Palynological Project - Chancellorsland Study

This study was specifically commissioned to help with the reconstruction of the prehistoric environment in which the Bronze Age people lived at Chancellorsland, Co. Tipperary (see The Ballyhoura Hills Project).

The Discovery Programme's excavations at Chancellorsland have shown that people lived there during the Middle Bronze Age, from around 1500 BC to 1000 BC. The complex consists of a number of enclosures and a barrow-cemetery. The Bronze Age people lived in an oval-shaped enclosure, defined by a double-ditch, from which the pollen samples for this study were extracted.

The evidence from the pollen indicates that the site was constructed in a landscape that had already been cleared of much of its forest, even though evidence from the Bog of Cullen, about 4km north, shows that woodland cover was still considerable in the region as a whole at this time. Much of the land surrounding the Bronze Age settlement seems to have been under grass, with crop-cultivation playing an important role in the local farming economy. Later on, however, the evidence for cereal-growing decreases and instead, the farming economy seems to have shifted to one based primarily on livestock. There is also less pollen from the sort of plants that tend to grow in disturbed habitats, which might indicate less human activity on the site during the later phases of occupation

Principle Investigator: Dr. Karen Molloy