Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100 , livre ebook

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How did people create and live in their own worlds in early medieval Ireland? What did they actually do? And to what end did they do it? This book investigates and reconstructs from archaeological evidence how early medieval Irish people lived together as social groups, worked the land as farmers, worshipped God, made and used objects and buried their dead around them. It uses evidence from excavations conducted between 1930 and 2012 to explore how people used their landscapes, dwellings and material culture to effect and negotiate social, ideological and economic continuities and changes during the period ad 400-1100.

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Archaeology

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Publié par	Royal Irish Academy
Date de parution	01 avril 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781908996305
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	11 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,3750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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EARLY MEDIEVAL IRELAND, AD 400-1100
EARLY MEDIEVAL IRELAND, AD 400-1100
The Evidence from Archaeological Excavations
A IDAN O S ULLIVAN F INBAR M C C ORMICK T HOMAS R. K ERR L ORCAN H ARNEY
Royal Irish Academy Monographs
First published in 2013 (DOI: 10.3318/978-1-908996-29-9) by
Royal Irish Academy
19 Dawson Street
Dublin 2
Ireland
www.ria.ie
Hardback edition 2014 Reprinted 2021
Copyright Royal Irish Academy 2013, 2014, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or other means known or hereafter invented, including photocopying or recording, or otherwise without either the prior written consent of the publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency CLG, 63 Patrick Street, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, A96 WF25.
ISBN: 978-1-908996-30-5 (ePub)
978-1-908996-31-2 (mobi)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copyedited by Helena King
Cover design by Fidelma Slattery
Typeset by Datapage International Ltd
Printed by Industrias Gr ficas Castuera, S.A.
Royal Irish Academy is a member of Publishing Ireland, the Irish book publishers association
Front cover: Reconstruction of early medieval settlement with burial ground and possible church, excavated at Owenbristy, Co Galway; original drawing by Daniel Tietzsch-Tyler, for Eachtra Archaeology and the National Roads Authority.
Back cover: Plan of figure-of-eight dwelling, Deer Park Farms, Co. Antrim. Crown copyright; reproduced courtesy of the Northern Ireland Environment Agency.
Spine: Reconstruction of large round house, Moynagh Lough crann g, Co. Meath; drawing by Una Lee, reproduced courtesy of John Bradley.
This publication has received support from:
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface to the 2021 reprint
Acknowledgements
Authors Biographies
List of Figures
List of Plates
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 The History and Legacy of Early Medieval Archaeological Excavation in Ireland
Chapter 3 Early Medieval Dwellings and Settlements
Chapter 4 The Early Medieval Church
Chapter 5 Farming in Early Medieval Ireland
Chapter 6 Early Medieval Crafts and Technology
Chapter 7 Early Medieval Trade and Exchange
Chapter 8 Death and Burial in Early Medieval Ireland
Chapter 9 Conclusions
Appendix of Tables
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
It is appropriate that a book focusing on the practicalities of life in early medieval Ireland, the challenges, the resources, the know-how, the craft and the graft that made life not just tolerable but rich and varied, should itself arise from the very practical and pressing challenge of harvesting the immense corpus of new data arising from the decade of the development boom c . 1998-2008 and merging it into a canon of existing knowledge.
The decade 1998-2008 saw exponential increases in the numbers of archaeological excavations undertaken in Ireland, placing unsustainable pressure on the sector, and in particular on the regulatory bodies and the multitude of private archaeological companies that worked through the maelstrom that was Celtic Tiger Ireland . At the time, the prevailing attitude seemed to be get the archaeology excavated, there will be time to make sense of it later , with the result that an archive of monumental proportions now lies largely unprocessed, unsynthesised and unpublished (although some monographs and papers have started to appear). Worse still, such has been the scale of collapse in the economy that many of the archaeological companies responsible for the excavations have folded and disbanded, and there is simply no money left in the coffers to work on the material deriving from the excavations. Much of this was predictable.
This publication is the result of an archaeological policy innovation aimed to address this crisis. Following a request in 2006 by government to review the, sic , research needs in Irish archaeology , and after consulting widely, the Heritage Council in 2008 proposed a new research initiative called the Irish National Strategic Archaeological Research (INSTAR) programme. Since its inception, funding for this significant programme has been provided by the National Monuments Service of the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.
