Assoc ProfessorNeil Carlin

My research is focused on the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Ireland and Britain in their European contexts. I am very interested in the ways in which people construct and negotiate their social relationships, identities and worldview through their everyday material engagement with their world, including the routine production, use and disposal of objects in specific places during this timeframe. I particularly enjoy problematising how archaeologists think about the past and identifying the ongoing legacy of previous approaches, especially relating to 'culture', identity, status, gender, migration, mobility, social relations and aDNA.

Enquiries from potential PhD students and post-doctoral researchers relating to any of these areas, especially the Neolithic or Bronze Age are very welcome.

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

'Project Radiocarbon' - Big Data, integrated cross-national heritage histories’ : this IRC-AHRC-funded project will provide the first transnational, open access, live-update and interactive map-based digital repository. Assembling and validating the radiocarbon (14C) data along with all their metadata from across the islands of Ireland and Britain within a sustainable and searchable archive that is accessible to academia, heritage bodies, practitioners and the public will safeguard the value of these radiocarbon dates for future research. The project will use these data to examine archaeological research across all periods and regions of the UK and Ireland and the management of the historic environment. It will also provide a sector-wide training legacy, and develop schools’ resources. We are supported in this work by our historic environment partners in national government, and national heritage agencies across the islands of Ireland and Britain.

'Third and fourth millennia Ireland and Britain: a history of Major social change Explored (TIME)': this AHRC-funded archaeology project comprises an international team of academics, museum staff, government and professional archaeologists and administrators which is being led by Dr Seren Griffiths (PI) in Manchester Metropolitan University. This research uses the latest radiocarbon dating techniques and complex mathematical modelling to produce a new high precision chronological sequence of events, - at a generational timescale or 3500-1500 BC in Britain and Ireland. This will allow us to come much closer to the human experience of change compared to the static centuries-long time-blocks that are usually imposed. This will challenge our understandings of how lives, practices, monuments and materials on these islands continued and changed over this 2,000-year period.


PREVIOUS RESEARCH PROJECTS

IRC Post-doctoral Fellowship - Understanding the Irish Late Neolithic: Grooved Ware in Context: From October 2012 to September 2014, I studied the depositional treatment of Grooved Ware and associated objects in Ireland to understand how and why these objects occur in the Irish archaeological record in the manner that they do. I used this information to characterise Late Neolithic ceremonial, settlement and funeral practices in Ireland. By applying the same ground-breaking methodology as my doctorate, I identified over 100 new Grooved Ware sites including 25 Late Neolithic timber circles, many of which were not previously recognised as such. Strong similarities between the architectural principles and depositional practices of passage tombs and Grooved Ware-associated monuments (particularly timber circles) were observed. My research demonstrates that the adoption of Grooved Ware in Ireland actually occurred as part of the Middle Neolithic passage tomb tradition and that there is much more continuity in practices between that period and the Late Neolithic than previously recognised.

PhD: A proper place for everything: the character and context of Beaker depositional practice in Ireland: My doctorate explored the introduction of a suite of novel material culture including the first metals (known collectively as the Beaker phenomenon) to Ireland at the beginning of the Bronze Age (2450-2050 BC). I provided a detailed account of how new (foreign) practices were incorporated into an Irish milieu, suggesting that increasing interest in external contacts was one of numerous gradual changes over the preceding Late Neolithic and that there was far less social upheaval than previously believed.