Graduate students Madeline Ware and Emily Jaskwich enjoying the Irish weather.
Our students don’t believe it rains in Ireland. Each May, we counsel them to pack the rain gear. “Umbrellas are useless,” we caution. “Either the rain comes sideways off the Atlantic, or its a mist hanging in the air and you’re walking through it.” Bring a good raincoat, we tell them, and waterproof shoes.
CofC students examining an example of a West Cork orthostat in brilliant weather, Maymester, 2018
Then comes the whole of June and hardly a drop from Dublin to Skibbereen. The only mist we saw came fifteen minutes after arriving at the Cliffs of Moher. Bad luck that. When we closed up shop on the 1st of July, several counties were in an incipient drought. Historic weather. All the news was about measuring soil-moisture–or, rather, the lack thereof.
But the disaster was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for archeologists. Our own anthropologist, Moore Quinn, who takes students to digs near Cork each summer, told us about neolithic and ironage sites emerging from the earth. Here’s a report from CBS This Morning.
