Neil Carlin (University College Dublin, Ireland), Jessica Smyth (The Heritage Council) and Eoin Grogan

In the past 10 years, development-led excavation in Ireland has revealed a far greater range and distribution of Grooved Ware sites than previously known, with the pottery occurring in a much more complicated set of contexts at both a landscape and a feature level. Large numbers of Grooved Ware-associated timber circles have also been recorded, their circular and square settings sometimes isolated and reworked in different settings. This paper will give an overview of the new evidence and examine the contribution that this makes to understanding the use and meaning of Grooved Ware in Ireland and Britain. In the light of recent discoveries in the Orkney Islands and southern England, it is also timely to examine the form of Irish Grooved Ware structures and their role in the interplay between ritual and domestic worlds in the late Neolithic.