Welcome to Emerald Archives
Emerald Archives presents Ireland’s story one reference year at a time, from the deep prehistoric past to the modern era. Each article explores the evidence, people, places and developments associated with a particular year and places them within their wider historical setting. The collection brings together archaeology, politics, society, religion, culture, conflict, everyday life and changing landscapes in one continuously expanding timeline. New articles appear here as the archive grows. You can also explore the full Irish History Timeline, search the archive directly, or use Explore to move through the collection by period and subject.
31,810–31,801 BCE
Hyaena Land at Castlepook
The label 31,810 BCE cannot identify an event in the modern sense. No calendar, written record, named community or dated human action survives from Ireland at this remote point in the Late Pleistocene. In archaeological terms it is best treated as an approximate position within a much broader span: roughly 33,800 calendar years before 1950, during Marine Isotope Stage 3, a fluctuating interval of the last Ice Age. The evidence relevant to Ireland consists not of annals or monuments but of cave bones, freshwater sediments, pollen and plant remains, insects, glacial deposits, radiocarbon measurements and reconstructions of changing ice margins. These sources can illuminate conditions across centuries and millennia; they cannot responsibly narrate a single year.
