Old Irish

While total war flames around Eire, Irish archeologists have peacefully dug into their country's prehistory. In 1934 some 30 excavation projects were set going by the Irish Government, to make work for laborers as well as to illuminate Eire's antiquity. Last week, with the 1940 season wound up at Lough Gur in County Limerick, word came from there that a continuous chain of human habitations had been traced back--through the Norman and Viking invasions, through the Bronze Age to the Stone Age--to the oldest known village site in Eire. It was dated at 2400 B.C.

Trophies at Lough Gur came from all ages: stone axes, flint weapons and tools, a bronze bracelet and bronze pins, bone combs, glass beads, hand mills for grinding grain, whetstones, Viking silver, and, according to the diggers, the finest ceremonial circle of druid stones in Eire. In charge were Professor Sean P. O'Riordain of Cork's University College and his assistant lecturer, Miss Caitriona MacLeod, a witty and personable young woman who speaks and dances Gaelic. A typical Stone Age house which they unearthed, 32 feet long by 18 wide, had walls of stone and wood, a thatched roof supported by rows, of wooden posts, a long living room with a fireplace and aisles off the side for sleeping.

Bronze Age pottery discovered at Lough Gur is the first direct evidence in Eire of the archeologically famed "Beaker people," so named for the drinking vessels which they buried with their dead. Some archeologists believe the tall, husky, brachycephalic (roundheaded) Beaker people came into Europe from the steppes of southern Russia, where burials resembling the Beaker graves have been found.

But the earliest known inhabitants of Ireland were people from Spain and some wanderers from northeastern Europe. The old Irish were smart. They worked metals a long time before the Stone Age ended in Britain.

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