Querns & Crannogs

The tiny islands poking above the blue waters of Lough Gara in Ireland's County Roscommon appeared to be useless lumps of land. No one bothered with them, except an occasional moonshiner who went over in the dark of the moon to turn out his poteen in peace.

Last summer a drainage project dropped the water level in the shallow lake and 112 more islands popped into sight. None was more than 100 ft. in diameter and not until last month did any seem worthy of attention. Then the Resident Works Engineer stumbled on the remains of a Stone Age dugout canoe. Immediately he sent for Joseph Raftery, Keeper of Irish Antiquities at Dublin's National Museum.

Raftery recognized the "islands" for what they were--man-made crannogs, piles of stone ferried from the mainland by men of the New Stone Age and Late Bronze Age. Covered with a lattice of logs, they made a sturdy foundation for the lake dwellers' homes. In the peaty soil that now covers the crannogs, Raftery and his assistant have uncovered 17 dugout canoes beautifully hollowed from the solid trunks of great oaks. They have also found shards of undecorated pottery, axheads, a dagger, a chisel and other tools. They have dug up bronze ornaments, fragments of a Bronze Age trumpet and some well-preserved saddle querns, the primitive hand mills with which ancient man ground his grain.

The evidence he has gathered suggests to Archaeologist Raftery that the crannogs were inhabited at three separate times: by New Stone Age men around 2500 B.C., by Late Bronze Age men 2,000 years afterwards, and by a settlement of early Christians. Perhaps a sudden rise in the water level wiped out the first settlement. Perhaps a change in local conditions made the island dwellings with their connecting zigzag causeways unneccessary as refuges.

Raftery has found enough tools and the bones of enough domestic animals to feel sure that men who lived on Lough Gara were prosperous farmers. Not only could they mill flour, but they had also reached the stage of specialization of labor. A large deposit of 200 flake-cutting tools found in one spot suggests a village toolsmith's shop. One Bronze Age axhead is so finely, finished it might have been machine made.

The once-thriving Lough Gara crannogs, one of the largest concentrations of Stone Age lake dwellings in Europe, offer a field day to an Irish archaeologist. Now that the drainage project is finished, the lake level will remain constant. Raftery, whose work had only begun, can concentrate on filling in another page of his country's history.

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