Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns

Houses and Homes

Rebecca Boyd

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Hardback

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English

Routledge
20 October 2023

Medieval European archaeology

Series: Routledge Archaeologies of the Viking World

Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns discusses the emergence of towns, urban lifestyles, and urban identities in Ireland. This coincides with the arrival of the Vikings and the appearance of the post-and-wattle Type 1 house. These houses reflect this crucial transition to urban living with its attendant changes for individuals, households, and society.

Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns uses household archaeology as a lens to explore the materiality, variability, and day-to-day experiences of living in these houses. It moves from the intimate scale of individual households to the larger scale of Ireland’s earliest urban communities. For the first time, this book considers how these houses were more than just buildings: they were homes, important places where people lived, worked, and died. These new towns were busy places with a multitude of people, ideas, and things. This book uses the mass of archaeological data to undertake comparative analyses of houses and properties, artefact distribution patterns, and access analysis studies to interrogate some 500 Viking-Age urban houses. This analysis is structured in three parts: an investigation of the houses, the households, and the town. Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns discusses how these new urban households managed their homes to create a sense of place and belonging in these new environments and allow themselves to develop a new, urban identity.

This book is suited to advanced students and specialists of the Viking Age in Ireland, but archaeologists and historians of the early medieval and Viking worlds will find much of interest here. It will also appeal to readers with interests in the archaeology of house and home, households, identities, and urban studies.

By: Rebecca Boyd
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 760g
ISBN: 9780367482787
ISBN 10: 0367482789
Series: Routledge Archaeologies of the Viking World
Pages: 274
Publication Date: 20 October 2023
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction: An Archaeology of Houses, of Towns and of Households; Part 1 – The Houses; 2. Ireland’s 9th century Viking-Age Settlements; 3. Ireland’s 10th- to 12th-century Viking-Age Towns; 4. Exploring the Houses; Part 2 – The Households; 5. Artefact Distribution Studies: Visible and Invisible Work Practices; 6. Access Analysis: Moving Around the House; 7. Exploring the Properties; Part 3 – The Town; 8. Urban Worlds and Urban Lives; 9. Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns: Where Next?

Rebecca Boyd is an archaeologist with a special research interest in the emergence of towns and urban life in Ireland’s Viking Age. She held a Government of Ireland Fellowship at the Department of Archaeology, University College Cork from 2019 to 2021. She obtained her PhD from University College Dublin in 2012. Her research interests span Ireland’s Viking Age, the archaeology of houses and households, crannogs, and public perceptions of heritage and archaeology.

Reviews for Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns: Houses and Homes

The vagaries of document survival often lead to top-down historical analysis: a handful of royals take up more pages than thousands of ordinary people. Rebecca Boyd's Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns: Houses and Homes is the perfect antidote to this problem. ... This is an academic book, dense with detail, research and references, but running through it all is a human story and one which Boyd is careful to keep at the forefront of her analysis. ... A fantastic work of scholarship"" Grace O'Keeffe, Editor, Archaeology Ireland This book offers a compelling and richly detailed examination of the residential architecture and urban development in Viking-Age Ireland. The author brings her expertise to bear in this comprehensive study that combines excavation data, archaeological theory and contemporary scholarship to illuminate the lives of Ireland's first townspeople. As the first book to explicitly compare the Viking-Age houses from Dublin, Cork and Waterford in detail, it is an essential resource for archaeologists and historians of the Viking period as well as those who research medieval Ireland and/or the past built environment. As such, this will no doubt be an essential addition to reading lists for students and a crucial reference point for understanding how these early urban centres shaped the cultural landscape of medieval Ireland. Dr. Sarah Kerr, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 2024