Eugene Costello | University College Cork (original) (raw)
Books by Eugene Costello
https://boydellandbrewer.com/transhumance-and-the-making-of-ireland-s-uplands-1550-1900-hb.html (... more https://boydellandbrewer.com/transhumance-and-the-making-of-ireland-s-uplands-1550-1900-hb.html (35% off with code BB135)
ISBN: 9781783275311
The rearing of cattle is today a fairly sedentary practice in Ireland, Britain and most of north-west Europe. But in the not-so-distant past it was common for many rural households to take their livestock to hill and mountain pastures for the summer. Moreover, ethnographic accounts suggest that a significant number of people would stay in seasonal upland settlements to milk the cows and produce butter and cheese. However, these movements all but died out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, meaning that today transhumance is mainly associated with Alpine and Mediterranean landscapes.
This book is the first major interdisciplinary approach to the diversity and decline of transhumance in a northern European context. Focusing on Ireland from c.1550 to 1900, it shows that uplands were valuable resources which allowed tenant households to maintain larger herds of livestock and adapt to global economic trends. And it places the practice into a social context, demonstrating that transhumance required highly organized systems of common grazing, and that the care of dairy cows amounted to a rite of passage for young women in many rural communities.
EAA Members can contact 'administrator@e-a-a.org' for 30% discount. Now available in paperback -... more EAA Members can contact 'administrator@e-a-a.org' for 30% discount.
Now available in paperback - https://www.routledge.com/Historical-Archaeologies-of-Transhumance-across-Europe/Costello-Svensson/p/book/9780815380320
Transhumance is a form of pastoralism that has been practised around the world since animals were first domesticated. Such seasonal movements have formed an important aspect of many European farming systems for several thousand years, although they have declined markedly since the nineteenth century. Ethnographers and geographers have long been involved in recording transhumant practices, and in the last two decades archaeologists have started to add a new material dimension to the subject.
This volume brings together recent advances in the study of European transhumance during historical times, from Sweden to Spain, Romania to Ireland, and beyond that even Newfoundland. While the focus is on the archaeology of seasonal sites used by shepherds and cowherds, the contributions exhibit a high degree of interdisciplinarity. Documentary, cartographic, ethnographic and palaeoecological evidence all play a part in the examination of seasonal movement and settlement in medieval and post-medieval landscapes. Notwithstanding the obvious diversity across Europe in terms of livestock, distances travelled and socio-economic context, an extended introduction to the volume shows that cross-cutting themes are now emerging, including mobility, gendered herding, collective land-use, the agency of non-elite people and competition for grazing and markets.
The book will appeal not only to archaeologists, but to historians, geographers, ethnographers, palaeoecologists and anyone interested in rural lifeways across Europe.
Published papers by Eugene Costello
Journal of Field Archaeology, 2024
Grazing livestock in uplands was a widespread practice in late Medieval and early modern Europe, ... more Grazing livestock in uplands was a widespread practice in late Medieval and early modern Europe, but there can be uncertainty about the date and function of archaeological sites associated with herding. This paper reviews fieldwork on such sites in northern and northwestern Europe and reports on the excavation of a hut and enclosure in the mountains of southwestern Ireland. The hut was found to have been built in the 16th or 17th centuries A.D. and was probably used to oversee dairy animals (likely cows). The enclosure was dated to the early 18th or early-mid-19th century A.D. and is more likely associated with goat milking. The excavations demonstrate that construction dates can be obtained for pastoral sites in uplands of northwestern Europe. Furthermore, with careful reading of features in the surrounding landscape and consideration of documentary and ethnographic evidence, fieldwork can help determine the nature of pastoral economies over time.
Agricultural History Review, 2023
In this roundtable, three early-career historians discuss relationships between early modern agri... more In this roundtable, three early-career historians discuss relationships between early modern agricultural and environmental history in Britain and Ireland. The discussion focuses on how the growing field of environmental history can both contribute to and ask new questions of agricultural history, particularly through an attention to each subdiscipline’s history, sources, methods and key debates. Britain and Ireland provide the geographical focus due to their rich traditions of early modern agricultural history, which contrast with the relatively recent development of early modern environmental histories of the region. The contributors bring their varied disciplinary training in environmental, social and intellectual history and archaeology to bear on questions that trace and blur the boundaries of environmental and agricultural history and offer fresh perspectives on their future intersections.
Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 2023
This paper uses interdisciplinary methods to investigate responses to the Little Ice Age in regio... more This paper uses interdisciplinary methods to investigate responses to the Little Ice Age in regions where livestock farming was dominant, a neglected subject due to the scarcity of detailed written records regarding pastoral land use. It argues that landscape-level histories which include pollen evidence and archaeology can address this challenge and reveal local processes of climate adaptation. Here we focus on Ireland and Scotland and a fascinating rise in small-scale cereal cultivation on upland pastures during the Little Ice Age. Bayesian modeling is used to test the chronological resolution of field evidence and compare it with climate reconstructions. We can see that the cultivation emerged in late medieval times, when cattle were facing climate-related stresses, and increased in early modern times during the Little Ice Age's main phase. We suggest that it started in an indirect adaptation to climate change, supplementing supplies of food and fodder for pastoralists, but increased as rural populations and external market demands grew. There is a need for finer temporal resolution in pollen records and archaeology, as well as greater integration with socioeconomic history, if we are to be more certain about changes in the relative significance of climate in pastoral land use.
Journal of Migration History, 2022
This article offers a critical re-examination of Early Modern migrations to Ireland and their eff... more This article offers a critical re-examination of Early Modern migrations to Ireland and their effect on farming practices, c.1580–1660. During and after the English conquest of Ireland, tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of settlers arrived from Britain. Focusing on Munster and to a lesser extent Ulster, I argue they were not greeted with an agricultural tabula rasa ripe for ‘improvement’. In contrast to what Tudor writers claimed, and what some scholars today have assumed, cereal cultivation and field enclosure already formed important elements in the agricultural landscape. Changes clearly took place, but English, Welsh and Scots settlers also made some remarkable adaptations by accepting local breeds of livestock and relying economically on forms of semi-mobile pastoralism that earlier writers had decried. Looking outside Ireland helps to evaluate their actions, since livestock mobility was widespread in contemporary European pastoralism, and if anything contributed to, rather than conflicted with, the commercialisation of farming.
Seasonal Settlement in the Medieval and Early Modern Countryside, 2021
This paper sheds light on the neglected question of how archaeologists might imagine and identify... more This paper sheds light on the neglected question of how archaeologists might imagine and identify evidence of seasonal land use in medieval Ireland (c. 450-1600). Up to now, research on seasonal resource exploitation in Ireland's past has focused on the post-1550 period, and primarily on upland booley sites used in transhumance. Archaeologists have not paid very much attention to earlier seasonality, and when they do there is usually an emphasis on sites rather than landscapes. To understand the role of seasonal land use in the medieval Irish economy, and ascertain where it took place, we need a conceptual framework that takes a site's physical resource catchment into account as well as its social occupants. A remarkable text from the early second millennium AD provides a starting point. Outlining the story of a rich lowland farmer on a grazing circuit in the Wicklow Mountains, it offers an insight into seasonal upland 'taskscapes', including the grazing of cows in woodland pasture, the number of people who travelled, and the association of such activity with hunting. The paper then assesses the archaeological evidence for such activities around Ireland, concluding that it has been quite meagre. In addition to a bias in development-led excavation towards fertile lowland areas, a number of recent land-use trends have impacted the archaeological record of Ireland's lower upland slopes, i.e. those most likely to be used in medieval times. These trends include 18th-and 19th-century population growth and upland improvement as well as 20th-century afforestation and mechanisation. The paper proposes a nationwide programme of remote sensing to define the country's remaining sections of unenclosed, unimproved, and unplanted hillsides below 300 m a.s.l., followed by field survey to select structures of potentially medieval form within them, and trial excavation to obtain dates and potentially environmental proxies from them.
Medieval Archaeology, 2021
THE STUDY OF HOW MEDIEVAL FARMERS colonised upland environments, and lived there on a year-round ... more THE STUDY OF HOW MEDIEVAL FARMERS colonised upland environments, and lived there on a year-round basis, can provide valuable insights on the long-term adaptability and resilience of rural communities. Yet there is a lack of clarity on the extent and chronology of this phenomenon in Britain and Ireland, and how to explain it without simplistic climate, population or market determinism. By undertaking a critical review of the evidence for upland colonisation across medieval Britain and Ireland, this article demonstrates that ‘glocal’ perspectives are crucial. Locally favourable geology, non-agrarian resources, and prior domestication of sites through prehistoric settlement and transhumance all encouraged upland colonisation. Indeed, when combined with regional socio-economic trends, these local factors sometimes overrode wider climatic conditions. As researchers look increasingly to large-scale modelling of land-use change, this article provides a reminder not to lose sight of the local landscape context and environmental knowledge of the peoples they are studying.
