The Early Medieval Archaeology Project is a collaborative research initiative that has been running for a number of years based out of UCD and QUB and funded by the Heritage Council's superb, and endangered, INSTAR research grants. It has just announced the publication of its latest round of reports on settlements in Early Medieval Ireland as well as a revision of its intimidating Bibliography of Early Medieval Archaeology in Ireland. These are massively important pieces of work, particularly for researchers, and there are few parallels for this kind of work outside of Ireland.

The project has been releasing reports on its work annually for the last couple of years and their work has involved the (figurative) surveying of pretty much every site ever excavated dating to the Early Medieval period in Ireland, particularly settlement sites. All of this will be drawn together in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the Royal Irish Academy. You can read more about it on the EMAP website, Facebook page and blog. 

This kind of synthetic and exhaustive consideration of the archaeological evidence from Ireland is one of the massively positive results of the Celtic Tiger boom and developer-funded archaeology. It, and other projects like it, have already begun, based on the abundance of sites excavated in the last two decades, to transform the way we understand periods like the Iron Age and Early Medieval period in Ireland. Hopefully the minuscule amount of money required to undertake more such research isn't withdrawn by the government in the coming years, thus squandering the massive amount of money, sweat and back-problems put into generating so much of the grey literature that makes this kind of research possible.