This article ran on the New York Times website 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. 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.
--Continues-->
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/travel/CEIDE.html
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com