Landscape Research, 2020
This article responds to calls for the historical sciences to inform adaptation in the Anthropoce... more This article responds to calls for the historical sciences to inform adaptation in the Anthropocene, in this case, the sustainability of hill farming in view of EU habitat conservation. Focusing on Kerry, Ireland, it highlights the difficulties that conservation of upland bog, heath and grassland habitats faces due to rural depopulation. It then uses landscape history to assess the long-term feasibility of conserving/restoring these habitats according to EU directives, pointing to the remarkably recent disappearance of woodland due to grazing and deforestation. Instead of being ‘traditional’, as conservation discourse holds it to be, historical management of uplands by farmers could vary greatly depending on sociopolitical factors and economic trends. I discuss how this historical ecology of change helps to explain the failure of conservation in parts of Ireland, and outline how ‘lessons from the past’ may contribute to sustainable upland management if co-evolution is accepted as an on-going process.
World Archaeology, 2018
This article investigates the socio-cultural role of temporary habitation sites associated with s... more This article investigates the socio-cultural role of temporary habitation sites associated with short-distance transhumance in upland and outland pastures of northern Europe. Comparing recent archaeological fieldwork with neglected ethnohistorical information, the author discusses the extraordinary social and sexual freedoms which unmarried young people – particularly young women – experienced in summer pastures of post-medieval Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. Shieling sites and booley sites were places where female-specific traditions of work and leisure were reproduced seasonally with minimal male interference. However, this autonomy was ultimately curtailed by the economic importance of what young women were doing in the hills, namely, looking after dairy cows and ewes. Adult males maintained subtle control over the architecture of seasonal sites and formed a noticeable presence in uplands thanks to occasional industrial activities. Seasonal transhumant sites demonstrate that temporary places in so-called ‘marginal’ landscapes can greatly enhance the study of social practice in non-elite rural communities.
Post-Medieval Archaeology, 2017
This paper examines parish church sites in County Limerick and their evolving meanings as a resul... more This paper examines parish church sites in County Limerick and their evolving meanings as a result of Ireland’s unsuccessful Protestant Reformation. Unusually for Europe, most Irish parish churches fell into ruin from 1550 to 1700. Conquest, loss of patronage and the Anglican Church of Ireland's failure to convert most native Catholics ensured that.
Nevertheless, local memories continued to draw people to these sites. There is evidence for Catholic burial in the 18th and 19th centuries, conversion of chancels into burial plots and, sometimes, church maintenance or construction by Anglicans. These activities all reveal contemporary concerns with history, identity and legitimacy.
Journal of Social Archaeology, 2017
This article explores the perception and practice of everyday life at transhumant settlements in ... more This article explores the perception and practice of everyday life at transhumant settlements in western Ireland during the period, c.1750-1920 AD. Small-scale summer transhumance to upland pastures was once widespread in Ireland. Dairy cows would be sent by families to hill and mountain commonages, with herders milking the cows and making butter. Recent archaeological and oral historical research has shown that these people dwelled in small structures known as booley houses, which have a high degree of variability in construction, distribution, and use. Unlike Continental European pastoralism, but similar to Scandinavia, it seems to have been mostly young people who occupied booley sites. With oral tradition and field evidence, this article addresses the social implications of seasonal re-location to liminal landscapes, and how it functioned as a didactic rite of passage. Furthermore, it demonstrates the flexibility of pastoral communities as work routines changed over time at both home and booley.
![Research paper thumbnail of Feirmeoirí faoi cheilt: dul chun cinn agus dúshláin sa taighde faoi ghnás an bhuailteachais [Hidden farmers: progress and challenges in the study of transhumance]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/58142102/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Béaloideas: Journal of the Folklore Society of Ireland, 2016
This article revisits the seasonal farming practice of booleying (buailteachas) which died out in... more This article revisits the seasonal farming practice of booleying (buailteachas) which died out in Ireland during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Booleying was a form of agro-pastoral farming which involved the seasonal movement of people and cattle to pastures in marginal land, where they generally stayed for the duration of the summer, if not slightly longer. It is a small-scale relative of transhumance practices that still take place in some parts of continental Europe. The article assesses the progress that has been made in understanding booleying in the seventy to eighty years since folklorists attempted to collect detailed information on the practice from elderly people, largely in the west of Ireland. It points out that it has not been studied in detail since that period by ethnographers, whose interest in booleying lay mainly in data collection and presentation. Inevitably, as the ethnographic sources dried up, so did scholarship in the discipline. Moreover, booleying systems in the east and south of Ireland have been ignored, since here memories of the practice were weaker or non-existent. The author uses examples from Munster to show that a combination of archaeological, historical and placename evidence can retrieve details about the operation of booleying. The usefulness of placenames is evaluated in particular since these are available even when other evidence of booleying has not survived. Ultimately, no one source is without challenges. As further archaeological work increases our knowledge of the material culture, a multi-disciplinary approach is necessary to bringing this somewhat elusive but integral aspect of Irish farming heritage to light and doing justice to the Irish Folklore Commission’s fieldwork.
