The Bronze Age in Ireland

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ion or political organization during the Bronze Age do not exist; and even the ethnological affinities of the dominant race that inhabited Ireland during this period are doubtful. All that can be said is that there was apparently no gap betwe

ounded with difficulty; such evidence as there is points to cremation having been practised early, as was also the

, a burnt interment was discovered in a cist, the remains being associated with a wrist-bracer and remains of pottery.[2] In the fine series of cairns on Carrowkeel Mountain, County Sligo, burnt and unburnt intermen

Continent. ?gean and Scandinavian influences can be detected in the great tumuli of the New Grange group[5]; and Iberian influence is discernible in some of the later types of bronze implements. Ireland, as will be shown in the chapters dealing directly with the gold objects, was, during the Bronze Age, a kind of western El Dorado, owing to her great richness in gold; Irish gold ornaments have been found both on the Continent and in Scandinavia; while Scan

ined a certain fixed form. What the actual dwellings occupied by the people were we cannot say; but it is probable that many of the promontory-forts and some at least

gy of the Ir

s the general trend of advance and culture. The doyen of prehistoric arch?ology, Dr. Oscar Montelius, of Stockholm, has been the pioneer of the study of the prehistoric chronology of Europe, his chronology of the Bronze Age in Scandinavia having been published as far back as 1885. Since then he has published the results of his studies of the Bronze-Age chronologie

of the Irish Bronze Age into five periods may be accepted, we should hardly care to place the first period as early as Dr. Montelius suggests; and without going into the question of the time at which the period commenced, we might take the period of its ending at from about 2000-1800 b.c. In this period would be

d made use of in prehistoric times-was used for making ornaments at this period, or possibly, as Prof. Gowland suggests, may have been hammered into or

included, as the principal types, the flat bronze celts-including those with the edge much wider than the blade-flanged celts, small bro

ncipal types falling within it are flanged celts with stop-ridges, tang

ves), and some of the earlier forms of socketed celts, long rapiers, the earlier type of leaf-shaped swords, and the looped and leaf-shaped spear-heads, gold torcs, and possibly some of the bronze fibul?, and sickles withou

e swords with notches below the blades, bronze sword-chapes, the socketed sickles, probably some of the more highly ornamented bronze spears with apertures in the blades, the bronze trumpets, the gold fibul?, and gold gorgets. It must be remembered that the Continental Hallstatt period is not a