Dr Alastair Ruffell of Queens University Belfast talks about the ancient remains found in bogland at Newferry near Bellaghy
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Without a hit on the DNA database or any pathology for the state pathologist like a gunshot wound,
00:09 that's the sort of thing that puts you into the recent, is the police, everyone is very dependent on radiocarbon data.
00:18 So we're very lucky in Queens, in Northern Ireland and Ireland to have a 14-chrono radiocarbon lab
00:26 and quite a world-class laboratory, the brand new mass spectrometer to carry out this data.
00:33 The archaeologists from the Pearson IT team, they have an archaeologist employed by them, looking right at me now.
00:40 She knows what she's doing. What body parts to send, because some are suitable, some aren't, to send for the data.
00:49 The great thing about our new facility is very, very small parts. Back in the day you had to send a bit of a bone,
00:56 in this case very small parts of the body could go. They were put on a fast track to get the data out
01:03 because of course an investigation was waiting on this. Under 70 years, I think it is, it remained a police matter
01:12 because it's an unexplained death, a father and a mother, 70 years, it's an archaeological find.
01:18 So this came out as 2100 years old, plus or minus about 30, which is a spectacular accuracy.
01:26 I've got the diagram if you want to see it. I'm going to put this individual, which I'm calling 'the lucky boy',
01:32 but I believe the locals want a townland name, which is fine, as Iron Age mid-date.
01:41 So 2100 before present actually means 2100 before 1950, which is a marker for radiant carbon dating.
01:52 So that puts the individual in and around the time of Christ.