The results from ongoing research into the practice of transhumance-referred to as booleying in I... more The results from ongoing research into the practice of transhumance-referred to as booleying in Irelandin the peninsula of Iorras Aithneach, south-western Connemara, Co. Galway are presented. Transhumance, in Ireland as in other parts of Europe, is a strategy that involves the seasonal movement of people and livestock, to pastures distant from the main farmsteads for periods of at least some weeks and often months. Cattle, especially dairy cows, were central to the system in Ireland. The study area, Iorras Aithneach, is of particular interest in that the practice of booleying persisted here until the start of the twentieth century. My focus is on the period ca. 1750-1910 when ethnographic and cartographic sources are available which help in elucidating when, where and why booleying took place in the study area. Use of aerial photography, in conjunction with ground proofing, has led to the identification and characterisation of several structures in the Iorras Aithneach uplands associated with booleying. This archaeological evidence, in the form of booley houses or brácaí, complements other sources of evidence for the local importance of booleying. Booleying served two main purposes, namely, conserving land at the permanent farmstead for crops and grazing over the winter period (winterage), and providing a nutritional balance in the animal feed by rotating grazing between lowland and upland sites for extended periods of several weeks at a time. It is shown that there were distinct linkages between coastal (lowland) townlands where the main farmsteads were situated and townlands in the uplands (interior of the peninsula) where the summer pastures were located. The grazing rights, especially in the uplands, were defined by traditions of mutual understanding rather than fences and routeways as is often the case in modern farming in Ireland, even in marginal areas such as Iorras Aithneach.
Landscape History, 2016
This paper discusses the complexity of archaeological evidence associated with seasonal upland se... more This paper discusses the complexity of archaeological evidence associated with seasonal upland settlement in Ireland, a subject which has only recently started to come to light. As a result of the lack of attention, many uncertainties remain in the interpretation of upland sites compared to lowland archaeology. The paper uses a casestudy of the Galtee Mountains in the south of Ireland, where it focuses on the material culture of transhumance in the post-medieval period. It explores two important aspects of this: first, the activities of transhumant herders in the wider landscape as revealed by the various material remains they have left behind; and second, the identification of chronological depth in these landscapes, as revealed by the morphology of summer (booley) houses and the context in which they are found.
Landscape History, 2015
This paper examines evidence for transhumance in the Galtee Mountains during the post-medieval pe... more This paper examines evidence for transhumance in the Galtee Mountains during the post-medieval period, c.1600–1900AD, and attempts to explain the reasons for its decline. The results of field survey into seasonal upland structures (or booley houses) occupied during this time are discussed while considering the difficulties involved in their identification and dating. In the parish of Kilbeheny, it is shown how a number of these booley houses were used in a nineteenth-century system of small-scale transhumance, contrasting this with what appears to have been a more important form of the practice in the mid-seventeenth century. The paper then goes on to demonstrate how population growth and the commercialisation of farming in the intervening period contributed to the marginalisation of transhumance in the regional farming economy. It is speculated that much of the extant archaeological evidence for seasonal settlement belongs to a post-1750, reduced, form of transhumance in which the produce of dairying was vital to the semi-subsistence farming carried on by tenants relatively new holdings in the foothills.
Transhumance is a form of pastoralism that has been practised around the world since animals were... more Transhumance is a form of pastoralism that has been practised around the world since animals were first domesticated. Such seasonal movements have formed an important aspect of many European farming systems for several thousand years, although they have declined markedly since the nineteenth century. Ethnographers and geographers have long been involved in recording transhumant practices, and in the last two decades archaeologists have started to add a new material dimension to the subject.
https://boydellandbrewer.com/transhumance-and-the-making-of-ireland-s-uplands-1550-1900-hb.html (... more https://boydellandbrewer.com/transhumance-and-the-making-of-ireland-s-uplands-1550-1900-hb.html (35% off with code BB135)
ISBN: 9781783275311
The rearing of cattle is today a fairly sedentary practice in Ireland, Britain and most of north-west Europe. But in the not-so-distant past it was common for many rural households to take their livestock to hill and mountain pastures for the summer. Moreover, ethnographic accounts suggest that a significant number of people would stay in seasonal upland settlements to milk the cows and produce butter and cheese. However, these movements all but died out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, meaning that today transhumance is mainly associated with Alpine and Mediterranean landscapes.
