WE STARTED DIGGING AND FOUND OURSELVES
When We Picked Up the Trowel, Everything Changed
WE WERE BOXED INTO CATEGORIES WE DIDN'T CREATE
For years, we were boxed into categories we didn’t create.
Sociologists observed us.
Policy-makers wrote about us.
Report writers measured us.
Always from a distance. Always through a lens we didn’t control.
Then we met archaeology and something shifted.
Not in theory. In the earth.
It became the first discipline to break the walls of assumption.
And once we started digging, we didn’t stop.
What Followed Was Not Just Research
It was an adventure equal parts science, memory, and myth.
Something closer to *Indiana Jones with a conscience.
FROM MARGINS TO MATERIAL EVIDENCE
Archaeology provided something no other field could: undeniable physical proof of cultural continuity. Not speculation. Not policy jargon. Not biased metrics. But tangible evidence that reveals a different Irish story one deeply rooted in continuity and resilience.
Kinship networks beyond blood
Burial patterns that mirrored Traveller funerals today
Non-hierarchical mobility and seasonal movement
Material culture that made sense to us not to the textbooks
“They were describing us only 3,000 years earlier.”
IT WASN'T ALWAYS WELCOMED
This work did not come without resistance.
Certain academic disciplines especially sociology were unsettled by what we were uncovering.
Why? Because it challenged the settled narrative.
It questioned the state’s constructed version of identity.
It exposed a long arc of survival that official Ireland spent decades trying to erase.
But science is on our side.
Modern archaeology alongside DNA analysis, isotopic testing, burial mapping, and kinship modelling is reshaping what we know about Ireland’s past.
Traveller culture can no longer be dismissed as a modern byproduct.
It is something far older.
A living, breathing echo of Indigenous Gaelic life.
Still walking.
Still remembering.
Still buried in the land.
and still standing above it.
OUR ROLE IN THIS WORK
- We don’t just observe archaeology.
- We participate in it.
- We bring cultural memory into the trench.
- We challenge biased readings of artefacts.
- We interpret landscape with knowledge passed through generations not drawn from British colonial archives.
This makes us unique.
At TraVision Foundation, we’re among the only groups in Ireland combining community insight with archaeological partnerships to offer a new, more honest model of interpretation.
And we’re only getting started.
WHY IT MATTERS GLOBALLY
Ireland is not the only colonised country where archaeology has been used to silence Indigenous truths.
Across the world from Canada to Australia state archaeology once erased what it should have preserved.
But now, the tide is turning.
Community guided, Indigenous-informed archaeology is not only possible it’s essential.
And what we’re learning in Ireland has relevance far beyond our island.
It tells a global story about memory, land, and survival.
JOIN THE DIG
Are you an archaeologist, researcher, museum curator, or educational institution ready to re-examine the past?
Do you want to explore interdisciplinary partnerships that honour science and cultural continuity equally?
Academic archaeology departments
Landscape historians and Neolithic researchers
Documentary and media collaborators
Museums ready to reframe their collections
Indigenous and decolonial scholars around the world
Let’s build a new map together.