Significant exhibition to relaunch city museum

Date Published: 21-Jun-2011

By Denise McNamara

An 8,000-year-old fish-catching spear will be one of the highlights of the most significant natural history exhibition ever hosted in Galway which will mark the opening of the revamped Galway City Museum next week.

Hundreds of artefacts relating to Galway’s prehistoric and medieval past will feature in the collection which is on loan from the National Museum of Ireland.

Objects discovered on archaeological digs throughout the 1980s and 1990s in and around Galway City, as well as some more recent finds uncovered during the building of the M6 motorway.

“A significant event for both the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) and for Galway City Museum”, is how Mary Cahill, assistant keeper with the NMI, has described the loan.

Among the many highlights will be Neolithic (4000-2000BC) polished stone axe heads, Bronze Age Spearheads dating to 1300-1000BC found in the River Corrib during the 1980s and Bronze Age pottery dating back to approximately 2000 – 1800 BC.

The array of stone tools of flint and chert, such as scrapers and blades give a fascinating insight into prehistoric humans and their existence in Galway. Many of the tools would have been used to hunt and skin animals, cut meat and even to do some woodworking. One of the earliest objects on display will be a Mesolithic stone spearhead, which may have been used to catch fish, and dates back to approximately 6000BC.

Galway’s medieval past will also be represented with samples of ceramics from Ireland, England and all over Europe, as well as coinage, wine bottles and drinking glasses.

The medieval collection will draw attention to Galway’s trading past and an age when the so-called Tribes of Galway ruled the waters off the west coast of Ireland.

The artefacts will be on display on the ground floor from the end of next week in new high quality specially built showcases which were purchased with a grant from the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism and are designed to accommodate priceless, sensitive objects which need high regulated temperatures.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.