"The isles afar off": taking a new look at Ireland's holy islands (original) (raw)
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Islandscapes and islandness: the prehistoric Isle of Man in the Irish Sea-scape
This paper will explore the role of the Isle of Man in the prehistory of the Irish Sea area through an examination of its changing islandscape from the Neolithic through the Iron Age. It was far from insular during prehistory, but the social and economic interactions of prehistoric Manx people around the Irish Sea and beyond were heavily affected by their water-bound environment. The way that the prehistoric Manx perceived their boundaries and their coastal situation is reflected in their ritual and social landscape, their preferential use of coastal areas for monumental architecture, and in the choices they made with regard to the island landscape they inhabited. This culturally constructed sense of islandness allowed the prehistoric Manx people to maintain distinctive local cultures while still playing an active role in the larger Irish Sea region.
Antiquity, 2018
The Christianisation of Ireland in the fifth century AD produced distinct monastic practices and architectural traditions. Recent research on Inishark Island in western Ire-land illuminates the diverse material manifestations of monasticism and contributes to the archaeological analysis of pilgrimage. Excavations revealed a ritual complex (AD 900-1100) developed as both an ascetic hermitage and a pilgrimage shrine. It is argued that monastic communities designed ritual infrastructure to promote ideologies of sacred hierarchy and affinity that legitimated their status and economic relations with lay worshippers. In a global context, this research emphasises how material and spatial settings of pilgrimage can accommodate and construct social distinctions through patterns of seclusion, exclusion and integration in ritual.
Along the Margins? The Later Bronze Age Seascapes of Western Ireland
European Journal of Archaeology , 2019
This article presents the results of multi-scalar investigations into the Later Bronze Age (LBA; 1500-600 BC) landscape of Inishark in County Galway, Ireland. The European LBA along the Atlantic coast was characterized by the development of long-distance maritime exchange systems that transformed environmentally marginal seascapes into a corridor of human interaction and movement of goods and people. Archaeological survey, test excavation, and radiocarbon analysis documented the LBA occupation on Inishark. The communities living on Inishark and other small islands on the western Irish coast were on the periphery of both the European continent and of the elite spheres of influence at hillforts in Ireland; yet they were connected to the Atlantic maritime exchange routes. A focus on small coastal islands contributes to a better understanding of LBA socioeconomic systems and the development of social complexity in Bronze Age societies.
Irish influence on ecclesiastical sites in Scotland - a case study of the island of Islay
This was an M.Phil thesis done in Durham under the supervision of Professor Rosemary Cramp in the 1980s which has now been made publically available via their ethesis system. It is somewhat outdated in terms of published data from individual sites from both Ireland and Scotland at this stage but the general problems about the interpretation of small chapel sites and their social function(s) are still live ones - as witnessed in papers given in TCD at the 17th Friends of Medieval Dublin seminar last Saturday (17th May 2015). Do they represent early attempts at provision of widespread pastoral care? family chapel sites? or early "monasteries" or at least monastic "granges" or some sort of amalgam of all of these?
Pebbles and Peregrinatio: The Taskscape of Medieval Devotion on Inishark Island, Ireland
Medieval Archaeology, 2018
SINCE 2008, the island of Inishark, Co Galway, Ireland, has been the subject of archaeological research by the Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast (CLIC) project, directed by Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame. The CLIC project’s excavations have produced new evidence for the use of water-smoothed pebbles within monastic and pilgrimage practices on the island. Using a relational perspective centred on the concept of ‘taskscape’, this article traces the formation, acquisition, manipulation, and deposition of these pebbles by human and non-human agencies and suggests how the stones may have facilitated worshippers’ embodiment of penitential devotion — peregrinatio — by evoking the divine governance of hydrological forces. Relational theory, although inspired by non-Western indigenous perspectives, is shown to be effective in shedding light on the interplay of bodies, language, objects, and environmental phenomena in early medieval and medieval Irish Christian practice.