Episode 2 Taisce Shean Uladh - Treasures of Ancient Ulster

BIRDS TWEET

BIRDS TWEET

The horn was modelled on a cow's horn and deliberately sold

because the bull was a cult animal in ancient Ireland.

And of course one of the great tales that's associated,

especially with the north of Ireland,

the Cattle Raid of Cooley, Tain Bo Cuailnge,

centres on the Brown Bull of Cooley

and the White Bull of Connacht.

And these are magical bulls.

The metalworkers here actually made this horn. How good were they?

They were of the very, very highest order.

These objects have been replicated in modern times by metalsmiths

and they have found them extremely challenging.

The metalsmiths who made these objects were absolutely

among the best bronze casters of their time and indeed of any time.

First of all, in terms of the technical difficulties

in making this object, there are considerable problems to be overcome.

You have to align a central clay core and two outside clay moulds.

They have to be positioned exactly right,

the temperature of the mould has to be kept at a certain standard

during the pouring. There's a hundred things can go wrong.

So these smiths knew exactly what they were at.

How valuable an object is this?

I think these objects,

in terms of the technical mastery that they display,

and indeed their artistic merits, really places them

at the very, very forefront of the later Bronze Age in Ireland.

They are true masterpieces.

We have to think of the late Bronze Age as a very international period.

The higher echelons of society across Europe or across much of Europe

seem to have been in close contact.

Warfare on the one hand, feasting on the other.

Both of these important significant pursuits of the higher echelons

of late Bronze Age society.

Tell me about these objects and why they're of particular significance.

The main significance of this find is the combination of

a locally-manufactured sword with an imported bronze bowl or bronze cup

of a type that was quite common in central Europe.

Having this imported metal vessel, metal drinking cup,

which clearly is not an every day item but a piece of

feasting equipment here in Northern Ireland,

that is something really significant.

So the bowl is European and the sword is of Irish design?

Ireland received a lot of ideas from the rest of Europe

which were taken up and used to manufacture objects

with a specifically Irish twist to them, like this sword.

The basic design idea though, that is very much pan-European,

first introduced in central Europe

a couple of centuries before this particular piece was manufactured,

so in a way this is an Irish variation on a pan-European theme.

Eileen, I'm conscious of the fact I'm looking here at an individual

whose life experience was very, very different from my life experience.

What do we know about him?

Well, we know we've got an adult male.

He's about 4,000 years old,

so he dates to about 2,000 BC which is the early Bronze Age,

and he comes from Rathlin Island, so it's a part of the island called

Church Bay which is where most of the modern islanders would

still live today.

So he would've been about 5'11" in height and he would've been a fairly

imposing person, he's quite well built, his bones are quite robust.

So he's about 40 to 60 years of age. So a big sturdy, elderly man.

His teeth...

Last time I saw my teeth they weren't in as good a state as that

and he's comparable in age to me.

Teeth are another way that we can tell the age of a skeleton,

and just from looking at his teeth they would suggest he's in his 20s.

But the more reliable indicators in his bones definitely tell us

he was an older man.

He probably had quite an active life cos he had bits of arthritis

on his spine and he also had some arthritis around his shoulder joint.

So you can see the little bits of bone growth, the little lips.

Oh, yes, I see.

I suppose the most obvious injury that he had was down in his ankle.

So you can see in this bone it's quite depressed

and sort of uneven in appearance.

And then if I show you the opposite bone...

It's quite clear when you see them like that.

When you see them together.

So erm, this is the back of your foot, you know, your heel.

So we think he must have had some sort of soft tissue injury

maybe to his Achilles tendon at some stage during his life.

When he was found was he laid out like this?

No, he was buried in what's called a cist.

A very typical funerary monument for that time.

It's basically like a stone box with a big lid on top of it.

You can imagine he had to be sort of squeezed inside the box

and in a crouched position with his legs drawn up towards his chest

and his arms up towards his chest.

And then they would've put this pot in beside him at his head.

So this would've been like a funerary gift

that was put into the cist with him.

There are fingernail marks here and I can... Good lord.

I can actually put my fingernail into the fingernail marks

of somebody who did that 4,000 years ago.

It's wonderful.

Just looking at their funerary context

and the associated grave goods,

you can empathise with the people in the past

and you can imagine they were part of a community.

And you can sort of imagine that people looked after them

and there was a degree of care and support in their life.

Because he was laid out carefully in a particular position

and then they gave him a grave good, a gift, you know, for the afterlife.

He was part of a community.

Maybe he was a father, a brother, maybe he had children.

It's only natural to empathise and imagine and wonder

what life would've been like for this person 4,000 years ago.

We have to remember that in the Bronze Age

rituals were very important.

People wanted to make sure that the crops would grow, to prevent evil,

to bring good luck.

And perhaps what we can imagine is that the chieftain

or leaders at Haughey's Fort perhaps under pressure

from the local population were forced into making a series of

ritual sacrifices.

And what we imagine might have happened is that on occasions

sacrifices and offerings were placed into watery pools

and on occasions they might have even been human sacrifice.

This is the skull of the young man who was found at the King's Stables.

How old is he?

He would've lived in Armagh some time around 3,000 years ago.

And if we look at this skull,

what does it tell us about the way he died?

One of the most obvious things

when you look at the skull is it's not intact.

In fact, most of the back of the head seemed to have been removed.

I suppose there is a slight chance that this happened accidentally,

but there is an alternative explanation that this was

a deliberate cut mark perhaps made by a Bronze Age sword,

and I'd be pretty certain that a sword or an axe would've had

the power to cleave off part of the skull.

I think we're looking at a human sacrifice.