The Discovery Programme

The remains of insects found in archaeological contexts are studied firstly in their own right and secondly as evidence for the environmental conditions in which they originally lived. Both sorts of evidence can be very useful for archaeological reconstructions.  As Dr Nicki Whitehouse has written:

Insects potentially provide one of the most effective means of reconstructing both past environments and the details of changing climate, being very sensitive to environmental change and occupying almost every type of habitat on land and freshwater.  Their diversity enables them to be utilized as proxy data for a wide variety of habitats and climatic conditions…  As a group, their remains may be the most frequent identifiable fossils in terrestrial, waterlogged sediments and they are similarly common in anaerobic [non-oxygenated] archaeological sediments.
(Murphy and Whitehouse 2007, 136)

The foundations of this study were established in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s but, for a variety of reasons and despite some important exceptions, it is relatively new and still comparatively rare in Irish archaeology.

Some insects such as beetles (of which there are about 3,000 different species found in Ireland) are particularly suited to this study as their diagnostic exoskeletons [i.e. their skeletons are on their outsides] are robust and survive well in waterlogged deposits. However other species are also useful, such as ‘non-biting midges, bees, flies, ants, and human and animal parasites (lice and fleas).  As habitats are often particular to distinct types of insect, finds of multiples of differing insects can help to refine what the original environment in which they were living may have been like.

A good example of this type or research was carried out as part of the Discovery Programme’s Lake Settlement Project (see pages in Research section) at the Ballywillin Crannog on Lough Kinale.   The results of that research have been summarized by Dr Nicki Whitehouse:

The work included, amongst other approaches, the analysis of both fossil beetles and chironimids [midges].  The environmental record recovered covers the period from the construction of the crannog, c. cal. AD 640 and possibly up to the eighteenth century.  A lake core was taken 10 cm from the outside of the palisade of the crannog and analysed, alongside other proxies, for its chironimid midge fauna.  Although the crannog itself was not excavated, the work was able to highlight periods of more versus less intense activity and provided a good indication of the beginning of activity on the crannog.  The results showed how levels of activity associated with the crannog caused increased eutrophication [an increase of nutrients and hence of plants, ultimately reducing levels of oxygen in the water and hence killing off animal life] of the lake, especially from about cal.AD 1180, but that c. cal. AD 1330 activity became less intense, when the site may have been used for storage…  Coleoptera [beetles] found in plant macrosfossil samples from the same core were analysed.  Although not especially numerous, the fossil beetle fauna showed an increase in diversity after cal. AD 620, as a result of deposition of plant and dung material close to the site, interpreted as being associated with crannog construction.  After about cal. AD 900, the material included culture-favoured taxa [types of living things] typical of material associated with floor material and vegetable debris, including a common species associated with hay…
(Murphy and Whitehouse 2007, 154)