Ireland (Other Keyword)
26-48 (48 Records)
Following recent extreme weather events, one of the three Spanish Armada ships lost off the Sligo coast in Ireland in 1588 has again been revealed. The remains of La Juliana, the only Catalan ship of the three, is currently exposed. The State Underwater Archaeology Unit of the National Monuments Service (NMS) has been carrying out detailed recording, excavation and recovery of material throughout the summer to map the current site and protect vulnerable artefacts lying on the seabed. Several...
Landscape Archaeology & the Irish Chalcolithic – Early Bronze Age: Discovering Termon, Co. Clare, Ireland. (2018)
The Burren is a region located in southwest Ireland containing the highest concentration of wedge tombs in the county showing a significance of place in the Chalcolithic–Early Bronze Age. Contemporary to wedge tombs are large complex systems of settlement enclosures, farm fields, and other ritual monuments, which can be seen at sites across the Burren, such as Roughan Hill, Coolnatullagh, and Carran Plateau. Excavations at these sites have provided cohesive radiocarbon dates within the...
Life Continues as the Hearth Fire is Eternal: The McCarthy Family and Life in Post-Famine Ireland (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology on the Island of Ireland: New Perspectives" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. One cannot interpret the structure of everyday life without understanding the concept of family and household. Perhaps Henry Glassie said it best when he wrote that as archaeologists “we make meaning out of ruined houses, moving from pattern to change, logic to will, culture to history.” In this paper, we use...
Manifestations of Identity: Materiality, Meaning & Mediation in Early Modern & Contemporary Ireland. (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology on the Island of Ireland: New Perspectives" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Perhaps one of the most significant contributions made by historical archaeologists working throughout the island of Ireland is the promotion of archaeology’s remedial effects in terms of conflict mediation and reconciliation. Using the material record to challenge Ireland’s sense of cultural identity, key...
Marginality in a Connected World: Consumption and Consumerism in 19th-Century Rural Ireland (2017)
Although, the rural Irish are often characterized as a geographically and economically isolated people, their material culture reveals that in the nineteenth century, they were part of a growing global economy—one that circulated both goods and people around the British Empire and beyond. While the industrial revolution and the spread of capitalism allowed for greater access to a variety of goods for the rural Irish, they also maintained a class system that perpetually confined the rural poor to...
The Materiality of Cultural Resilience: The Archaeology of Struggle and Transformation in Post-famine Ireland (2018)
Cultural resilience or collapse has been the focus for the study of prehistoric and proto-historic societies. Little, if any work in historical archaeology, or the archaeology of the modern world, has linked the impact of traumatic natural events and social, economic, and political structures to how cultural groups respond. In this paper, cultural resilience theory is employed to discuss the capacity of a culture to maintain and transform its world-view, cultural identity, and critical cultural...
Materialized Mourning: House wakes and pipe use on Inishark and Inishbofin, County Galway, Ireland. (2015)
19th and 20th century Irish house wakes memorialized the dead in a spirit of remembrance, revelry, and community healing. A central aspect of the wake was the smoking of pipe tobacco, with funeral goers smoking in the house and at the burial ground often discarding their clay pipes after smoking. Archaeological excavations on Inishark Island, County Galway, Ireland, revealed complete and incomplete clay pipes in a deposit within building 8, a home dating to the late 19th century. By comparing...
Mesolithic Stone Tools and the Organization of Technology at Kenure, Ireland (2016)
During the late 1950s, the avocational archaeologist Gwendoline Stacpoole collected a sizable assemblage of stone tools from farm fields along Ireland's east coast near the town of Kenure, Rush, County Dublin. Stacpoole worked in collaboration with G.F. Mitchell at Trinity College, Dublin, and the assemblage from Kenure was ultimately donated to the National Museum of Ireland. In the summer of 2014, I analyzed a considerable sample of Stacpoole's collection from Kenure and this paper presents...
Networks of Material Mediation: Shopkeepers in Rural Community Social Dynamics (2017)
While archaeologists have explored networks of trade and exchange of manufactured goods between rural communities, regional market towns, and urban centers, less attention has been given to the way that rural shops and shopkeepers played a significant role in the accessibility and distribution of material goods in local economies. Focused on the emergence of rural shops in Western coastal Ireland and islands of Inishark and Inishbofin, 1840-1950, this study will contribute to an understanding of...
A Pilgrimage Lost and Found: Cultivation and the Cult of Saint Leo on Inishark, Co. Galway (2015)
Pilgrimage traditions on islands along the coast of Connemara in western Ireland provide a valuable context for exploring the relationship between ritual practice, identity, and political economic change from a long-term perspective. The island of Inishark, Co. Galway, contains a number of ritual remains dating from the 9th-13th centuries, including a church, a holy well, cross-slabs, one or more burial grounds, as well as a number of penitential stone platforms known as leachta. Islanders in...
Pilgrims and Pebbles: The Taskscape of Veneration on Inishark, Co. Galway (2017)
This paper explores how a relational approach centered on the concept of taskscape could reinvigorate analyses of how pilgrimages create, sustain, or transform human-environment relations. Medieval and modern traditions of pilgrimage in Ireland are renowned for their engagement with ‘natural’ places and objects, such as mountains, springs, and stones. Some take this focus as evidence of an animistic pre-Christian heritage, but few have questioned how such practices structured peoples’ ideas and...