This book is the first major interdisciplinary approach to the diversity and decline of transhumance in a northern European context. Focusing on Ireland from c.1550 to 1900, it shows that uplands were valuable resources which allowed tenant households to maintain larger herds of livestock and adapt to global economic trends. And it places the practice into a social context, demonstrating that transhumance required highly organized systems of common grazing, and that the care of dairy cows amounted to a rite of passage for young women in many rural communities.
EAA Members can contact 'administrator@e-a-a.org' for 30% discount. Now available in paperback -... more EAA Members can contact 'administrator@e-a-a.org' for 30% discount.
Now available in paperback - https://www.routledge.com/Historical-Archaeologies-of-Transhumance-across-Europe/Costello-Svensson/p/book/9780815380320
Transhumance is a form of pastoralism that has been practised around the world since animals were first domesticated. Such seasonal movements have formed an important aspect of many European farming systems for several thousand years, although they have declined markedly since the nineteenth century. Ethnographers and geographers have long been involved in recording transhumant practices, and in the last two decades archaeologists have started to add a new material dimension to the subject.
This volume brings together recent advances in the study of European transhumance during historical times, from Sweden to Spain, Romania to Ireland, and beyond that even Newfoundland. While the focus is on the archaeology of seasonal sites used by shepherds and cowherds, the contributions exhibit a high degree of interdisciplinarity. Documentary, cartographic, ethnographic and palaeoecological evidence all play a part in the examination of seasonal movement and settlement in medieval and post-medieval landscapes. Notwithstanding the obvious diversity across Europe in terms of livestock, distances travelled and socio-economic context, an extended introduction to the volume shows that cross-cutting themes are now emerging, including mobility, gendered herding, collective land-use, the agency of non-elite people and competition for grazing and markets.
The book will appeal not only to archaeologists, but to historians, geographers, ethnographers, palaeoecologists and anyone interested in rural lifeways across Europe.
Journal of Field Archaeology, 2024
Grazing livestock in uplands was a widespread practice in late Medieval and early modern Europe, ... more Grazing livestock in uplands was a widespread practice in late Medieval and early modern Europe, but there can be uncertainty about the date and function of archaeological sites associated with herding. This paper reviews fieldwork on such sites in northern and northwestern Europe and reports on the excavation of a hut and enclosure in the mountains of southwestern Ireland. The hut was found to have been built in the 16th or 17th centuries A.D. and was probably used to oversee dairy animals (likely cows). The enclosure was dated to the early 18th or early-mid-19th century A.D. and is more likely associated with goat milking. The excavations demonstrate that construction dates can be obtained for pastoral sites in uplands of northwestern Europe. Furthermore, with careful reading of features in the surrounding landscape and consideration of documentary and ethnographic evidence, fieldwork can help determine the nature of pastoral economies over time.
Agricultural History Review, 2023
In this roundtable, three early-career historians discuss relationships between early modern agri... more In this roundtable, three early-career historians discuss relationships between early modern agricultural and environmental history in Britain and Ireland. The discussion focuses on how the growing field of environmental history can both contribute to and ask new questions of agricultural history, particularly through an attention to each subdiscipline’s history, sources, methods and key debates. Britain and Ireland provide the geographical focus due to their rich traditions of early modern agricultural history, which contrast with the relatively recent development of early modern environmental histories of the region. The contributors bring their varied disciplinary training in environmental, social and intellectual history and archaeology to bear on questions that trace and blur the boundaries of environmental and agricultural history and offer fresh perspectives on their future intersections.
Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 2023
This paper uses interdisciplinary methods to investigate responses to the Little Ice Age in regio... more This paper uses interdisciplinary methods to investigate responses to the Little Ice Age in regions where livestock farming was dominant, a neglected subject due to the scarcity of detailed written records regarding pastoral land use. It argues that landscape-level histories which include pollen evidence and archaeology can address this challenge and reveal local processes of climate adaptation. Here we focus on Ireland and Scotland and a fascinating rise in small-scale cereal cultivation on upland pastures during the Little Ice Age. Bayesian modeling is used to test the chronological resolution of field evidence and compare it with climate reconstructions. We can see that the cultivation emerged in late medieval times, when cattle were facing climate-related stresses, and increased in early modern times during the Little Ice Age's main phase. We suggest that it started in an indirect adaptation to climate change, supplementing supplies of food and fodder for pastoralists, but increased as rural populations and external market demands grew. There is a need for finer temporal resolution in pollen records and archaeology, as well as greater integration with socioeconomic history, if we are to be more certain about changes in the relative significance of climate in pastoral land use.
