The Kingship and Landscape of Tara

Conor Newman

                                                    (photo courtesy of Eamon O’Donoghue)

This project started in 1992 with the launch of the Discovery Programme’s Tara Archaeological Survey (Conor Newman, Joe Fenwick and Kieron Goucher), and is now operated collaboratively between the Discovery Programme, NUI Galway and the Römisch-Germanische Kommission (Frankfurt). The research ranges from field survey (as new, non-invasive survey technologies become available they generate fresh data) to historical research and analysis of the kingship of Tara, the earliest chapters of which are filtered through the lens of mythology.
The current phase of research at Tara is drawing together surveys (geophysical, LiDar and photogrammetric) and analysis of the last eighteen years or so at Tara, and is headed up by Dr Roseanne Schot (Discovery Programme and formerly NUI Galway). The result will be a new book (2019) that will supercede the 1997 Tara. An Archaeological Survey (Discovery Programme & Royal Irish Academy).
A key aspect of the work carried out at NUI Galway concerns how the wider landscape of Tara was made into and used as a royal domain and theatre for the rituals associated with kingship.

Select publications relating to this project since 2005 include:

Edel Bhreathnach (ed.) The Kingship and Landscape of Tara (Dublin: 2005).

Conor Newman ‘Procession and symbolism at Tara: analysis of Tech Midchúarta (the ‘Banqueting Hall’) in the context of the sacral campus’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 26:4 (2007), 415-38.

Roseanne Schot, Conor Newman and Edel Bhreathnach (eds) Landscapes of Cult and Kingship (Dublin: 2011).

Conor Newman ‘In the way of development: Tara, the M3 and the Celtic Tiger’, in F. Dukelow and R. Meade (eds) Defining Events: Resistance and Identity in Twenty-first Century Ireland (Manchester UP 2015)