Cist, Ballyconnell, Co. Wicklow

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Burial Sites

Cist, Ballyconnell, Co. Wicklow

On a gentle north-facing slope at Ballyconnell in County Wicklow, a small stone-lined grave held a cremation burial that had been sealed in a deliberate and careful way: an encrusted urn, placed upside down directly over the remains.

That inversion was not accidental. In Bronze Age burial practice, pottery vessels were commonly set mouth-downward over cremated bone, functioning as a kind of protective cover rather than a container in the conventional sense.

The grave itself is what archaeologists call a short cist, a box-like structure made from a few upright slabs and a capstone, just large enough to hold a crouched inhumation or, as here, a deposit of cremated bone. The urn recovered from the site is catalogued in the National Museum of Ireland (NMI 1956-1, 2), which places its formal recording in the mid-twentieth century. The find is noted in scholarship by Ríordáin (1955) and later by Waddell in his 1990 survey of Irish Bronze Age burial traditions. Encrusted ware is a distinctive ceramic type of the Irish Earlier Bronze Age, typically decorated with raised, applied ornament, and its presence alongside cremation is a recognisable pattern across the country, though each individual find carries its own quiet particularity.

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