Unearthing the past: Archaeologist runs exciting camps to inspire explorers
“We get them to dig up the Viking house and uncover the story – they become the detectives”
In the heady days of the Celtic Tiger, Mark Kelly was one of the 2,500 Irish commercial archaeologists working in the field on State infrastructure projects.
Their task: to salvage or document all possible traces of our heritage as developments such as new motorways sliced through the landscape, turning up clues to our past that had been lost for millennia.
The sector was at maximum employment and Kelly loved his job, having started out on the excavations for the M50 at Carrickmines in Dublin. “It’s sort of like Christmas – you’re unwrapping things all the time,” he explained.
The best things he ever found were some Mesolithic arrowheads left behind by hunter-gatherers around 8,000 years ago.
Another find was ‘a beautiful copper alloy key which looked like someone had dropped it yesterday’, unearthed at the bottom of Francis Street during the excavations of the Coombe Hotel in Dublin and which turned out to be a Viking artefact. It sits currently in the repository of the National Museum of Ireland.
But with the economic crash, the change in the industry was stark, with the number of working archaeologists dwindling to 300 by 2010. Kelly was amongst those made redundant, and was left pondering his options. “Initially it was quite a dark period,” he admitted. “I was studying for my licence as a director to be able to carry out my own excavations and work as a consultant. All of a sudden, there was nothing to practice – the industry had collapsed,” he said. "But as everything, the phoenix rises from the ashes – I had this moment where I thought, how can I continue this work but in a sustainable manner and that wouldn’t be impacted by a recession?”
He came up with the brain wave of running archaeology camps for young people with the hope of explaining the function of an archaeologist through learning and fun, setting up the School of Irish Archaeology.
His first programme ran in Harold’s Cross National School in Dublin in 2011. A year later, he was running a camp with 20 young people with the main focus a mobile pop-up Viking excavation site dubbed ‘the Big Dig’ - where participants sift for artefacts like swords, skulls and other intriguing objects, as they learn about life at that time and the job of an archaeologist.
Photo Caption: Mark Kelly, Managing Director of the School of Irish Archaeology pictured excavating the Coombe Hotel site in Dublin where Viking artifacts were discovered. Photos supplier by School of Irish Archaeology.
For the School of Irish Archaeology, vital funding from the National Lottery on an annual basis through Heritage Officers in The Heritage Council gives them the wings to take their work to young people in communities where they might not otherwise have had the chance to be part of such an experience.
“It’s wonderful to have that type of opportunity to touch so many lives across the country – we do festivals from Sligo to West Cork, Wexford and the midlands,” said Kelly.
“We just wouldn’t be able to get around the country if that money wasn’t there. It’s a fantastic initiative and helps so many, not just us”, he added.
Last year, he catered for an astonishing 23,000 students nationwide and had to turn down many others, due to a lack of capacity. He employs two staff members full-time, together with about 20 part-time workers during the summer – one of whom first came along to the workshops at the age of seven and loved it so much that she did her work placement there during Transition Year and has been coming back to help out every summer since.
Their next step is to organise a permanent hub in Dublin for their work where young people could come at weekends to learn and explore and moves towards this are already well underway.
“We’re flying,” Kelly said, cheerfully, of the business as it stands. “Everyone who takes part gets to have a bit of fun. We get them to dig up the Viking house and uncover the story – they become the detectives. And for young people, it’s absolute gold – that moment when they find something in the ground like a sword or a large skull – their eyes light up and you can just see their cognitive wheels whirling. It’s magic.”
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