Finding rock bottom

Fieldwork doesn’t always take you to a nice riverbank or a quiet forest, sometimes you need to venture underground. This image was taken deep within a cave in County Cork, Ireland. Here, a group of cave archaeologists are surveying for new areas of the cave to excavate, looking for ancient animal bones. Irish caves like this one often contain a large number of animal remains, many of which are tens of thousands of years old and from extinct species like the giant deer, woolly mammoth, and cave hyaena. Although this particular area of the cave was quite large, most parts are much less spacious, allowing for just one person to move or work in at a time. Our goal was to find unexcavated regions of the cave and dig up bones which I conduct stable isotope analysis on. Stable isotope analysis of these bones helps us to better understand Ireland’s past environment, how these animals lived and interacted with one another, and how they were impacted by past climate changes and early human activity.