US archaeology team using drones to examine historic Westmeath sites

An American research team which has been analysing drone photographs of three archaeological sites in Westmeath in a bid to see how the medieval Irish lived has announced it intends to continue and expand the work.

Last October, archaeologists Dr Vicky McAlister, of Southeast Missouri State University – who is from County Down – and Dr Jenny Immich of the City of Boulder University, arranged to have high-quality drone footage taken to facilitate in-depth study of the lands surrounding Fore, Kilbixy and Kilmacahill (near Rathaspick), all locations known to have monastic or/and castle ruins.

“There’s a lot going on in this landscape,” Dr Immich said this week, explaining that while aerial shots of the site at Rathaspic show a lot of enclosures and field boundaries of interest from a historical perspective, the drone footage they have obtained shows even more, while the use of multispectral imagery is providing evidence that could be indicative of other architectural or archaeological features.

Their works to date have led them to wonder, Dr Immich explained, if some of the features registering may be indications that the site at Kilmacahill may have included an early type of Anglo Norman castle.

It is already known that Kilmacahill was home to a medieval settlement and, the two believe, a medieval nunnery.

Since they have just recently received the data, the researchers have not yet begun analysing the material relating to Kilbixy and Fore, but already they are very excited at what their Kilmacahill material is showing and thanks to a grant they have just received, they are planning to carry out more thorough analysis.

“We want to continue analysis of the landscape with additional topographic processes and methodologies,” Dr Immich said.

Drs Immich and McAlister are principal investigators on HELM (Human Environmental Exchanges in the Landscape of Mediaeval Ireland), which started in 2017 by examining four Anglo-Norman sites in the Tipperary and Limerick area, before last year adding the three Westmeath sites to their investigation.

At an online seminar last Monday hosted by the University of Boulder, Colorado, they explained that specialist GIS and 3D software is being used to identify signs of settlements that would have existed in the vicinity of castles or religious communities, in a bid to answer a problem question in Irish archaeology, which is where and how did the ‘ordinary’ people live in medieval Ireland.

Stated Dr McAlister: “We hypothesised that peasant settlements could be found clustered around castle sites, mediaeval parish churches, and mediaeval monastic sites.”

Their researches in Tipperary and Limerick found the techniques they were using did show some evidence that that was the case and Dr Immich explained that examining the models they have been able to derive from the drone shots, they are able to search for traces, under the grass, of what appear to be enclosures in the landscape, indicating the existence of fields and evidence of settlement.

Dr McAlister said that their researches in Tipperary showed “some highly organised and regular” land plots and that they were concentrated between the castles and parish church, indicating that the settlements of the peasants within the Norman-occupied parts of medieval Ireland did tend to cluster around these types of “high status buildings”.

She stated that the theory is that the Anglo Normans arrived in Ireland and apportioned out the land that they had seized into long narrow plots that could be used as an enticement to settlers from England.

A question the team hopes their Westmeath research will answer is whether Gaelic Irish sites differed from the planned-out Anglo-Norman settlements, and whether they were influenced by the Anglo-Norman systems. They also hope to be able to determine the extent to which the communities interacted.

Explaining why Westmeath was selected as the study area for the second phase of the HELM project, Dr McAlister stated that it was different from the area covered in the first phase as it was a western extreme of the area with the most Anglo-Norman influence.

Dr Immich said that HELM has been awarded a grant from Duke University that is to be used to recruit a number of US-based students who will spend this summer working on processing techniques to facilitate further analysis of the data collected in Westmeath to date.

Dr Immich revealed that the use of drones and geoanalytical software has led to the identification of some previously unknown, mediaeval archaeological sites and possibly other types of sites – but also provided insights into other areas of interest such as climate change and land use.

Dr McAlister and Dr Immich say that given the results they have obtained to date from their researches in Tipperary and Westmeath, they would like to keep the project going for at least another couple of years, and to extend its reach.

As part of their future research, they want to incorporate pollen analysis – examination of the biophysical material covering the surface of the earth – in order to discover more information about how the land was farmed – a subject not yet comprehensively studied in Ireland.

They explained that researchers from Queen’s University of Belfast are keen to work with them on the pollen analysis dimension.

Dr Immich explained that as part of their work, they intend extending their research to some sites near bogs, from which there should be a yield in terms of pollen analysis data.

The intention is that these would be located in proximity to the core sites.

She pointed out that the pollen samples would have dates from the Neolithic, to the mediaeval to the late mediaeval to the modern, and these would hopefully throw light on what was happening in the landscape during those different periods.