In 1952, Professor Seán P. Ó Ríordáin from UCD began a re-examination of Ráith na Senad, a complex multi-vallate enclosure from the Iron Age and early centuries AD, that had been crudely trenched by a group associated with the British Israelites in a vain search of the Ark of the Covenant at the turn of the twentieth century. He continued in 1953 and, following a break in 1954, turned his attention to the nearby Duma na nGiall (Mound of the Hostages) in 1955. Although the expected earthen mound proved to be no more than a one-metre thick mantle of soil overlying a cairn, the excavators encountered a variety of Early Bronze Age burials in this mantle. In the 1956 season, however, they confirmed the existence of a megalithic tomb within the cairn and began examining its entrance area. The Mound of the Hostages proved to be a passage tomb containing arguably the riches collection of human bone and funerary artefacts known from any megalithic tomb in Europe. It was constructed in the centuries before 3,000 BC and continued in use until about the 17th century BC. By then, it is likely that the ritual landscape of Tara was already well established, although the vast majority of the earthworks we see on the hilltop today were constructed later.
Tragedy struck the Tara excavation programme in the autumn of 1956 when Professor Ó Ríordáin, still in his early fifties, became seriously ill. He died in April 1957 and it was Ruaidhrí de Valera, his successor as Professor of Archaeology in UCD, who completed the excavations at Duma na nGiall in a long final season during the summer of 1959. De Valera, however, had his own research agenda and he appears to have encouraged his research students to focus on aspects of the Tara evidence while he published a succession of major catalogues and interpretative papers on court tombs. By the time of his own sudden death from a heart attack in 1978, some of the pottery and other artefacts from Duma na nGiall had appeared in catalogues by Rhoda Kavanagh and Michael Herity, but the results of the excavations were not addressed comprehensively.
Following a concerted effort since the late 1980s, the definitive account of the Mound of the Hostages was published in (opens in a new window)Muiris O’Sullivan’s Wordwell monograph in 2005. An exhibition based on the volume is available from the links on the right hand side of this page and a second, edited volume is currently underway, in which the wider context and implications of the excavation results will be discussed by invited specialists.
