Popular magazine focuses on early farming

My research features in the current edition (Winter 2016) of the popular RTE magazine, Ear to The Ground. The television show of the same name has been broadcast in Ireland for many years, exploring issues of interest to Irish farmers and their families. The magazine delves further into some of the issues raised during the television broadcasts, as well as highlighting farming news stories.

A researcher from the magazine was interested in finding out how and when farming arrived and spread across Ireland, eventually becoming a new way of life. Much of the article, entitled "Ireland's first farmers" (pages 120-122), is based upon an interview with me, where I explained my research findings.

An extract from the article:
The earliest farmers practised mixed farming. They cleared forests to graze their animals, chose sheltered locations and lived in isolated settlements, for the most part. We know this because these early farmers’ remains are occasionally discovered and excavated by archaeologists. Meriel McClatchie is an assistant professor at the UCD School of Archaeology and also the director of the Ancient Foods Research Group, which explores the foods eaten by our ancestors from as early as the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers; she explains how various excavations have helped to create a pretty good picture of the early farmers’ lifestyle.

"What we find on a lot of excavations of the early farmers is actual food remains, such as animal bones, which tell us the types of animals these people were eating; we’re finding bones that suggest they were raising cattle, sheep and pigs,” she says. “Then we find little tiny burnt seeds, which are the crops – what happens is if the crops come into contact with fire and become charred then they can survive in the ground for thousands of years – and we can reconstruct what the first farmers were eating: wheat, particularly, and barley, but it was an older type of wheat, emmer wheat, the earliest wheat. Oat and rye are much later introductions to Ireland – they only came in roughly 2,000 years ago. They were producing crops on a sustainable level for themselves.”

Another extract:

“What we see in Ireland from the very beginning of farming is that they were growing wheat and barley, they were raising animals but not just for meat; we know that they were producing dairy products as well. They were also making pottery vessels for the first time too. So we have built up a very nice picture of what people were eating and how they were farming,” says Meriel.

For more, you will have to buy the magazine! You can also read more about this topic in my recent collaborative paper in the academic journal, Antiquity.

McClatchie Meriel, Bogaard Amy, Colledge Sue, Whitehouse Nicki J., Schulting Rick J., Barratt Philip, McLaughlin T. Rowan (2016) Farming and foraging in Neolithic Ireland: an archaeobotanical perspective. Antiquity 90(350), 302–318.