The use of caves for funerary and ritual practices in Neolithic Ireland

Abstract

Caves in Ireland, as elsewhere, have been used for shelter and burial over much of recorded time. The author here focuses on their use during the Neolithic, carefully isolating the available material and arguing from it that caves then had a primary role in the remembrance of the dead, and were used for excarnation, token deposition or inhumation. The author compares these practices to other contemporary types of burial and concludes that there was a strong symbolic or ritual sense shared in Neolithic Ireland between passage tombs and those certain kinds of cave that they resembled.