Evidence from Britain and Ireland between 3500-2000 BC (the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic) makes this one of the most important periods in prehistory. During this time, we see spectacular Grooved Ware and Beaker pottery, metallurgy, carved mace heads, and use of some of Europe's most iconic sites such as Newgrange and Stonehenge. Recent ancient DNA data (suggesting almost complete population replacement at the end of the period) and dietary stable isotopes (indicating movement of people and animals over previously unsuspected distances) suggest that there is still much to learn. These new data challenge and reinvigorate older debates in terms of growing social hierarchies, ethnicity, religious organisation, and identity. However, these data have not been matched by developments in our chronologies; such fine-grained evidence requires equally sophisticated and specific chronologies in order to understand these changes. While previously prehistorians had to rely for their chronological structure on typologies of sites and things, we now have the ability to produce very precise, probabilistic, independent chronologies using Bayesian statistical analyses (e.g. Bronk Ramsey 2009; Bayliss 2009). Bayesian analysis has provided precise chronologies for individual sites (e.g. Whittle 2018) or activity at types of site (e.g 'Neolithic burials'; Whitehouse et al. 2014), which were previously understood at the scale of several centuries. It allows a coherent way to compare scientific chronologies, and applications to earlier Neolithic sites (e.g. Whittle et al. 2011) have had international significance in the ways archaeologists approach scientific dating as a whole. While we have had excellent examples of scientific chronologies for individual late Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites or things (see below), no attempt has been made to write a synthetic history of the dramatic changes of late 4th and 3rd millennia Ireland and Britain using accurate and detailed chronology. Moreover, 'simply' increasing chronological precision on its own is not enough. To fully achieve the potential of the Bayesian 'revolution' (cf. Bayliss 2009; Bronk Ramsey 2009; Griffiths 2017), we need both an independent chronological framework, and an approach to 'prehistory' that moves beyond ever more precise chronologies for sites or sequences. We need narratives that can synthesise and interpret evidence from across 'packages' that archaeologists recognise as significant - such as the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic - and use precisely defined time-scales as the basis for discussing changes in practices, things and places produced by people in historically-specific times. Chapman (2018) has recently called this the 'central challenge' in order to write 'a new kind of archaeology', while Whittle (2018, 248) argues that the 'pre- must come out of prehistory'. This project will do just that. We will build on previous approaches, producing site-specific chronological models for all evidence from Britain and Ireland from 3500-2000 BC, while generating a significant legacy of new data, in order to use time - expressed in centuries and decades - as the basis for our new narrative structure. We will make all data, analytical programs and outputs open access, meaning it will be possible to adapt and revise our chronologies in future research. This project's significance will therefore lie not just in our methods, or our routine chronological precision for 1500 years of Irish and British history, or our commitment to open access, but also in our new approaches to writing narratives of 'prehistory' in the future.

The project's objective is to harness digital tools from different fields to transform scholarly and popular understanding of Ogham - an ancient script unique to Ireland and Britain. At a more general level, it provides a potential model of collaborative ways of working to ensure the long-term sustainability, continued development, and inter-operability of diverse digital resources for multi-disciplinary humanities research. It addresses the challenge of giving continued and renewed life to existing digital resources beyond the end of individual funded projects by integrating them with new data created using subsequent technological and intellectual advances. Through collaborative working, resource-sharing and skills-exchange the project will strengthen partnerships between academia, museums, libraries, and state heritage agencies across all 6 nations in the UK, Ireland and Man. It will also contribute to Europe-wide collaboration in digital epigraphy and place Ogham in the vanguard of global epigraphical studies. Ogham is highly unusual among world writing systems. It entirely lacks iconicity: like a barcode, it consists solely of a succession of straight lines. It is read vertically and is written in 3 dimensions across the edge of a solid object (using letters which consist of bundles of 1-5 short parallel lines, their value depending on their position relative to a baseline). Its heyday was the 1st Millenium CE, but knowledge of it never died out. Texts written in this ingenious script are of international significance to historical linguists as the earliest evidence for the Gaelic languages. We will digitally document all c.640 examples of Ogham writing in all media, from its origin in the fourth century CE until the dawn of the modern revival c.1850. We will build on the success of the 'Ogham in 3D' website (2012-15, 2016-17), created by our partner organisations, the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, the Discovery Programme, and the National Monuments Service which covers c.25% of surviving ogham and provides detailed supporting information, photographs, & 3D models. We will upgrade its data and metadata, enhance its searchability, and greatly expand its thematic, chronological & geographical scope by including Oghams from the whole island of Ireland (i.e. including Northern Ireland) and from outside Ireland. The latter - from Scotland, Wales, Man, England, and Continental libraries - comprise almost a third of the total surviving. We will also move beyond stone monuments to include portable objects, graffiti, and manuscripts. We will document in 3D all Ogham in the collections of the national museums (the British Museum; the National Museums of Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales; and the Manx Museum), with the support of state heritage agencies in 4 countries. Additional joint fieldwork in all six nations will allow us to more than treble the number of 3D models available to nearly 80% of the corpus. Uniting this scattered evidence will transform Ogham studies, and connect local communities with their heritage. We will work with the Discovery Programme to evaluate the effectiveness of different methods of 3D recording and visualization, and use for analysis techniques hitherto used only for documentation. We will refine new methods of digital groove analysis (to identify the work of individual carvers and establish the contemporaneity of different carvings) and digital reconstruction of worn detail. We will conduct analysis based on the new documentation, using analogue and new digital techniques, including computational corpus linguistics. The enduring social value of Ogham is reflected in its increasing popularity for decorative, symbolic, and creative functions. The project will support this use of Ogham in contemporary culture by responding to the need for authoritative guidance on writing accurate and authentic Ogham, and by inspiring new & innovative applications and artistic responses.

