Navigating complexity: new discoveries in the Bronze Age landscape of Haughey’s Fort, Northern Ireland

Adjacent to the well-known Iron Age ceremonial centre of Navan Fort in Northern Ireland, an expansive
complex of Late Bronze Age monuments was discovered in the 1990s. Centred on the hillfort known as
Haughey’s Fort, this complex includes several unusual monuments, such as an artificially constructed
ritual pool and a linear earthwork. Recent re-analysis of this landscape, incorporating a suite of methods
including new targeted excavations, geophysical prospection, topographical surveys, and isotopic
studies, has begun to transform our understanding. These investigations, combined with previous
studies, have revealed a multifaceted system of large-scale settlement and craftworking, long-distance
trade, agricultural centralisation, and ritual and religious activities, all integrated within the complex,
which itself is enclosed by a massive, newly discovered 109-hectare hillfort. This paper presents these
new findings, contextualises them within the Irish and European Bronze Age, and explores how the scale
of the evidence challenges previous models of social complexity.