Abstract Exploring past people’s interactions with wetland environments in Ireland AIDAN O’SULLIVAN * School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, Dublin 4 People have engaged with Ireland’s wetland environments since the earliest times, leaving a unique, fragile and valuable archaeological and environmental legacy. A long history of antiquarian and archaeological investigation of Ireland’s wet envi- ronments has established a good understanding of this archaeological resource, but ongoing industrial development, land reclamation and climate change continues to threaten its integrity. Multidisciplinary approaches, ongoing survey and excavation and a theoretically engaged study of this wetland archaeology will continue to enable us to explore aspects of settlement, travel and ideologies in Ireland’s past, fulfilling this archaeology’s significant potential for reconstructing the details of past lives and societies, the perceptions and uses of landscapes and the social, economic and ideo- logical roles of material culture across time. In the past, some of the most striking archaeological discoveries on this island have been made in its wetlands, whether they are Iron Age human remains or trackways in bogs; early medieval crannogs and dwellings in lakes with their abundant collections of objects; or intact late medieval wooden fish-traps and baskets quietly eroding out of estuarine mudflats. Archaeological survey and excavation in wet environments can uncover spectacularly well-preserved dwellings with their occupation and mid- den deposits present; or wooden vessels with their tool-marks surviving and traces of their last contents within them. Protected from the annihilation of time by their anaerobic, waterlogged environments, the sense of wonder that these discoveries evoke is often traceable to the fact of their unlikely survival and existence (e.g. Ó Floinn 1995; Raftery 1990, 1996, 1999a; O’Sullivan 1998, 2003a, 2003b). Archaeological discoveries in wet environments Archaeological sites in wet environments in Ireland and elsewhere are also empiri- cally valuable and arguably more informative than other archaeological sites due to the much wider range of evidence that they produce (e.g. Coles and Coles 1989; Coles 2001, Fig. 14). Archaeological excavations can reveal significantly more about past environments and their changes; a wider range of evidence for past economy and subsistence; a fuller understanding of the structures, stratigraphy, chronology and organisation of dwellings and a more intact assemblage of past material culture— such as the clothing, basketry, organic bindings on tools and wooden and leather Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 107C, 147–203 © 2007 Royal Irish Academy Introduction * Author’s e-mail: aidan.osullivan@ucd.ie