COUNTY SLIGO, IRELAND—Part of a fulacht fiadh, or 4,000-year-old box-like structure, is being studied on Ireland’s Coney Island. Eamonn Kelly, director of Irish antiquities at the National Museum, thinks it may have been used for bathing or cooking during the Bronze Age, when the stone-lined pit would have been filled with water and heated with hot stones. “It tells us that people walked the beach here 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, searched for large stone slabs, and carefully built this structure. Many other archaeological sites probably await discovery on Coney,” Ciran Davis, an archaeology student who alerted researchers, told The Irish Times. Radiocarbon dating should offer the team more information. “It makes us wonder why they would have wanted to heat saltwater,” added Marion Dowd of the Institute of Technology Sligo. To read more about fulachtaí fia, read ARCHAEOLOGY's "Letter From Ireland: Mystery of the Fulacht Fiadh."