RIFNET will alter the conversation around the Irish family. For too long, understandings of the family have been constrained by an over-emphasis on the 'traditional' unit. Comprised of a heterosexual married couple and their offspring within one household, this understanding is, and has always been, but one expression of the family. In the Republic of Ireland, the family is defined by the constitution in Article 41. This article has been a 'contentious' issue in the Irish State (Visser, 2018), and one which is to be subject to a nationwide conversation in the form of a citizen's assembly, and ultimately a referendum. As senior parliamentary researcher Anna Visser noted in 2018, 'there is a dominant view amongst policy-makers and commentators that it is desirable to amend or repeal Article 41.2.' On both sides of the border, important legal changes have been made in recent years in regards to family and reproductive law (Marriage Equality, ROI 2015, NI 2019), while other changes are still being worked through or demanded (for example, the recent extension to the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes (2019), and renewed attention on the 27th constitutional amendment (2004) which denied citizenship rights to children born in Ireland to non-Irish or British parents). Working in different fields, scholars of the Irish family have long pointed out the conceptual problems of the 'traditional' Irish family. Nuclear, white, Catholic, settled, and heterosexual, this idea of the 'traditional' Irish family does not, and has never, matched the messy reality. Indeed, the problem is not just conceptual. This view of the family has long been used as the basis of family regulation in Ireland for centuries to the detriment of women, men and children. Generations of Irish families have deviated from the traditional model. Yet, their stories have been overlooked, overshadowed and omitted from the narrative. Historians, sociologists and legal scholars have all captured the lives of historical and contemporary communities of Irish women and men whose family experiences sit outside the assumed norm. While each of these fields have developed a rich disciplinary body of literature, these perspectives have not yet been considered together. RIFNET sits at this nexus and makes an important intervention in scholarship and society to provide academic scholarship and resources. In bringing to the fore marginalised stories and side-lined experiences, this research network provides a powerful challenge to dominant narratives of the family. RIFNET will engage with the latest international research on the concept of family (Finch, 2007;Morgan, 2020), and in turn, will provide a model for analysing the family within a supposed homogeneous society which will be internationally significant. We aim to push the boundaries of existing knowledge to create a new model that captures the broad diversity and messy realities of Irish family life. Through a series of workshops and impact activities, RIFNET brings together scholars, policy-makers and the general public to engage in critical discussions about the Irish family, both past and present. The work is divided across five work packages, from which the following outputs will flow: * An embedded research network. * 2xECR Research seminar presentations. * Archival research on the family. * A primary source collection of oral histories and images for future analysis and research. * A methodological model for accessing, preserving and disseminating diverse family experiences in Ireland. RIFNET members may present findings on The Conversation or Radio Teilifis Éireann (RTÉ)'s 'Brainstorm' or through partner networks. * Academic workshop facilitating wider networking. * Special issue of high-impact journal. * Online exhibition of audio-visual sources on the Irish family. * A searchable and interdisciplinary academic database of researchers and research on the Irish family. *Biographies of RIFNET members.

