Just six miles from the center of Belfast, County Down, on the
plateau of Ballynahatty above the River Lagan, is one of
Ireland’s great Neolithic henge monuments: the 200 m wide
Giant’s Ring. For over a thousand years, this area was the focus
of intense funerary ritual seemingly designed to send the dead to
their ancestors and secure the land for the living. Scattered
through the fields to the north and west of the Ring are flat
cemeteries, standing stones, tombs, cists, and ring barrows –
ancient monuments that were leveled by the plough when the land was
enclosed in the 18th and 19th centuries. A great 90 m long timber
enclosure with an elaborate entrance and inner ‘temple’ was
first observed through crop marks in aerial photos. Excavation of
the site between 1990–1999 revealed a complex structure composed
of over 400 postholes, many over 2 m deep. This was a building in
the grand style, elegantly designed to control space, views, and
access to an inner sanctum containing a platform for exposure of
the dead. By 2550 BC, the timber ‘temple’ had been swept away
in a massive conflagration and the remains dismantled. Ballynahatty
was one of the last great public ceremonial enterprises known to
have been constructed by the Neolithic farmers in Northern Ireland,
an enterprise proclaiming their enigmatic religion, ancestral
rights and territorial aspirations. This report reconstructs the
remarkable building complex and explains the sophistication and
organization of its construction and use. The report sets the site
and excavation in the wider development of the Ballynahatty
landscape and its study to the present day.
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