About the Field School

The Achill Archaeology Field School celebrated 20 successful years as a Training School for undergraduate and graduate students.

The Achill Archaeology Field School was established in 1991 as a Training School for students of archaeology, anthropology and related disciplines. Located in County Mayo, Achill Island is also the western most point in Ireland and Europe and is widely known for its beauty, majestic cliffs and mountains. Achill Island, Achill Beg island and the Corraun peninsula have a rich archaeological heritage that spans the entire spectrum of Irish history from the remote Neolithic to the nineteenth century.

The Achill Archaeological Field School has been training archeaology students in field techniques for 21 years.

The Achill Field School usually conduct two archaeological excavations each year and these create an ideal training environment in which we can teach archaeology students to excavate and to record the results of their archaeology excavations in a three-part system which creates a written record, a photographic record and a drawn record. These three archaeology records come together in the post-excavation stage of the project to tell the story of the excavated site and form the foundation for our analysis of the excavated evidence and for our presentations to the public in the form of public lectures and printed publications. For many years, detailed stone-by-stone drawings, which were created on site to a precise scale, were later ‘inked-up’ in our office building using traditional methods, but these skills have now been replaced by digitisation using Adobe Photoshop and AutoCAD.

While students undertaking our two-week, four-week and six-week Modular Courses between mid-May and late-August are primarily here to work on the excavation sites, we do try to involve them in the post-excavation process as much as possible and this valuable experience, often undertaken on wet days, can involve washing and numbering artefacts, processing soil samples and digitising field drawings. Our Modular Courses are generally taken for University Academic Credit, in the sense that students may apply to have their work in Achill recognised though our in-house assessment process – we have a long-standing relationship with NUI Galway in this regard and they issue Academic Credit to our students which then contributes to each student’s degree at their home university.

A hallmark of Achill Archaeology Field School is our reputation for the quality of our field school training in Europe.

Achill Archaeology Field School cater for small group sizes with all instruction delivered directly by highly experienced archaeologists and environmental scientists. Following on from our archaeology research at the world-renowned Deserted Village in Slievemore, Achill Archaeology Field School extended our research to some of the prehistoric sites on Slievemore Mountain. The prehistoric landscape on Slievemore consists of Neolithic Tombs, massive stone-built Bronze Age Roundhouses, smaller circular and oval shaped buildings and a complex system of field walls. Because stone was the building material of choice, and because the sites have been covered over by the bog for several thousand years, the state of preservation is truly exemplary. To date, our archaeology students have helped excavate two of the largest and best-preserved prehistoric Middle Bronze Age buildings ever found in Ireland, as well as working on a series of associated, smaller but equally well preserved Early Medieval buildings. In addition to the work on the prehistoric landscape at Slievemore, we also did a limited amount of work on a series of transhumance sites.

Archaeological field schools are found around the world, but we stand out for a number of reasons:

We are a long established archaeology field school in Europe which was established specifically to train archaeology students and that is still our core mission.

We are situated in a superb location with an amazing natural landscape and fascinating heritage – Achill Island is our classroom and many of our archaeology course students from around the world have Irish heritage and seek to incorporate their archaeology field school course into a longer visit to Ireland.

Achill Archaeology Field School have a broad range of archaeology courses designed to suit all interests and budgets – our archaeology courses range in duration from one week to ten weeks and each archaeology course is targeted at a different market – interested amateurs seeking an exciting holiday (Introduction to Irish Archaeology and Bare Bones), archaeology undergraduate students seeking field experience and Academic Credit (modular courses), older students seeking technical courses (Dig, Draw and Digitise) and potential site supervisors (Trainee Supervisor course) – we don’t believe that one size fits all and so we offer a variety of archaeology courses to a variety of markets.

In 2013, Achill Archaeology Field School shall be returning to work at the prehistoric and historic landscape on Slievemore Mountain and we are also hoping to conduct an excavtion at Kildavnet Castle, a small late medieval tower house at the southern end of Achill island.

Self-catering (sharing) accommodation and local transport is included in the cost of each archaeology course.