What is recorded here

Half a mile east of the Boyne, beneath the grass and gravel of Knowth, a forgotten kitchen still holds its shape. Around 2300 BC, hands cut shallow pits, drove posts into the earth and lit a single hearth beside Tomb 1C. They broke or discarded nearly eighty beakers, some marked with cords and comb lines, until ceramic shards buried the place in a rectangular rain. The dead had already claimed the mound; the living returned beside them to eat, drink and remember.

Five concentrations of Beaker pottery, part of Eogan’s Phase 5 – Final Neolithic / Beaker complex dating to c. 2500 – c. 2200 BC (Eogan and Cleary 2017, 42) are recorded around Tomb 1C. This is Concentration D, which is SE of the entrance to the E tomb. It is a subrectangular area (dims 21m NE-SW; 12.5m NW-SE) with a humus that partly rises on to the primary slip from the great mound. It has one hearth and a few shallow pits and post-holes but no pattern can be discerned. As well as flints it produced c. 2000 small sherds of Beaker ware representing about 80 vessels but they were too fragmentary to provide profiles. About 280 sherds were decorated, mainly with incised lines of cord and comb decoration. (Eogan 1984, 286-304; Eogan and Roche 1997, 232-41). True location: ITM (699665, 773440) Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 06 November 2013. Amended: 17 September 2020 See the attached illustrations: _1 Cemetery plan from Knowth 6, Fig. 2:1 _2 Features at Concentration D from Knowth 2, Fig. 50

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