Just six miles from the center of Belfast, County Down, on the plateau of Ballynahatty above the River Lagan, is one of Ireland’s great Neolithic henge monuments: the 200 m wide Giant’s Ring. For over a thousand years, this area was the focus of intense funerary ritual seemingly designed to send the dead to their ancestors and secure the land for the living. Scattered through the fields to the north and west of the Ring are flat cemeteries, standing stones, tombs, cists, and ring barrows – ancient monuments that were leveled by the plough when the land was enclosed in the 18th and 19th centuries.
A great 90 m long timber enclosure with an elaborate entrance and inner ‘temple’ was first observed through crop marks in aerial photos. Excavation of the site between 1990–1999 revealed a complex structure composed of over 400 postholes, many over 2 m deep. This was a building in the grand style, elegantly designed to control space, views, and access to an inner sanctum containing a platform for exposure of the dead.

By 2550 BC, the timber ‘temple’ had been swept away in a massive conflagration and the remains dismantled. Ballynahatty was one of the last great public ceremonial enterprises known to have been constructed by the Neolithic farmers in Northern Ireland, an enterprise proclaiming their enigmatic religion, ancestral rights and territorial aspirations.

This report reconstructs the remarkable building complex and explains the sophistication and organization of its construction and use. The report sets the site and excavation in the wider development of the Ballynahatty landscape and its study to the present day.

