A Former Archaeologist recreates an excavation on Achill Is., Ireland | Archaeological Minecraft

Hello my name is Harold hafta and welcome to archaeological Minecraft I’m a former archaeologist who enjoys playing Minecraft and thought it would be fun to combine the two today’s episode is going to be a bit different as you might have suspected from the title thanks to all of you my channel

Hit 500 subscribers that to me is absolutely Bonkers it wasn’t very long ago and just a couple of few videos ago that I did the 250 subscriber special I asked all of you in a post what ideas you had for me to celebrate that Milestone and thank all of you there

Were a bunch of good ideas and I thank you for taking the time to send them to me some of those suggestions I liked more as topics for regular videos and so I’m adding them to my list of future builds but one idea I liked and I’m

Going to give a little shout out to Luke Ash 3048 for this suggestion was to talk more about the work of archaeologists such as myself like I did in my trail ruins episode in that video I told some stories about my time as an archaeologist so instead of telling a

Small number of disconnected anecdotes like I did in that video I’m going to focus on when I was on a dig in Ireland on Ackle Island and try and recreate that build and sight in Minecraft while telling the story of my time on the island Ackle Island is located off the

Northwestern coast of Ireland in County Mayo it’s a small triangular shaped island that is accessible to the mainland by way of a small Bridge The Village we were based out of was a small town named Dua in the southern coast of the island that if memory serves me

Right had a population of around 500 people and would seemed to be 5 000 or more sheep Ackle Island as a whole has a population of around 23 to 2 400 people and parts of Apple were used during the filming of the Banshees of innishun if you’ve seen that movie that recently

Came out just to the west of Dua around three kilometers or 1.8 miles along the southern coast Road was another small village by the name of Keel which we would sometimes walk to as none of us had cars I don’t think many more people lived in Keel than lived in Dua but it

Had more restaurants a larger grocery store and a fantastic crescent-shaped Beach that was great to visit sometimes on the weekends when we weren’t all at the archaeological dig site in Dua there weren’t those kinds of things and really it was just a bunch of houses that

People lived in and a couple of streets there were two pubs one which we would often visit when we were done with our day of Excavating and there was also a small shop I don’t recall if it had a name but I think we called it Jared shot because I

Think the owner was named Jared at that time the shop was a very small one-room grocery store that was also a post office and a currency exchange I remember that he had a small selection of fresh produce from people’s Gardens or maybe it was his own garden but it

Was a very small selection and if he would go fishing in the morning you could sometimes purchase fish from him later in the day I remember his wife would try and teach us visitors different swear words in Irish which was always kind of fun the pub we would

Frequent most often was gilty’s Pub and it was always fun as families would come in with their kids and they would do their homework while they ate and visited with friends and I think a couple of times I remember they would practice their musical instruments later

In the evening some of the old timers would sometimes start singing songs once they got a few pints into them which was always a good time I remember the pubs all having to close at the specific time of the night I think it was about 10 or

11 or so and the island I think only had a couple of police officers or constables or what whatever they called them and one of them would drive the Circuit of the island making sure all the pubs were closed when they were supposed to I remember sometimes the

Pubs would get a call from the pub up the road and then they would flip off all the lights and everyone had to be quiet while the officers drove past and then the pub would flip back on the lights and then call the next Pub up the

Road letting them know it was their turn to do the same I’m sure the officers all knew exactly what was happening as they were likely in one of those pubs when it wasn’t their turn to drive the Circuit of the island and it was their day off but it kept everything orderly and

Allowed everyone to keep up appearances accol Islands rich in archeology there’s a small four-story Tower house on the island named kildawat castle that dates to the early 1400s and was one of the strongholds of Grace O’Malley otherwise known as the pirate Queen who lived from 1530 to 1605. there are also some

Neolithic Cairns and some Dolmen we had the Good Fortune of being able to visit different archaeological historical sites on the island on the days that we weren’t able to excavate and I’ll talk about why that was the case later the archaeological site I was working on was

What the locals on the island call the deserted village and it was a village that was occupied from the late Medieval Era all the way up to the late 1800s I’ll get to why it was abandoned but first let me talk a little bit about the site The Village was located on the

Slopes of Mount slavemore which Towers over the central part of the island and the island as a whole the trench I was working on was in the main street that ran through the village and if I remember correctly there were about 10 to 12 houses that were still standing in

The village though all of the houses were in Ruins you could often see where the doorway was and where the walls were sometimes those walls were only waist high and other times they were up to the roof line the houses were small and rectangular and you could often see

Where one or sometimes both of the peaks of the roof would be but none of the houses still contained any roofs or any wooden Timbers and in fact all of the outer walls were just dry Stone Cobble which looked like they had been made in

