Culture, Class & Consumption: Ireland in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Summary

Archaeological investigations throughout the northern Irish port town of Carrickfergus have generated a vast collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century material culture, reflecting the role of the town as an entrepôt of early-modern Atlantic goods.  Carrickfergus was a heterogeneous settlement, with a mixture of Gaelic Irish, Scots, and English identities amongst a network of merchants, sailors, soldiers, and tradesmen.  The material culture is illustrative of the changes in attitudes towards consumption and materialism – at both a local and global level – in the seventeenth century, and of the commonalities of consumption and the development of a motivated consumerist society, particularly in terms of cross-class and cross-ethnicity hybridity.  References to surviving port accounts are insightful of the international trading links Carrickfergus was enjoying, and to the materiality of the emerging British and European Atlantic economies, demonstrating that Ireland was not on the periphery of this consumer revolution but rather was actively engaging in it.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions) 2018   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 1012