Materialized Mourning: House wakes and pipe use on Inishark and Inishbofin, County Galway, Ireland.

Author(s): Ian Kuijt; Sara Morrow; Katie Shakour

Year: 2015

Summary

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 clay pipes from building 8 with other excavated sites from Inishark, and neighboring Inishbofin, we examine how unique properties of the building 8 assemblage reveal information on use and discard of pipes and other contextual material regarding funerary practices. This poster examines how pipes were used in a daily context of island life, but also how they may have transcended that role and were repurposed into ceremonies of death and burial given the relative isolation and unpredictable access to goods on the island. As a result, islander wake customs during the 19th and early 20th century fostered local community ties, shared regional identity and engagement with symbols of resistance to colonial rule.

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Cite this Record

Materialized Mourning: House wakes and pipe use on Inishark and Inishbofin, County Galway, Ireland.. Sara Morrow, Ian Kuijt, Katie Shakour. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 397001)

Keywords

Geographic Keywords
Europe

Spatial Coverage

min long: -11.074; min lat: 37.44 ; max long: 50.098; max lat: 70.845 ;