The Bronze Age in Ireland

Coffey wrote this survey while serving as keeper of Irish antiquities at the National Museum in Dublin, and he built it out of the objects themselves. Twelve chapters move through the copper celts and halberds of the transitional period, spear-heads and casting moulds, daggers and rapiers, gold lunulae, gorgets and sun-discs, leaf-shaped swords and shields, torcs, trumpets, sickles, pottery and ornament, tracing how each form changed. His larger argument is that Bronze Age Ireland was never sealed off: he saw a community of ideas reaching from Mycenae across the Continent and arriving in Ireland by way of the Danube, the Elbe and Scandinavia. The book gathers up research he had scattered through the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, written because no adequate account of the period existed. The 1913 edition carries eleven plates and eighty-five illustrations.