What is recorded here

Excavation is a shallow, subcircular pit in Kilkenny, cut through gravel and an old boundary ditch to hold discarded comb parts and antler shards from a workshop active around AD 1000. It lies within the grounds later occupied by the Bishop of Ossory’s palace, close enough to St Canice’s Cathedral that the making of everyday things and the keeping of sacred things shared one landscape. One grape pip preserved in the waste suggests the worker may have eaten while shaping bone, turning a medical fact into a human image: hands busy, mouth occupied, life continuing beside the church.

Within the grounds of the 14th-century palace for the Bishop of Ossory (KK019-026123-) and 22m N of the N transept of St Canice's Cathedral (KK019-026029-). An early medieval pit filled with waste from a bone and antler working workshop, uncovered in excavations (11E0157) (Ó Drisceoil 2011, www.excavations.ie; 2012, www.excavations.ie; 2013, www.excavations.ie, 2018). The subcircular pit (1.3m N-S x 1.6m E-W; D 0.67m) cut the backfilled outer fosse associated with the ecclesiastical enclosure (KK019-026231-) and the natural gravel subsoil. It was filled with off-cuts from bone and antler working, notably fragments of composite bone/antler combs (Dunleavy Class G) and 'pot-boiler' cobbles. A piece of antler from the pit was radiocarbon dated to AD 990-1155. Included in a diverse assemblage of charred archaeobotanical material were two grape-pips. One was radiocarbon dated to AD 1000-1155, in keeping with the other related dates. The other pit was, however, dated to the Iron Age, 365-60 BC. What might be the workshop building that produced the waste material was identified in geophysical surveys of the lawn to the NW of the Bishop's Palace 10m to the N of the pit (Earthsound 2005, 7). Around 75% of the contents of the pit were excavated but the remainder was preserved in situ. See attached photograph. Compiled by: Cóilín Ó Drisceoil Date of upload: 11 November 2020

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