Loughcrew, less well known, about 15 passage tombs there, maybe 30, originally. And Carrowkeel, I'm going to mention Carrowkeel a lot. So just keep a note of where it is there in Sligo, a whole series of monuments there, 26 or 27 probable passage tombs.
So these monuments weren't representing the burials of the whole community. At Carrowkeel, the osteological analysis said about nine men-- if memory serves me right-- and about four women could be identified.
You can sit in a passage tomb and not meet anyone for several hours by yourself, talk to the gods, or whatever it is you like to do in your spare time. And then Carrowmore, the most westerly of the big passage tomb complexes, very simple, small monuments in a very beautiful location. And so here are some of the features.
And it's a little bit tumbled down here. This is at Carrowkeel, that location we mentioned already. Though some monuments are covered in may be loose stone, and then they have a soil covering over that, or .
So this is one of the first sites that I looked at. This is Carrowmore, already mentioned. This is a horse riding stables here.
And you can see it a little bit closer. This is Carrowmore 3. So you have a boulder circle.
And there's a whole series of developments leading up to Newgrange. We could see that also here at Carrowkeel. Isn't this just an extraordinary image here?
So we're beginning to trace the outline of a chronological trajectory of the construction of these monuments. Another project was up on top of Carrowkeel here, and we found the very first art at Carrowkeel. This is a colleague from the University of Edinburgh.
These are from the Hill of Tara, from a small monument called the Mound of the Hostages. And you've got this unusual pottery called Carrowkeel ware. It's often polished and white or beautiful colored stone, stone bowls, pins, and personal items,
Which is older? So again, we're able to see into this story of developments and changes over time. But perhaps the most exciting project has been here at Carrowkeel. Bones from here were taken after an excavation in 1911, and they were brought to somewhere known as the Duckworth laboratory in Cambridge.
So these monuments weren't representing the burials of the whole community. Yeah, the evidence from Carrowkeel is showing-- is filling in that picture a little bit for us.
So these monuments weren't representing the burials of the whole community. So when we looked at the remains of 14 different people from Carrowkeel, we saw the vast majority of them had grown up in the local area.
This is probably the most dramatically situated of the big four passage tomb complexes in County Sligo here. And we dated material from inside those monuments, and not as old as Carrowmore, but still about 300 years older than Newgrange. So we're beginning to trace the outline of a chronological trajectory of the construction of these monuments.
So these monuments weren't representing the burials of the whole community. It's very common. The first analysis in 1911 of the remains from Carrowkeel said most individuals were around 25, sometimes women younger than men as an average age of death.
So we had to go up in the middle of the night to use these techniques. So it was really just us, the bones of the dead, ,, so this very wonderful, but slightly eerie, experience up at Carrowkeel. This is the monument.
So these monuments weren't representing the burials of the whole community. Again, another brilliant part of the project, we have done ancient DNA-- aDNA-- analysis on eight individuals from Carrowkeel.