15/07/2026
Dorothy Kelly R.I.P.
Dr. Dorothy Kelly, who passed away on 11th May, served with distinction as a lecturer in Archaeology at UCD until her retirement in 2006-7. In a profession where research, teaching and administration vie for attention, Dorothy was ultimately a teacher. Every lecture she gave was researched, prepared, referenced and delivered with a thoroughness that might normally be reserved for a one-off set-piece presentation. She had the presence of a teacher, but her influence went far beyond that. When word of her death emerged, several of her former students posted comments on the Condolence Book and UCD School of Archaeology social media page to offer tributes describing her as ‘a great supervisor’, ‘my mother away from home’ and ‘a warm and cheerful presence in the department who wore her scholarship lightly’. One former student said she adored Dorothy’s classes, a former MA student remembered walking ringforts together in Rathkeale, and Dr. Sharon Greene remembers her importance as a role model for women students in the mid-1990s when the department was still heavily male-dominated.
Dorothy Hassett, as she was known before her marriage to fellow UCD academic Professor Aidan Kelly, was born in county Limerick in the mid-1940s. Trained originally as a schoolteacher, she taught for some years in Sutton, county Dublin before enrolling in 1980 as an undergraduate student in UCD. In 1983, she graduated with first class honours in Archaeology and History. So began Dorothy Kelly’s archaeological journey. She was awarded an MA degree in 1985, and a PhD in 1990 for her thesis on Aspects of Irish High Crosses. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, she published a series of articles, in JRSAI and elsewhere, dealing with High Crosses and related topics. She was a fine scholar and her contribution is best encapsulated in three of these papers. The first, in JRSAI volume 116 (1986), is based on her MA thesis completed a year earlier and sets about exploring the nature of the high cross phenomenon in terms of definition, total population, the underrated and understudied 46% she classified as plain, and the significance of solid-disk examples. The second, based on a chapter from her PhD, is entitled ‘The Heart of the Matter’ and argues that certain high crosses in Ireland and western Scotland are essentially wooden skeuomorphs, stone crosses based on wooden prototypes. The final one, a review article entitled ‘The High Crosses of Ireland’ (JRSAI 122) responded forensically to Peter Harbison’s three-volume illustrated corpus of high crosses (The High Crosses of Ireland: An Iconographical and Photographic Survey, published in Bonn, 1992). This final paper reflects a confident knowledge of the field and concludes with a section on the future of Irish high cross studies which, along with her lecture contributions in UCD, suggests that a book on Early Medieval art in Ireland would have been her crowning research achievement. However, Dorothy’s steady rate of production came to an end as commitments elsewhere took up increasing amounts of her time.
In the summer of 1982, while still an undergraduate student, she had been invited by the late Professor Michael Herity to assist with his survey of the extended historical landscape at Rathcroghan, county Roscommon. She also contributed massively to the preparation of his catalogue of finds from Irish Court Tombs (Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, volume 87C). Then, as Professor Herity embarked on a survey of the decorated slabs from island hermitages and associated mainland sites, Dorothy was again at his side.
For the 1989-90 academic year, she was part of a small team which pioneered a new tutorial system for First Year students of Archaeology. Not long afterwards, she was appointed to a part-time lectureship in Archaeology, and by 1996, this had become a fulltime permanent position, effectively the post occupied previously by Dr. Françoise Henry and then Hilary Richardson. From the beginning, Dorothy became a stalwart of the department, and the demands on her time grew as she was assigned responsibilities not just in the Archaeology unit but across the university. It is a measure of her quality that she was sometimes asked to undertake sensitive and confidential tasks, known only to a few, that were probably well above her grade. In 1992, she became Honorary General Secretary of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, a voluntary but incredibly demanding position she filled with distinction and typical thoroughness until 1998, and she also served as book review editor for the Society’s journal in 2004. In UCD, she gradually took over responsibility for the preparation of examination boards in the Department of Archaeology, and she took part wholeheartedly in a series of away days organised by Professor Barry Raftery in the late 1990s. This generated an entirely new curriculum for Archaeology, one upshot of which was the emergence of an MA stream in Art and Architecture in which she played a central role. In 2005, the University itself undertook a major overhaul of academic structures, and transformed the various individual lecturing programmes into a universal Modular system. Dorothy, as Teaching and Learning officer in the School of Archaeology, took on a heavy workload around this as we integrated our newly devised teaching programme into the university-wide structures. Once she knew what was needed, she set about implementing it with authority and precision, and the seamless transition to the new system in the School of Archaeology was primarily due to her. It was therefore a surprise when she confided in me a year or two later that she planned to take early retirement from UCD.
In retirement, she kept an eye on the School of Archaeology and often commented encouragingly and with a smile on its page to celebrate the various events and successes of its staff and students. However, she had a wide family network to whom she was very close, often mentioning over the years that she had family members staying at her house in Mount Merrion, and her life now gravitated more in that direction. We stayed in touch during those later years, but it was noticeable that Dorothy was becoming gradually more private. She was enduring a long illness, and it was ominous that her annual Christmas card did not arrive in 2025, but it was a shock to learn in June that she had passed away peacefully on 11 May 2026.
By nature, Dorothy was not one to highlight her achievements, but occasionally those working with her caught glimpses of successes she downplayed. As a student in her mid-30s, she was a member of the UCD women’s cross-country team and once intimated to Ursula Mattenberger that she had a background in sport. This was by way of dismissing her feat of tossing heavy Slab Survey equipment from the shore to a bobbing and dipping boat during an evacuation from an offshore island in a storm. At Rathcroghan, she comfortable negotiated the many precarious stone walls and barbed wire fences we met every day, and giggled at the misfortunes of those who accidentally touched an electrified wire or lost their footing on a loose stone. She was a wonderful companion in the field or in the university because she was always in good form and ready for a laugh but also focused firmly on the task in hand. She was loyal, independent-minded and dedicated to service. Tadhg O’Keeffe, who knew her in her student days and later as a colleague in UCD, has described her as “someone who facilitated everyone else’s success”. Let that epitaph stand as the greatest tribute that could be offered in her memory.
Dorothy Kelly is survived by her husband Aidan, her brothers Jonty and Charlie, her in-laws, goddaughter Katie and her other nieces and nephews.
Text: Muiris O’Sullivan
An edited version of this obituary for Dr Dorothy Kelly will be published in Archaeology Ireland, Autumn 2026, Vol. 40(3), No. 157.
Muiris O'Sullivan is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology and one-time head of school in the UCD School of Archaeology.
https://rip.ie/death-notice/dorothy-kelly-dublin-mount-merrion-630493
UCD School of Archaeology, UCD College of Social Sciences and Law, University College Dublin, UCD Alumni, National Museum of Ireland, National Monuments Service - Archaeology, Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland
