Two 4,000-year-old Bronze Age burial bowls have been recovered intact from cist graves on a Donegal farm.
Also found on the site were the intact remains of a young man and the cremated remains of another person, probably a woman in her early 20s.
Burial bowls have been recovered from about 100 sites in the country, but intact examples of such bowls are quite rare and the discovery of two in such good condition is rarer still.
The discovery was made on Mr David Patterson's farm in Liscooley, Castlefinn, Co Donegal when he was excavating the foundations for a shed.
Mr Patterson contacted the archaeological section of the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, and the investigation was carried out by senior archaeologist Mr Victor Buckley.
He said the two cist, or stone-lined graves, had been covered with massive stone capstones which were removed. "When we lifted the first capstone, we found an intact bowl of a highly decorated type accompanying a cremation."
He said that the second cist contained another bowl, again, highly decorated, which had been buried with unburnt human remains.
The bowls, he explained, had been made from strips of clay which had been pressed together and then individually decorated in vertical and diagonal bands. "They were made from local clay and fired in an oven. Intact examples of these bowls are quite rare and less than 100 bowls, most of them in poor condition, have been recovered."
He said the skeleton was that of a young man whose genes were those inherited by 3.7 million Irish people. At nearly 12 years of age, he would have been a father in a time when 35 years of age was old.
He said the 4,165 fragments of bone from the cremation were deemed to be those of an adult, probably a woman aged between 20-25 years.
The find went on display for a day at the Customs House, Dublin yesterday.