Rapid climate change and demographic decline at the end of the Irish Bronze Age (2016)
The accumulation of large 14C data-sets over recent decades provides archaeologists with a substantial resource which has only recently begun to be systematically explored. Such data-sets offer the potential to explore temporal variations in the intensity of past human activity at a range of geographical scales, although the ‘reading’ of such data is far from unproblematic. One area of clear potential is the relationship between patterning evident in 14C and palaeoclimate data-sets. In this...
Re-use and Recycle: the various lives of prehistoric monuments (2015)
There are innumerable examples throughout prehistory (and history) of ancient monuments repurposed for a variety of reasons, such as the legitimation of power, land ownership and ancestry, among others. Today, many people, in particular Neo-Pagans, attempt to identify with past peoples and to incorporate ancient sites into their modern day religious beliefs. Although not inherently bad, interpretations of ancient sites through a Neo-Pagan lens tend to gloss over archaeological evidence and...
Religion, Memory and Materiality: Exploring the Origins and Legacies of Sectarianism in the North of Ireland (2018)
The early seventeenth-century Plantation of Ulster, in which the English Crown sought to plant loyal British colonists in the north of Ireland, is commonly understood as overtly religious in intent and action, and is viewed as the foundation for today’s dichotomous divide between Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland. However, archaeological and documentary evidence complicates this straightforward narrative by demonstrating considerable cultural exchange and the emergence of...
Ritual and Rag Trees in Contemporary Ireland (2017)
In Celtic countries, early Christianity was syncretized with pre-existing religious beliefs and rituals, some of which were maintained and modified through the centuries, while others were subsequently adopted but understood as ancient or essential. One ritual practice inhabiting the border of Christian and non-Christian tradition is seen in the Irish rag tree, a hawthorn with strips of cloth hanging from the branches, often located at holy wells or other Early Medieval ecclesiastical sites....
The Salmon of Knowledge: Determining the influence of marine-derived isotopes on the diets of medieval and early modern Irish populations (2015)
Many medieval and early modern villages and abbeys in County Galway, Ireland are situated directly on the coast. This study seeks to understand the pathways that marine resources follow as they enter diets of religious and lay Irish populations by using isotopic, ethnographic, and historical evidence. The isotopic portion of this study elucidates how marine-derived isotopes cycle through the coastal Irish landscape and are included in the diet. Ecological sampling on the Atlantic island,...
Space as place: understanding emptiness in archaeological landscapes (2015)
One of the basic tenets of the landscape approach in archaeology is that we need to think beyond the idea of discrete sites and consider instead the use of an entire landscape (or landscapes). From this perspective, places in a landscape that do not contain "sites" as understood in the conventional sense were nevertheless woven into the lives of ancient people. This means that, in order to understand the past, we need to understand both the places where people left things behind and the places...
Subsistence and Political Economy: Dairying and Change in Late Prehistoric Ireland (2017)
Cattle played a critical role in the economic and socio-political structure of the Iron Age in Ireland, yet the nature of this relationship is not yet clear. The Irish Iron Age (~500 BC - AD 500) is characterized by scant settlement evidence yet with several large, complex, ceremonial centers. It has been difficult, therefore, to contextualize the nature of social change leading into the Early Medieval Period. The Early Medieval Period (~ AD 500-1100), emerged with a fully-developed dairying...
Toward an Archaeology of Self-Liberation (2017)
Hierarchical, capitalist society, though inherently domineering and oppressive, creates spaces for self-actualization. These spaces, most often transitory and short-lived, allow for a degree of class-based self-liberation. Using ideas from anarchist thinkers, I explore the concept of self-liberation with specific reference to two archaeological sites: the seventeenth-century maroon community of Palmares in northeast Brazil, and a nineteenth-century tenant-farming community in central Ireland...
The Trip of a Lifetime: Archaeology, Tourism, and Irish-American Identity (2015)
In America, millions of people claim Irish ancestry and celebrate their heritage in myriad ways. Many actively embrace the identity of Irish-American generations after their family members became U.S. citizens in the aftermath of the famine and socio-political turmoil of the mid-19th to early 20th century. Over the past two decades, the tourism industry in Ireland has flourished with Americans among the most numerous visitors each year. Several of the top destinations are those connected to...
Understanding the Irish Famine Using Deep Neural Networks and Protolanguage (2017)
Drawing from historical records and archaeological data, we used multilayer neural networks to construct a sociocultural model of the Irish Famine. We found that Capital Exchange optimization for non-elites frequently contained polynomial-time mappings to the Assignment and Knapsack problems (which are both NP-hard). However, we only occasionally encountered nontrivial instances of these mappings when the same algorithms were applied to elites. That pattern of asymmetric computational...
Why We Need to Succeed: Assessing the Outcomes of Community Archaeology Practices in County Galway, Ireland (2016)
Public involvement and collaboration with communities are major concerns for archaeologists around the world. Community outreach efforts are major components of research projects and require an immense amount of resources. Further, different stakeholders have varied responses to those efforts. This paper uses data from the Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast (CLIC) project’s community outreach on Inishark and Inishbofin, County Galway, Ireland, islands five miles into the Atlantic Ocean. This...
Working on the Margins of the Modern World and Within Archaeology: The Historical Archaeology of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentith-Century Ireland (2017)
In Ireland, historical, post-medieval, or modern world archaeology as a discipline is located on the margins. The time period and material comprising our research is argued by many to be relevant only to the pursuits of historians and folk studies. In this paper I discuss the importance and relevance of a discipline on the margins and the study of Ireland’s impoverished class during the last decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This marks one of the most dynamic periods in Ireland’s...