Life Continues as the Hearth Fire is Eternal: The McCarthy Family and Life in Post-Famine Ireland

Summary

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 the standing ruins of a late 19th-century house and the objects recovered archaeologically to make meaning of how an Irish household structured their physical and social space. The household as the central unit of analysis both structures and is deeply implicated in the social reproduction of individuals. It is within the spaces of the house where social identities are learned, constructed, questioned, resisted, and transformed. This paper brings together oral and written histories alongside archaeological data to create a narrative highlighting one family’s experiences in late 19th-century West Cork.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Historical Archaeology on the Island of Ireland: New Perspectives

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 186