Journal of Migration History, 2022
This article offers a critical re-examination of Early Modern migrations to Ireland and their eff... more This article offers a critical re-examination of Early Modern migrations to Ireland and their effect on farming practices, c.1580–1660. During and after the English conquest of Ireland, tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of settlers arrived from Britain. Focusing on Munster and to a lesser extent Ulster, I argue they were not greeted with an agricultural tabula rasa ripe for ‘improvement’. In contrast to what Tudor writers claimed, and what some scholars today have assumed, cereal cultivation and field enclosure already formed important elements in the agricultural landscape. Changes clearly took place, but English, Welsh and Scots settlers also made some remarkable adaptations by accepting local breeds of livestock and relying economically on forms of semi-mobile pastoralism that earlier writers had decried. Looking outside Ireland helps to evaluate their actions, since livestock mobility was widespread in contemporary European pastoralism, and if anything contributed to, rather than conflicted with, the commercialisation of farming.
Seasonal Settlement in the Medieval and Early Modern Countryside, 2021
This paper sheds light on the neglected question of how archaeologists might imagine and identify... more This paper sheds light on the neglected question of how archaeologists might imagine and identify evidence of seasonal land use in medieval Ireland (c. 450-1600). Up to now, research on seasonal resource exploitation in Ireland's past has focused on the post-1550 period, and primarily on upland booley sites used in transhumance. Archaeologists have not paid very much attention to earlier seasonality, and when they do there is usually an emphasis on sites rather than landscapes. To understand the role of seasonal land use in the medieval Irish economy, and ascertain where it took place, we need a conceptual framework that takes a site's physical resource catchment into account as well as its social occupants. A remarkable text from the early second millennium AD provides a starting point. Outlining the story of a rich lowland farmer on a grazing circuit in the Wicklow Mountains, it offers an insight into seasonal upland 'taskscapes', including the grazing of cows in woodland pasture, the number of people who travelled, and the association of such activity with hunting. The paper then assesses the archaeological evidence for such activities around Ireland, concluding that it has been quite meagre. In addition to a bias in development-led excavation towards fertile lowland areas, a number of recent land-use trends have impacted the archaeological record of Ireland's lower upland slopes, i.e. those most likely to be used in medieval times. These trends include 18th-and 19th-century population growth and upland improvement as well as 20th-century afforestation and mechanisation. The paper proposes a nationwide programme of remote sensing to define the country's remaining sections of unenclosed, unimproved, and unplanted hillsides below 300 m a.s.l., followed by field survey to select structures of potentially medieval form within them, and trial excavation to obtain dates and potentially environmental proxies from them.
Medieval Archaeology, 2021
THE STUDY OF HOW MEDIEVAL FARMERS colonised upland environments, and lived there on a year-round ... more THE STUDY OF HOW MEDIEVAL FARMERS colonised upland environments, and lived there on a year-round basis, can provide valuable insights on the long-term adaptability and resilience of rural communities. Yet there is a lack of clarity on the extent and chronology of this phenomenon in Britain and Ireland, and how to explain it without simplistic climate, population or market determinism. By undertaking a critical review of the evidence for upland colonisation across medieval Britain and Ireland, this article demonstrates that ‘glocal’ perspectives are crucial. Locally favourable geology, non-agrarian resources, and prior domestication of sites through prehistoric settlement and transhumance all encouraged upland colonisation. Indeed, when combined with regional socio-economic trends, these local factors sometimes overrode wider climatic conditions. As researchers look increasingly to large-scale modelling of land-use change, this article provides a reminder not to lose sight of the local landscape context and environmental knowledge of the peoples they are studying.