• Cover page
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1: THE BALLYNAHATTY LANDSCAPE
  • 1. The landscape and historical research
    • 1.1 Introduction, geology and topography of the complex
    • 1.2 Historical overview of Ballynahatty and the Giant’s Ring
      • 1.2.1 Antiquarian study
      • 1.2.2 The 1855 tomb
      • 1.2.3 The later 19th-century landscape
    • 1.3 Archaeological investigations in the earlier 20th century
      • 1.3.1 H.C. Lawlor 1917: Giant’s Ring bank, interior and megalith
      • 1.3.2 D.A. Chart 1929: cropmark within the Giant’s Ring
      • 1.3.3 A.E.P. Collins 1954: Giant’s Ring bank and megalith
    • 1.4 The later 20th century: BNH
  • 2. Archaeological surveys
    • 2.1 Aerial photography
      • 2.1.1 Historical imagery
      • 2.1.2 Archaeological aerial survey, 1984–2018
    • 2.2 Geophysical surveys
    • 2.3 Stray finds
      • 2.3.1 The Ulster Museum
      • 2.3.2 The National Museum of Ireland
      • 2.3.3 The excavations
      • 2.3.4 Field collection
  • 3. Environmental history of the Ballynahatty area (Gill Plunkett)
    • 3.1 Introduction
    • 3.2 The Ballynahatty vegetation sequence
      • 3.2.1 The early post-glacial period
      • 3.2.2 Mesolithic
      • 3.2.3 Neolithic
      • 3.2.4 Bronze Age
    • 3.3 Discussion
  • 4. Cumulative interpretation landscape map
    • 4.1 The wider Ballynahatty landscape
• PART 2: THE EXCAVATIONS 1990–2000
  • 5. Ballynahatty 5 and 6: excavating the enclosures
    • 5.1 Overview
    • 5.2 Passage Tomb related chamber and deposits of cremated remains
    • 5.3 Cremation deposits and pit
    • 5.4 The timber circle (BNH6)
      • 5.4.1 Four-Poster setting
      • 5.4.2 Central structure
      • 5.4.3 BNH6 Inner and Outer Ring
      • 5.4.4 The entrance to BNH
      • 5.4.5 Eastern Setting (ES)
    • 5.5 Outer Enclosure (BNH5): feature analysis
      • 5.5.1 Overall shape and extent
      • 5.5.2 The entrance structure to BNH
      • 5.5.3 North–South postholes (NS)
    • 5.6 The Annexe area
      • 5.6.1 Northern East–West postholes (NEW)
      • 5.6.2 West–North–West postholes (WNW)
      • 5.6.3 Outer Façade and entrance (IF, MF, OF)
      • 5.6.4 Southern East–West postholes (SEW)
      • 5.6.5 The Entrance Chamber
    • 5.7 Early medieval period
    • 5.8 A note on the archaeobotanical remains from excavated soil samples
      • 5.8.1 Phase 1a
      • 5.8.2 Phase 1b
      • 5.8.3 Phase
      • 5.8.4 Phase 4
      • 5.8.5 Early medieval period
      • 5.8.6 Discussion
  • 6. The pottery
    • 6.1 Introduction
    • 6.2 The distribution of the pottery at Ballynahatty
      • 6.2.1 Topsoil and ploughsoil (contexts C1 and C2)
      • 6.2.2 Features and contexts
      • 6.2.3 Interpretation of the pottery distribution
    • 6.3 Pottery traditions present at Ballynahatty
      • 6.3.1 Carinated Bowl pottery
      • 6.3.2 Early to Middle Neolithic ‘Globular Bowl’ pottery
      • 6.3.3 Middle Neolithic Coarse Ware
      • 6.3.4 Grooved Ware
      • 6.3.5 Early Bronze Age pottery
  • 7. The lithic assemblage: chipped stone (Eiméar Nelis, abridged by Caroline Malone)
    • 7.1 Introduction
    • 7.2 Composition: flint and non-flint
      • 7.2.1 The flint assemblage
      • 7.2.2 Primary technology
      • 7.2.3 Secondary technology
    • 7.3 The distribution of the lithics
      • 7.3.1 Topsoil and ploughsoil assemblage
      • 7.3.2 Feature and context assemblage
      • 7.3.3 Discussion of the distribution of the lithic assemblage
    • 7.4 Summary and discussion
  • 8. Other artefacts from the excavation
    • 8.1 Introduction
    • 8.2 Distribution
    • 8.3 Selected artefacts
      • 8.3.1 Stone axeheads
      • 8.3.2 Stone ‘balls’, possibly hammerstones, plus quartz pebble hammerstone
      • 8.3.3 Fragment of Arran pitchstone
      • 8.3.4 Possible chisel
      • 8.3.5 Beads
      • 8.3.6 Possible bead of lignite
  • 9. Human remains from excavations at Ballynahatty (Eileen Murphy)
    • 9.1 Cremated bone from excavations at Ballynahatty 5 and
      • 9.1.1 Deposits of cremated remains
      • 9.1.2 Identifiable burnt bone (including burnt animal bone) from other contexts
      • 9.1.3 Overall conclusions
    • 9.2 Human remains from the 1855 tomb: a re-evaluation
      • 9.2.1 Cremated bone
      • 9.2.2 Unburnt bone: Chamber D
  • 10. Dating and chronology (Rowan McLaughlin)
    • 10.1 Introduction
    • 10.2 Potential problems with radiocarbon dates
    • 10.3 Methods and modelling approach
    • 10.4 Ballynahatty radiocarbon dates
    • 10.5 Radiocarbon dates from comparable Irish sites
    • 10.6 Discussion
      • 10.6.1 Early activity
      • 10.6.2 Late Neolithic Ballynahatty
      • 10.6.3 Later activity
    • 10.7 Conclusions
• PART 3: WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
  • 11. Interpreting the excavation results in the wider context of prehistoric Ballynahatty
    • 11.1 Introduction
    • 11.2 Early and Early to Middle Neolithic activity
      • 11.2.1 Middle Neolithic activity
    • 11.3 Late Neolithic activity: the timber enclosures BNH5 and BNH
    • 11.4 Early Bronze Age activity
    • 11.5 Early medieval activity
    • 11.6 Further consideration of the Late Neolithic timber monument complex
      • 11.6.1 The scale of construction
      • 11.6.2 Working to plan: Phasing the build
      • 11.6.3 Phase 1a BNH6: the planning and sequence of construction
      • 11.6.4 Phase 1b BNH5: enclosing the enclosure
      • 11.6.5 Phases 2 and 3, Annexe and entrance: impress and control
      • 11.6.6 Phase 4: destruction and removal or conversion and preservation?
      • 11.6.7 What do the artefacts tell us?
    • 11.7 Relationship between the timber monument complex and the Giant’s Ring
    • 11.8 Relationship with other Irish timber circles, and with ‘square-in-circle’ structures in Britain
      • 11.8.1 The Brú na Bóinne connection
    • 11.9 The Ballynahatty timber monument complex: what was it all for?
  • 12. Digitally recreating Ballynahatty and simulating astronomical alignments in Irish timber circles (R.P. Barrett)
    • 12.1 Introduction
    • 12.2 3D approximation: in situ elements
    • 12.3 3D approximation: hypothetical elements
    • 12.4 Astronomical simulation: from sites to data
    • 12.5 Astronomical simulation: results
    • 12.6 Conclusions
  • 13. The Ballynahatty landscape – past, present and future
    • 13.1 Introduction
    • 13.2 A short walk in the Neolithic
    • 13.3 Ballynahatty’s archaeology in the more recent past
      • 13.3.1 No room for the ancients: the tenant farmer
      • 13.3.2 The Dungannons: owning the land. The intervention of antiquaries
      • 13.3.3 Cultural awakening: an intellectual puzzle
      • 13.3.4 20th century: excavation
      • 13.3.5 The 21st century: old problems, new solution
    • 13.4 Ballynahatty, the future: outstanding research questions
• Bibliography
• Index