Exploring the Gaelic Social Order through Castle Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Exploring the Gaelic Social Order through Castle Archaeology," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In Western Europe Gaelic social and political systems persisted up to the Early Modern period. The aristocratic stratum of these societies commenced to construct fortified residences of stone between the 13th and 15th centuries AD. Despite the information potential of these compounds for informing about the organization of Gaelic society, cultural social interactions between Gael and non-Gael, the medieval political economy, and about changes to the Gaelic social order itself caused by interaction or integration with state-level political systems there has been very little investigation of these residences until recently. The participants in this symposium will report on the results of recent projects undertaken in Ireland and other Gael cultural areas that shed light on these topics.