Whereas the INSTAR programme is intended broadly to contribute to a better understanding of Ireland s archaeological heritage, the key targets in 2008 were to stimulate and disseminate research on the major findings coming from the archive of unpublished excavations. This was achieved by encouraging and fostering research partnerships between the academic and private sectors of the archaeological profession, and encouraging north-south and international dimensions to the study of Ireland s rich archaeological heritage. Areas of particular focus were landscape, settlement, environment and economy.
Though the funding for INSTAR may have all but collapsed as a result of the economic crisis-from 1m in 2009 to 50k in 2013-testimony to the worthiness of the programme is how INSTAR has entered the lexicon of archaeological research in Ireland, and has been internationally acclaimed as a smart response to an archaeological crisis of this nature.
Far more enduring testimony, however, is this publication. With this book, ranging as it does from settlement and subsistence infrastructure to craftworking and trade, the public and researchers alike have access to the most up-to-date findings on the early medieval period: information on how people lived; how they fed, clothed and housed themselves; how they utilised the landscape and imprinted themselves on it. While the engine-room of this monograph is a synthesis of early medieval archaeological excavations in Ireland from 1930 to 2012, the introductory chapters also provide a historiography, a commentary and even an indicative road-map for the future. This publication will immediately establish itself as the standard textbook for the settlement, environment and economy of early medieval Ireland, with the added bonus of a commitment to regularly up-date.
One of the aims of this monograph is to make the material on Irish early medieval archaeology more accessible to international scholars. This is vital, because otherwise this material will either continue to be ignored, thus making international collaborations all the more difficult, or remain bound in the arrested clich of the island of Celts, saints and scholars, permanently consigned to the periphery of compendia of early medieval Europe. The sections in this publication on imported goods are not just a vital, up-to-date window onto the internationalisation of early medieval Ireland, they may in fact serve to alert international scholars to the relevance of the Ireland of that time, since trade is always a two-way street.
I would like to congratulate the team involved in this publication, and to thank the great numbers of archaeologists who contributed information and generously shared their findings and insights. I look forward to more publications from EMAP, and indeed from other INSTAR projects.
The need for programmes like INSTAR remains as acute as ever. A vast store of untapped data still exists and there is a professional and moral obligation to make use of it. Moreover, as every archaeologist knows, no matter how well documented they are, insights and observations acquired in the field or laboratory, like photographs, fade over time. The longer work remains unpublished the harder it is to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. This process of dissipation of knowledge acquired through archaeological excavation and research is being accelerated by unemployment, lack of opportunity and emigration. The great legacy our early medieval ancestors have bequeathed us demands the very best from today s archaeologists. If we are to benefit fully from the work and money that went in to excavating their monuments, we need to continue resourcing the analysis and publication of the information derived through those excavations.
Conor Newman,
Chairman, The Heritage Council of Ireland,
October 2013.
Preface to the 2021 reprint
Bibliography of publications on early medieval archaeology in Ireland since 2014
Since this book, Early medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100: the evidence from archaeological excavations , was published (online in October 2013, and in hard copy in Spring 2014), scholarship on early medieval archaeology in Ireland has obviously moved on. This brief (well, it started out as brief) bibliographical essay seeks to provide the reader with some sense of the books and papers published about the evidence from early medieval archaeological excavations in the years following the appearance of the EMAP white book .
First, we can highlight to the reader that after 2014 most of our EMAP reports (submitted to the Heritage Council as part of the requirements of its funding the EMAP project under the INSTAR programme and previously only available online) were edited and brought to hard-copy publication in the British Archaeological Reports (BAR) International Series. These EMAP red books include O Sullivan et al . (2014) Early medieval dwellings and settlements in Ireland, AD 400-1100 ; McCormick et al . (2014) Early medieval agriculture, livestock and cereal production in Ireland, AD 400-1100 ; and Kerr et al . (2015) Early medieval crafts and production in Ireland, AD 400-1100: the evidence from rural settlements . These monographs go into each subject in significant detail and include interpretative chapters and extensive gazetteers of hundreds of early medieval sites. A final EMAP digital report, Kerr, McCormick, and O Sullivan (2013) The economy of Early Medieval Ireland , put together some concluding thoughts on how the early medieval economy worked. This was not published as a BAR, but is available t