A very similar manner as a lot of the ad hoc fences I don’t recall seeing that they were held together with any kind of mortar but perhaps I’m just remembering it wrong which is why I was calling them dry Stone cobbles the road I was Excavating was made from small

Cobblestones that formed a layer of the street and I remember that when I was Excavating and taking it up what we were expecting to find was Earth or perhaps a layer of sand or gravel or something of that ilk under the Cobblestone roadway but to our surprise the stones got

Bigger and bigger not smaller we extended our trench down the slope to the South so off that roadway as our trench ran east to west along the road and as we removed the layer of grass and sod and started to work our way down into the layer of peat we saw that the

Stones got bigger just like we saw underneath the roadway and the further down we got the larger the stones became as we removed the layers of the larger Stones we didn’t finish our excavation before the season ended so I couldn’t tell you for certain what that was but

Our theory was that the road was built over a Neolithic or Bronze Age Karen and so that was what the larger Stones were from was from the Karen and then the roadway ran over top of that which was an unexpected find we didn’t expect to find uh a Bronze Age or a Neolithic

Karen underneath that deserted village the excavation was quite a good experience the crew was fun and the site was interesting and I can’t say enough about the Beauty and the Majesty of the Landscapes or all the views you did have to deal with typical Irish weather which

Was often Misty and drizzly but it was a type of rain that never really stopped you from doing anything and even if you were out in it for a couple of hours you oftentimes never got soaked and rather you were just in a constant state of being slightly damp

At times it would get old and then you’d wish for some warm sun and perhaps some nice weather but that was when the midges would come out and that was by far worse if you don’t live in places that have midges imagine small gnat-like mosquitoes that swarm around you like

Gnats do but they bite and their bites itch like mosquitoes I remember we would be wearing long sleeves long pants gloves hats and even trying to cover our face as much as we could almost like a veil and they would just fly into your eyes or any other opening that showed

Any bit of skin the drizzling rain would keep them away and keep them at Bay but it was better if there was just a strong Breeze that would kick up because that would drive them off completely because we were out in the Bog and halfway up the mountain there were also times when

There were Mists or a low-flying cloud would come in and then when that would happen it sometimes would get to the point where you couldn’t even see the ground in the trench that you were working or even the hand in front of your face and you would just need to

Hunker down and wait for it to lift because you you can’t wander around in the Mist so that’s very dangerous you can fall and hurt yourself usually we would know in advance when there were storm or conditions like that that were going to happen and those were the days

That we didn’t try and work the site at all and instead would do visits to other archaeological sites in the island or we’d go and conduct site surveys somewhere else as we were looking for a couple of Sue trains which had previously been discovered during patrols during World War II but whose

Locations have now been lost to history I said it would come back to why the deserted village was deserted and it all comes down to the Potato Famine as I’m sure you know from 1845 to 1852 Ireland was hit by a blight that severely affected the potato crop which the Irish

Had come dependent on for their main food source there was massive suffering and Death on the island from starvation you can see above the village further up Mount slavemore where the potato Fields were as they could be viewed today by their long and straight rows what they would

Do year after year is plant their potatoes along those rows and then they would travel down to the coast and collect seaweed and also Sail Out to the small coastal islands that contained loads of seabirds where they would collect and gather their droppings they would then haul these up to the potato

Fields and Heap them over the potato crop Rose over time in many years those rows became higher and higher so that you can see them today the famine and its conditions on the local population left its mark on the structure of the village itself many of these houses in

The village show that when the houses were originally built they were larger than when the village was abandoned the people who lived in the houses ended up building Walls Within their houses to make them smaller that was because they were so poor they were having trouble heating their homes and so by putting

Putting up walls within their homes to make them smaller it was cheaper to heat them up ultimately the villagers just couldn’t sustain and feed themselves living up in their Village and so they all had to move down to the coasts where they lived today that’s why all the

Cities are right there along the coast today and they changed their diet and economy from one focused on agriculture to one focused on fishing well that wraps up this video I want to thank you so much for the community you’ve helped create your great comments and for pushing the channel over the 500

Subscriber Mark I never would have thought the channel would grow so fast in such a short time it wasn’t but a few episodes ago that I was doing the 250 subscriber thank you I really appreciate all of your support I also want to give a shout out to the AKO archaeological

Field School which is run by Theresa McDonald and is associated with the University of Galway Teresa is a great archaeologist and a good person and has written a book named Ackle Island that is all about the archeology his history and folklore of the island I put the

Information about the book down in the description below if you’re looking for more information about this subject and if you’re looking for a field school I recommend that you might want to check that out as well and I put the link for that Below in the description thanks

That’s it have a good rest of your day bye for now