Reassessing the Mesolithic ‘shell middens’ of Rockmarshall, Co. Louth

Despite many discoveries and developments in the archaeology of the Mesolithic (both developer- and research-led) in Ireland in the past 30 years, representations remain somewhat influenced by the legacy of a few key sites excavated by a few people in the early days of the discipline. The 1946 and 1948 excavation of three ‘shell middens’ by Frank Mitchell in Rockmarshall, Co. Louth, on a moraine overlooking Dundalk Bay, has contributed to create and solidify the image of a coastal Later Mesolithic in Ireland, along with the shell-bearing sites of Sutton and Dalkey Island, Co. Dublin. In this paper we reappraise the original data available (archives, lithics analysis) and present the outcomes of a new campaign of archaeological and geoarchaeological survey aimed at reassessing the state of knowledge and archaeological potential of the site using contemporary methods. Results indicate that a substantial part of the shell layers excavated by the original excavator still survives in situ, and identify a discrete accumulation of shells that was previously unrecorded. More widely, the ‘midden’ category itself masks differences between shell-bearing layers and sites that question their mooted monumentality, and overlooks commonalities across shell- and non-shell-bearing sites in the last two millennia of the Mesolithic period