Introduction The Early Bronze Age cemetery in the Mound of the Hostages is exceptional in the context of Early Bronze Age burial in Ireland. The cemetery was placed in an already ancient passage tomb monument, at a time when most Early Bronze Age graves were placed in either flat cemeteries or newly built barrow monuments. Of the well-investigated cemeteries of the period, it is one of a small number where burials in simple pits outnumber those in stone-built cists. The cemetery is one of the largest known from the period and was used for relatively frequent burial. The cemetery also has the largest collection of grave-goods recorded from any site in Ireland and is notable for the range of artefacts, including the largest collection of Food Vessel tradition pottery and daggers. Finally, the artefact associations and extensive radiocarbon dating of the site allow us for the first time to analyse the sequence of burial in an Irish Bronze Age cemetery. Background Over 900 Irish Early Bronze Age (2200–1600 BC) burial sites are now known and at these sites people practised a wide range of burial forms in a range of different monument types. People could be inhumed in a variety of positions, from extended to flexed, crouched and contracted. Or people could be cremated on a pyre, sometimes accompanied by artefacts, and the remains could be completely or partly collected and buried singly or with one or more others, either directly in the ground or, as the period progressed, contained in a pottery vessel. Cremation, at Tara and at other cemeteries, was the most common burial rite, although inhumation was practised until at least the nineteenth century BC. At the Mound of the Hostages the inhumations, the earliest Bronze Age burials at the site (see below), were placed into the passage tomb chamber with Bowl Food Vessels. Burials are also known to have been placed into the chambers of a small number of other passage tombs, such at Knockroe, Loughcrew (cairn H), Carrowkeel (cairns O and K), etc. The only inhumation in the mound, burial 30, was a late interment and came at the end of the use of the cemetery. Throughout Ireland burials could be interred in simple pits, in pits that were lined with stones or in small, stone-built, rectangular, trapezoidal or polygonal chambers called cists that were usually built in pits in the ground. One or more individuals could be placed in each grave, graves could be reopened for later burials, and they were often accompanied by a variety of artefacts of metal, faience, stone and bone but most commonly by pottery. Burials were often grouped together in cemeteries, which were often left unenclosed or flat, or could be placed into specially constructed monuments such as cairns or mounds or barrows. Occasionally cemeteries were established in old monuments in significant places in the landscape, such as the Mound of the Hostages at Tara. Old monuments While most Early Bronze Age communities preferred to bury their dead in new cemeteries or to construct new monuments, a small percentage, mainly in the northern part of Ireland, preferred to reuse old monuments. There are by my count 53 megalithic tombs, mounds and cairns in Ireland that are known to have been reused for burial in the Early Bronze Age (Table 1; data from 184 7. The context of the Early Bronze Age cemetery in the Mound of the Hostages, Tara CHARLES MOUNT , WITH A CONTRIBUTION BY ALEX BAYLISS