Does anyone know anything about Burnt Mounds? What's your opinion - sauna or kitchen? Here's a link to an excellent article by Antony Weir about Irish Sweathouses, and there's some discussion of Burnt Mounds at the end of it (on the second page).

http://www.beyond-the-pale.co.uk/sweathouses.htm

For my own part, I think that burnt mounds are more likely to be saunas, probably used as a shamanic technique. These sites are bronze age, after all, so there were metal cauldrons to cook in and therefore no need to do complicated things like heating up stones to throw in a trench of water. There are five burnt mounds within a square mile of each other near my home - those people surely loved their saunas!