Beginning in the Neolithic, the Irish made their mark on the land with great stone and earthen structures. Their descendants developed stories to explain them. Some of these tales were said by Celtic scholar Kuno Meyer in 1911 to represent the “earliest voice from the dawn of western civilization.” In the century of Irish scholarship since Meyer the provenance of the early Irish epics has been moved forward in time to the early medieval, likely preceded by a long period of oral tradition.
The voices in this project belong not only to the bards of ancient Ireland. The Voices from the Dawn belong to all who have been moved by the power of these ancient sites: the farmers who have lived in their shadows, the poets who saw in them images of time cast in stone, and the archaeologists who have made them a passionate vocation.
Detailed and footnoted research is an important aspect of each of the pages in this project, as well as the virtual-reality environments and other graphics which bring an element of verisimilitude to the ancient monuments featured on the website. Voices from the Dawn is used as a teaching resource in a number of academic archaeology programs in Ireland.