I found out about a newly discovered Viking house located behind the Four Courts in Dublin (Hammond Lane/Church Street) at the weekend through a friend working on the site but it has now trickled through to the national news. It was featured on Morning Ireland yesterday morning through a five minute interview with Margaret Gowen, complete with obligatory northside/southside comment at the end. You can listen to it on their podcast of the whole programme or just the interview below:

As a bonus, you can also see the report broadcast on the six-one news by clicking here or watch the whole programme on the RTE Player (skip to about 37 minutes in for the juicy bit). Also an Irish Times article here.

Good news for all those sad enough (like me) to have an interest in the early medieval period. Christmas has come early. Just head on over to the EMAP website and rip open you shiny new electronic copy of the latest EMAP publications.

These include a new version of the project's extensive bibliography of early medieval publications as well as Vol. 2 of their monograph series on early medieval settlement sites which, a little counter-intuitively, precedes Vol. 1 which will hopefully follow in 2010.

There are also some interesting early medieval articles appended to the 2009 progress report that are well worth a look.

Yesterday's Irish Times carried this satirical 'extract' from the 'annals of the fifth master' which was definitely deserving of a chuckle. Its not often the worlds of archaeology, history and comedy collide with such enjoyable consequences although  the clip above from Eddie Izzard is a notable exception.

Apparently the Ordnance Survey in the UK are planning on making all of their mapping data available free online next year. It will be interesting to see how its made available - formats, downloadability etc

It would certainly be nice if the OSI followed suit although their are some online viewers available, downloadable maps are still prohibitively expensive.

Considering the fact that we pay for the maps anyway through the tax system, state mapping really should be freely available to private citizens (if not for commercial use). This is especially true when it comes to early editions, many of which are now out of copyright.

I've been away in New Zealand taking a break from all that is Archaeology so Archnews has slipped a bit.

Considering that this is likely to happen quite frequently I have decided to make it a roughly monthly post - making it more of a trip down memory lane than a rolling review of Archaeology in the news.

Hopefully this will alow me to find the time in the last year of my PhD to keep on posting.

I recently received the excellent news that the call for papers for Trowel Volume XII has been re-issued. The volume had stalled recently but with new editors, a new website and a new online format it looks like this unique student publication, celebrating its 21st birthday, will continue despite the current hard times.

As a past editor I will be very interested to see how the transition to online publication will work and whether the relatively recent book reviews and reflections sections will continue. The inclusion of the thesis lists on the websites re-instates a valuable function served by Trowel previous to financial and logistical problems that led to us dropping them for Volume X.

Trowel volume X can be downloaded or read here on Seandálaíocht.com and Volume XI can be purchased using this order form.