The Viking Towns Of Ireland

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.

The relationship of Ireland with the Viking World is one of the enduring themes of the study of the Viking Age. The Fifteenth Viking Congress addressed key issues in the debate, including Viking-Age Ireland, the colonization of the North Atlantic, weapons and warfare, and the development of urbanism. This book, comprising papers by more than fifty of the world's leading Viking specialists, presents a broad range of ideas and approaches to these studies, supported by archaeological, historical, literary and linguistic evidence. --Book Jacket.

In Dublin, the Wood Quay-Fishamble Street archaeological excavations were a constant media story throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when the threat of official destruction brought thousands of protestors into the streets. Although this highly-publicized protest failed to "Save Wood Quay," it did force the most extensive urban excavations ever undertaken in Europe that yielded more unprecedented data about town layout in Dublin 1,000 years ago than about any other European Viking town of the time. Dozens of often nearly intact building foundations, fences, yards, pathways, and quaysides, as well as thousands of artifacts and environmental samples, were unearthed in the course of the campaign. In this book, Dr. Pat Wallace, the chief archaeologist who directed the Wood Quay and Fishamble Street excavations, provides a detailed examination of the implications of these discoveries for Viking-Age and Anglo-Norman Dublin by placing them in their national and international contexts. Lavishly illustrated with over 500 color images, maps, and drawings, together with detailed descriptions and analyses of the artifacts, this pioneering study gathers all the finds and discusses them in the context of parallel discoveries in Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia, and northern Europe, with the historical, economic, and cultural milieu of Hiberno-Scandinavian Dublin as the background. *** "This marvelous work memorializes a major archaeological discovery unearthed in Dublin between 1974 and 1981. Structural remains from 840 through 1169 CE, the most extensive for any site north of the Alps, were excavated by Patrick Wallace, who now analyzes his finds from Wood Quay, Fishamble Street, and related sites. A lively text and numerous photos enliven the hundreds of buildings unearthed.... Highly recommended." --Choice, Vol. 54, No. 4, December 2016 [Subject: History, Archaeology, Viking Studies, Medieval Studies, Art History, Irish Studies]

Over the course of 250 years, Viking raiders & their descendants settled in & urbanized Ireland, connecting the Irish with long-distance trade routes as never before. This book presents an accurate picture of the complex relationship between the town-dwelling Scandinavians & the rural Irish.

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,5, University College Cork (Department of Archaeology), language: English, abstract: “The term Viking conjures up for most Irish people bands of marauders and robbers who plundered Irish monasteries and churches, causing widespread destruction and terror [...]“. Such a negative perception of the Viking Age, about 795 and 1169, correlates with the assertion uttered by historians in the past that “the effect of the Viking invasions on Irish society was catastrophic”. This depiction of the invaders, mostly from Norway and later also from Denmark, seems to be based on sources from monasteries which had been the main targets of the Scandinavians during the first period of raids, approximately between 795 and 840. Therefore, the reliability of these sources is doubtful and they have to be interpreted critically and very carefully. However, many scholars nowadays believe that, on the whole, the Vikings had a positive effect on Irish society. The aim of this paper is to critically discuss and assess the archaeological evidence which appears to support this position.

This compilation of 13 papers by scholars from Ireland, England and Denmark, consider the extent and nature of Viking influence in Ireland. Created in close association with exhibitions held at the National Musem of Ireland in 1998-99 and at the National Ship Museum in Roskilde in 2001, the papers discuss aspects of religion, art, literature and placenames, towns and society, drawing together thoughts on the exchange of culture and ideas in Viking Age Ireland and the extent to which existing identities were maintained, lost or assimilated.

The study of early medieval towns has frequently concentrated on urban beginnings, the search for broadly applicable definitions of urban characteristics and the chronological development of towns. Far less attention has been paid to the experience of living in towns. The thirteen chapters in this book bring together the current state of knowledge about Viking-Age towns (c. 800–1100) from both sides of the Irish Sea, focusing on everyday life in and around these emerging settlements. What was it really like to grow up, live, and die in these towns? What did people eat, what did they wear, and how did they make a living for themselves? Although historical sources are addressed, the emphasis of the volume is overwhelmingly archaeological, paying homage to the wealth of new material that has become available since the advent of urban archaeology in the 1960s.

The thirteen chapters in this book bring together the current state of knowledge about Viking-Age towns (c. 800-1100) from both sides of the Irish Sea, focusing on everyday life in and around these emerging settlements. What was it really like to grow up, live, and die in these towns?

In Irish history the Vikings are often seen merely as attackers, but this book gives an account of the wider picture - how the Vikings significantly influenced Irish art and trade and the growth of towns and cities. It describes their first landing as a raiding party, and their settlement and gradual merging with the Irish by intermarriage and trade, and also explores the customs and traditions, and the arts and crafts which have become part of the Irish way of life. Cameos of the lives of individual Vikings - some real, some fictitious - are used in the retelling of events, and the illustrations include photographs of excavations and artefacts.