Archaeology uncovered in the course of the Luas works included a burial ground, a foundry, a collection of pikes thought to date from 1798, and gardens which had once bounded O'Connell Street. Tim O'Brien reports.
The artefacts - all of which were handed over to the National Museum - also include tools which had been used by the original railway workers constructing the Harcourt Street Railway Line, and Bronze Age fulacht fiadhs or cooking troughs.
Possibly the most gruesome find was in the vicinity of the former Maguire and Patterson premises in the north inner city where the remains of a young man was uncovered outside the grounds of St Michan's Church. The body appeared to have been oriented east in the Christian tradition but some of the head was missing - possibly due to the footprint of a much later building on site.
The skeleton was thought to date from the 1700 or slightly earlier according to the Railway Procurement Agency's chief architect Mr Jim Quinlan. Mr Quinlan adds that the same area which is now being developed as a new street - currently known as Tram Street - has yielded "some evidence of a foundry and old lead piping from a very old water system for the inhabitants of the area".
Another interesting find was a bunch of five pikes which was discovered in the bed of the old canal at Rialto.
Here the Grand Canal once branched off towards the Guinness factory and the spur was only filled in in the 1970s, when it became a linear park, according to Mr Quinlan.
However in the late 1700s or early 1800s anyone wanting to get rid of incriminating evidence of participation in the 1798 rebellion in a hurry, may well have decided to dump them in the canal.
Since Luas runs along the linear park parallel to Suir Road and at this point along the old bed of the canal spur, all work was brought to a halt when the pikes were discovered. However, no further artefacts were revealed reinforcing the theory that the pikes had been a once-off, and the work on the line resumed within a few hours.
It was at Ballymount that the fulacht fiadhs were uncovered which according to Mr Quinlan are most likely Bronze Age or possibly early Iron Age.
Also discovered in Ballymount was the remains of a a mediaeval farm yard which was catalogued and recorded by archaeologists working for the RPA. The record of the find is now in the national museum with the other artifacts recovered.
Also "preserved by record" are the houses in Mary's Abbey and Aran Quay at the city end of the Tallaght Line which were demolished to make way for Luas. Pictures of the exterior and interiors of the houses were combined with maps as part of the record.
In the O'Connell Street area some of the most remarkable finds were the walls of gardens which would have sealed off Sackville Street, separating it from the river.
On the Green Line the works famously uncovered basements of the buildings on Harcourt Street - when the road fell in on top of them! Many of the basement cellars had been sealed off from the Harcourt Street premises for many years and were unknown to the current owners and occupiers of the buildings.
Elsewhere on the Green line little of archaeological interest was uncovered, due to the fact that the line had already been excavated in about 1858 for the building of the Harcourt Street Railway Line.
"We found some ballast rock from the cutting dug for the line through Kilmacud Dundrum and some of the tools the workers would have used but nothing of huge significance", said Mr Quinlan.
So will we ever see an exhibition of artefacts uncovered by the Luas construction? "No, the museum wouldn't let us keep any", said Mr Quinlan. "We asked but they couldn't set a precedent.