Irish museums do not have the facilities to cope with the large number of excavations being carried out as part of the development boom, according to a report published yesterday.
An estimated 4,000 archaeological excavations have remained unpublished and the volume of material retrieved by development-led excavation is overwhelming storage and management, the report says.
Archaeology 2020: Repositioning Irish Archaeology in the Knowledge Society is written by UCD school of archaeology. On average a previously unrecorded site is discovered every two kilometres on infrastructural routes and more than 2,000 archaeological excavations are being carried out each year, it notes.
In the 1970s there were less than 100 a year and in 1992 there were 200. Planning legislation requires developers to engage archaeologists to undertake pre-construction excavations and almost all excavations in the Republic are now carried out in response to development, the report says.
A technical report on the information is sent to the Department of the Environment and the National Museum of Ireland, but the 1,000 archaeologists now working around the State no longer have the time to fully evaluate and publish their findings, it adds.
Prof Gabriel Cooney, one of the report's authors, said the profession hadn't managed to get across how stunning the material was that was being uncovered.
"For example, the sheer number of Bronze Age sites with hot-stone technology [used for cooking] being uncovered suggests that the population at the time [1,500 to 500 BC] is greater than we thought," he said.
"We estimated a population of half a million, but these finds suggest we may be talking about one million people living in Ireland at the time."
He said that a change of mindset was required to shift the focus in archaeology in the Republic from information generation to knowledge creation. Recommendations in the report include the establishment of a bureau for archaeological publication and an interinstitutional collaborative funding system.
