This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list.
Surnames: Caulfield
Classification: Query
Message Board URL:
http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/4II.2ACIB/154
Message Board Post:
If you're on the mailing list, you might get this a second time. But wanted to post it
to the Web site, too. This article ran on the New York Times online today, originally from
July 2001 edition. Anyone know of, or related to, the Caulfields at the center of this
story? If you're a history, archaeology, or poetry geek, you'll want to read this.
If you're looking for a relative from Mayo, as a lot of the folks posting to this
board seem to be doing, you'll want to know about this. First four grafs of article
below, with link to story.
HED: A Pompeii in Slow Motion
ON the boggy coastal moors of County Mayo in northwest Ireland lies one of the largest
Stone Age sites in the world — though it might not seem obvious at first glance.
It isn't that Ceide Fields, a sprawling Neolithic community of farms, houses and
tombs, has been destroyed or dismantled in the 5,500 years since it was built. In fact,
much of the ancient, enclosed settlement has been perfectly preserved, thanks to the bog
that began to encroach some five millenniums ago and slowly enveloped every structure.
The site's lead archaeologist, Seamus Caulfield, of University College, Dublin, has
likened this phenomenon to "a slow-motion Pompeii." While the bog's sudden
and inexorable expansion forced Ceide Fields' residents to move away, it also kept a
good number of the buildings and objects they used safely submerged beneath what is today
a seven-foot layer of marshy earth.
The Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney evoked the discovery of North Mayo's
buried archaeological treasures in his 1975 poem "Belderg": "When he
stripped off blanket bog/ the soft-piled centuries/ fell open . . ." Heaney wrote the
poem after an inspiring visit with the local schoolteacher Patrick Caulfield, the father
of the archaeologist Seamus Caulfield. In the 1930's the elder Caulfield realized that
his neighbors, while cutting and drying bog turf into peat (Ireland's traditional
fuel), were
hitting deep-lying, patterned walls of stones. He rightly surmised that these walls had to
be many thousands of years old, since it would have taken that long for such thick bog to
accumulate.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/travel/CEIDE.html