Burial, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Burial Sites
Beneath the floor of a small stone house on the island of Inis Gé Thuaidh, off the coast of Mayo, someone was buried inside the walls where people lived.
That detail alone sets this find apart. Burial beneath a domestic floor is not a common feature of early medieval Irish archaeology, and finding two such burials in close proximity, one layered above the other, makes the arrangement stranger still.
The burial came to light in 1938 when the French art historian and archaeologist Françoise Henry excavated the house, a single-room structure sitting on the Bailey Mór mound. Henry's 1945 publication recorded the skeletal remains as including the skull, ribs, and arm bones, oriented roughly east to west with the head placed to the west. The lower half of the skeleton was absent, most likely disturbed when the house itself was built over the grave. Just 0.3 metres below this burial, and at a slightly different orientation, lay a second skeleton, suggesting that the same corner of the floor held more than one interment, placed at separate moments or by separate hands. The east to west orientation, with the head to the west, follows a pattern associated with Christian burial practice, where the body was laid to face the rising sun at the resurrection, though the intimacy of the domestic setting complicates any tidy explanation.