The development of the radiocarbon (14C) dating technique represents one of the most significant events in the history of archaeological thought; with this innovative method archaeology really started again in the 1950s. Identifying when things happened in time (as well as where things happened in space) is central to the archaeological endeavour. Since the 1950s millions of pounds/euro have been spent in Ireland and the UK producing 14C measurements in order to undertake archaeological research. These measurements have been funded by government heritage agencies, by academic researchers, by archaeologists in professional practice, by local societies, and by research agencies including the IRC and the AHRC. The numbers of these data have significantly increased in the UK with changes in central planning policy, from Planning Policy Guidance 16 onwards and with the development of professional archaeological practice as part of the construction industry. In the Republic of Ireland, the construction boom associated with the 'Celtic Tiger' economy had a similar impact on the scale of the production of 14C data. The rapid expansion in the numbers of 14C data also underlines how central they are to all forms of archaeology, produced from every type of archaeological site, from the whole 60,000 years of human history when the technique can be used. However, 14C data can only be used effectively in subsequent research if they are correctly reported (Bayliss 2015; Millard 2014); because of a lack of training across the sector essential data attributes are often not reported or made publuc by researchers. If these attributes are lost or removed from radiocarbon measurements their utility becomes compromised and their value lessened. Ironically, given the importance of these data, there has been a global failure to curate them effectively. Across the UK and Ireland, there is no single functioning 14C archive. Because of this, millions of euros/pounds of data are being made rogue - with inaccurate, incomplete, or otherwise compromised 14C attributes often present in research literature. Moreover, the absence of international digital archives for these essential data is a significant barrier to research that seeks to work across national historic environment agency jurisdictions. This has major issues globally for archaeological research, and is especially true for Ireland and the UK, where many research objectives exist across borders, with datasets that do not respect the confines of contemporary nation states. Further, reporting standards mean that many existing 14C data are not interoperable with existing historic environment data management systems. The result is that we are impoverishing vast quantities of data of huge value, and that our research into, analyses of, and curation of the historic environment are similarly compromised. This project will address this significant, international problem for all archaeological research periods by transforming available data from across Ireland and the UK, reconstituting the essential attributes, and safeguarding these data for the future. We will use these data to achieve innovative Big Data analyses into the management of the historic environment, and into archaeological research across all periods and regions of the UK and Ireland. Our lasting legacy will be making these data and our analyses discoverable, open access, sustainable and functional for researchers to come, providing a sector-wide training legacy, and developing schools resources to educate the next generation of digital humanities researchers in the historic environment. We are supported in this work by our historic environment partners in national government, and national heritage agencies, and the digital infrastructure provided by the Archaeology Data Service which will secure this invaluable resource for the future.

The aim of the Network of UK-IRL researchers and partners is to address the challenges of uncovering hidden archaeological landscapes, buildings and monuments through digital documentation and visualisation. Heritage landscapes may remain hidden because their significance is simply not recognised or because knowledge of them is specific to specialists and not conveyed to the public. The transformative effect on knowledge exchange will be seen through communicating new knowledge to a socially inclusive public audience. The network includes archaeologists and heritage scientists from the University of Bradford, University of Aberdeen, NUI Galway and University College Cork. The UK partner is Historic Environment Scotland. IRL national partners include the National Monuments Service, the National Museum of Ireland and the Discovery Programme. The Burren and Cliffs of Moher UNESCO Global Geopark, the Burren College of Art, the Caherconnell Centre, Clare County Council, Wicklow County Council and the Carlow Archaeological and Historical Society are the regional and local partners, with key input from independent artist Sarah O'Connor. Researchers, partners and participants will develop the project through three workshops and a public symposium. Five discrete archaeological landscapes, in Rathgall, Co. Wicklow and the Burren, Co Clare, have been selected to showcase the project. A range of digital documentation and visualisation technologies will be trialled on hidden elements of (1) the unexplored settled landscape of Rathgall hillfort linked with a new Bronze Age social elite; (2) a large enclosure/ long cairn on Turlough Hill, a highly significant place for ritual gatherings in Neolithic and Bronze Age Burren; (3) artefacts from archaeological excavations at the medieval settlement enclosure of Caherconnell/ its multi-period landscape setting; (4) the unknown northern extent of the Chalcolithic - Early Bronze Age landscape of farms, field walls, and ritual monuments at Roughan Hill; and (5) a late medieval building which may have a hidden identity as a brehon law school, at Toomullin on the Atlantic coast of Burren. The narratives that we can generate about the material remains of human activity in the past is often limited by partial and broken views of the places in which individuals and communities once went about their lives. Digital technologies have the potential to extend and develop existing stories of places and can bring new narratives to bear on established views of the meaning of past built environments. Encouraging people working in different fields, especially in the creative industries to respond to and use 3D imagery and visualisation produced through the activities of this network will be an important dimension of the project. The National Museum of Ireland, the Burren College of Art (BCA) and independent artist, Sarah O'Connor will contribute to this creative process of reimagining the past in landscapes of the Burren and Wicklow. The project will also be a training opportunity for postgraduate students from Irish universities and QUB who will be invited to attend the technology trials and the public symposium. The use of digital documentation within archaeology and the humanities has the potential to stimulate interest from new and under-represented user groups - including young, disabled or otherwise disadvantaged sections in society - using dynamic, flexible and accessible delivery modes. Economic opportunities for heritage and tourism enterprises may also be promoted by the use of engaging/ immersive mixed (virtual and augmented) reality content of local monuments/ landscapes and by the creation of replicas and 3D prints of associated artefacts. The network will share knowledge through an interactive website, film and other artistic media together with 3D visualisation, mixed reality, and 3D prints of monuments and artefacts and a peer-reviewed journal article.