Norse Houses in Ireland and Western Britain, A.D. 800 – 1100: A Social Archaeology of Dwellings, Ethnicity and Cultural Identity
Rebecca Boyd
Supervisor: Dr. Aidan O’Sullivan
Funded by: UCD Ad Astra Research Scholarship
Abstract
Houses are a profoundly significant aspect of past material culture; they uniquely integrate landscape and artefact (as both places and constructs) in their location, character and social uses. Buildings are not merely physical objects; they are social and symbolic spaces that enable and structure culturally accepted protocols and practices through their layout for the benefit of both occupants and visitors. Exploring the architecture and spaces within and around buildings provides us with unique insights into the culture and societies that used them. Houses are theatres for social performance, and the anvils on which social identities are forged - the outside worlds of neighbours, land and objects are brought inside and are manipulated and used by the household social group. Houses have therefore always been seen as being of crucial archaeological, anthropological and historical importance in the reconstruction of past societies.
The Norse houses of Ireland and western and northern Britain provide an exceptional opportunity to explore the role of material culture in the expression of ethnic, social and gendered identities in the past. Over four hundred and fifty distinctive Norse structures – often spectacularly well-preserved in urban waterlogged deposits or coastal machair soils - have been identified across Ireland, the Isle of Man, northern England and Scotland, dating to between the ninth and eleventh centuries A.D. Despite contrasting landscape settings, they display common, distinctive physical characteristics which contrast greatly with earlier Iron Age British houses, and contemporary Anglo-Saxon and early medieval Irish houses. These similarities suggest a dominant regional Norse culture, where architectural traditions were maintained to actively preserve or even create a “Viking” culture. The project will explore social aspects of Norse architecture through the cultural biographies of house building, occupation, aging and abandonment, as uncovered through archaeological excavation. It will investigate daily life and practice through the spatial patterning of archaeological evidence, for example through the organisation of furniture (which uniquely survives in Norse houses), domestic objects, “ritual or cult” objects, craft and material culture debris, and varying functional zones.
The project will also consider local, regional and pan-regional patterns in the form and organisation of Norse dwellings. Houses are not isolated artefacts; they exist within social landscapes, through networks of neighbourhood, family, politics, history, communications and trade. This is particularly evident in this study area which was a vital Norse trade route in the North Atlantic, running from Dublin to the Shetlands, and east to Norway or westwards to Iceland, Greenland and to L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, where a Dublin-type ringed-pin was found in a Norse house.
The primary contribution of the project will be its investigation of the Norse material culture in Ireland, northern and western Britain, focussing on the social and cultural roles of Norse houses. It will shed light on Norse society and cultural values through its examination of themes such as gender, religion, family, social status and hierarchies, trade and craft associations and community. It will investigate the different regional aspects and urban-rural landscape contrasts of the study area (e.g., the contrast between Hiberno-Norse Dublin and the rural Earldom of Orkney) wherein a dominant regional Norse cultural identity was asserted through language, art, burial practices and, principally, through architecture. It will explore how houses (as cultural artefacts) embodied, maintained and gradually transformed the social identities of immigrant settlers – the house’s occupants, neighbours and visitors - in newly settled lands.