Landscape Research, 2020
This article responds to calls for the historical sciences to inform adaptation in the Anthropoce... more This article responds to calls for the historical sciences to inform adaptation in the Anthropocene, in this case, the sustainability of hill farming in view of EU habitat conservation. Focusing on Kerry, Ireland, it highlights the difficulties that conservation of upland bog, heath and grassland habitats faces due to rural depopulation. It then uses landscape history to assess the long-term feasibility of conserving/restoring these habitats according to EU directives, pointing to the remarkably recent disappearance of woodland due to grazing and deforestation. Instead of being ‘traditional’, as conservation discourse holds it to be, historical management of uplands by farmers could vary greatly depending on sociopolitical factors and economic trends. I discuss how this historical ecology of change helps to explain the failure of conservation in parts of Ireland, and outline how ‘lessons from the past’ may contribute to sustainable upland management if co-evolution is accepted as an on-going process.
World Archaeology, 2018
This article investigates the socio-cultural role of temporary habitation sites associated with s... more This article investigates the socio-cultural role of temporary habitation sites associated with short-distance transhumance in upland and outland pastures of northern Europe. Comparing recent archaeological fieldwork with neglected ethnohistorical information, the author discusses the extraordinary social and sexual freedoms which unmarried young people – particularly young women – experienced in summer pastures of post-medieval Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. Shieling sites and booley sites were places where female-specific traditions of work and leisure were reproduced seasonally with minimal male interference. However, this autonomy was ultimately curtailed by the economic importance of what young women were doing in the hills, namely, looking after dairy cows and ewes. Adult males maintained subtle control over the architecture of seasonal sites and formed a noticeable presence in uplands thanks to occasional industrial activities. Seasonal transhumant sites demonstrate that temporary places in so-called ‘marginal’ landscapes can greatly enhance the study of social practice in non-elite rural communities.
Post-Medieval Archaeology, 2017
This paper examines parish church sites in County Limerick and their evolving meanings as a resul... more This paper examines parish church sites in County Limerick and their evolving meanings as a result of Ireland’s unsuccessful Protestant Reformation. Unusually for Europe, most Irish parish churches fell into ruin from 1550 to 1700. Conquest, loss of patronage and the Anglican Church of Ireland's failure to convert most native Catholics ensured that.
Nevertheless, local memories continued to draw people to these sites. There is evidence for Catholic burial in the 18th and 19th centuries, conversion of chancels into burial plots and, sometimes, church maintenance or construction by Anglicans. These activities all reveal contemporary concerns with history, identity and legitimacy.
Journal of Social Archaeology, 2017
This article explores the perception and practice of everyday life at transhumant settlements in ... more This article explores the perception and practice of everyday life at transhumant settlements in western Ireland during the period, c.1750-1920 AD. Small-scale summer transhumance to upland pastures was once widespread in Ireland. Dairy cows would be sent by families to hill and mountain commonages, with herders milking the cows and making butter. Recent archaeological and oral historical research has shown that these people dwelled in small structures known as booley houses, which have a high degree of variability in construction, distribution, and use. Unlike Continental European pastoralism, but similar to Scandinavia, it seems to have been mostly young people who occupied booley sites. With oral tradition and field evidence, this article addresses the social implications of seasonal re-location to liminal landscapes, and how it functioned as a didactic rite of passage. Furthermore, it demonstrates the flexibility of pastoral communities as work routines changed over time at both home and booley.
Béaloideas: Journal of the Folklore Society of Ireland, 2016
This article revisits the seasonal farming practice of booleying (buailteachas) which died out in... more This article revisits the seasonal farming practice of booleying (buailteachas) which died out in Ireland during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Booleying was a form of agro-pastoral farming which involved the seasonal movement of people and cattle to pastures in marginal land, where they generally stayed for the duration of the summer, if not slightly longer. It is a small-scale relative of transhumance practices that still take place in some parts of continental Europe. The article assesses the progress that has been made in understanding booleying in the seventy to eighty years since folklorists attempted to collect detailed information on the practice from elderly people, largely in the west of Ireland. It points out that it has not been studied in detail since that period by ethnographers, whose interest in booleying lay mainly in data collection and presentation. Inevitably, as the ethnographic sources dried up, so did scholarship in the discipline. Moreover, booleying systems in the east and south of Ireland have been ignored, since here memories of the practice were weaker or non-existent. The author uses examples from Munster to show that a combination of archaeological, historical and placename evidence can retrieve details about the operation of booleying. The usefulness of placenames is evaluated in particular since these are available even when other evidence of booleying has not survived. Ultimately, no one source is without challenges. As further archaeological work increases our knowledge of the material culture, a multi-disciplinary approach is necessary to bringing this somewhat elusive but integral aspect of Irish farming heritage to light and doing justice to the Irish Folklore Commission’s fieldwork.
