. As a surveyor, cultural astronomer and archaeologist, I had many and different questions to ask and answer using methodological advances undreamt of by Praeger almost a century ago. My approaches, referencing a developed body of archaeological literature, used field astronomy, geographical information science tools, statistical modelling, and network analysis of recorded intervisibility between the prehistoric tombs. These methodologies were integrated into a phenomenological approach drawing on my field walking to nearly three hundred sites dispersed across the island....