The results from ongoing research into the practice of transhumance-referred to as booleying in I... more The results from ongoing research into the practice of transhumance-referred to as booleying in Irelandin the peninsula of Iorras Aithneach, south-western Connemara, Co. Galway are presented. Transhumance, in Ireland as in other parts of Europe, is a strategy that involves the seasonal movement of people and livestock, to pastures distant from the main farmsteads for periods of at least some weeks and often months. Cattle, especially dairy cows, were central to the system in Ireland. The study area, Iorras Aithneach, is of particular interest in that the practice of booleying persisted here until the start of the twentieth century. My focus is on the period ca. 1750-1910 when ethnographic and cartographic sources are available which help in elucidating when, where and why booleying took place in the study area. Use of aerial photography, in conjunction with ground proofing, has led to the identification and characterisation of several structures in the Iorras Aithneach uplands associated with booleying. This archaeological evidence, in the form of booley houses or brácaí, complements other sources of evidence for the local importance of booleying. Booleying served two main purposes, namely, conserving land at the permanent farmstead for crops and grazing over the winter period (winterage), and providing a nutritional balance in the animal feed by rotating grazing between lowland and upland sites for extended periods of several weeks at a time. It is shown that there were distinct linkages between coastal (lowland) townlands where the main farmsteads were situated and townlands in the uplands (interior of the peninsula) where the summer pastures were located. The grazing rights, especially in the uplands, were defined by traditions of mutual understanding rather than fences and routeways as is often the case in modern farming in Ireland, even in marginal areas such as Iorras Aithneach.
Landscape History, 2016
This paper discusses the complexity of archaeological evidence associated with seasonal upland se... more This paper discusses the complexity of archaeological evidence associated with seasonal upland settlement in Ireland, a subject which has only recently started to come to light. As a result of the lack of attention, many uncertainties remain in the interpretation of upland sites compared to lowland archaeology. The paper uses a casestudy of the Galtee Mountains in the south of Ireland, where it focuses on the material culture of transhumance in the post-medieval period. It explores two important aspects of this: first, the activities of transhumant herders in the wider landscape as revealed by the various material remains they have left behind; and second, the identification of chronological depth in these landscapes, as revealed by the morphology of summer (booley) houses and the context in which they are found.
Landscape History, 2015
This paper examines evidence for transhumance in the Galtee Mountains during the post-medieval pe... more This paper examines evidence for transhumance in the Galtee Mountains during the post-medieval period, c.1600–1900AD, and attempts to explain the reasons for its decline. The results of field survey into seasonal upland structures (or booley houses) occupied during this time are discussed while considering the difficulties involved in their identification and dating. In the parish of Kilbeheny, it is shown how a number of these booley houses were used in a nineteenth-century system of small-scale transhumance, contrasting this with what appears to have been a more important form of the practice in the mid-seventeenth century. The paper then goes on to demonstrate how population growth and the commercialisation of farming in the intervening period contributed to the marginalisation of transhumance in the regional farming economy. It is speculated that much of the extant archaeological evidence for seasonal settlement belongs to a post-1750, reduced, form of transhumance in which the produce of dairying was vital to the semi-subsistence farming carried on by tenants relatively new holdings in the foothills.
Transhumance is a form of pastoralism that has been practised around the world since animals were... more Transhumance is a form of pastoralism that has been practised around the world since animals were first domesticated. Such seasonal movements have formed an important aspect of many European farming systems for several thousand years, although they have declined markedly since the nineteenth century. Ethnographers and geographers have long been involved in recording transhumant practices, and in the last two decades archaeologists have started to add a new material dimension to the subject.
The central aim of this paper is to draw attention to the role played by transhumance, or booleyi... more The central aim of this paper is to draw attention to the role played by transhumance, or booleying, in 19th and 20th century Irish farming. Transhumance involves the seasonal movement of people and their livestock from one grazing ground to another and has been practised across the world ever since food-producing animals were first domesticated (Hole 1996). It is a system which varies greatly from region to region, but in Ireland it is usually characterised by the movement of dairy cows from lowland to upland for the summer months. The remains of the summer dwellings, or booley huts, of the cattle herders survive in large numbers on Irish mountain-sides but they have been largely neglected by Irish archaeologists to date bar two brief periods of interest in the 1940s and 1980s. Thankfully however, a good deal of folk information on the system was collected in the first half of the 20th century, before it died out completely. This paper examines what these sources can tell us and presents the results of recent archaeological fieldwork in the Galtee Mountains. Furthermore, indirect evidence is used to support views that 19th and 20th century transhumance is a survival of a practice which was much more widespread and important to Irish agriculture in previous centuries.