UCD School of Archaeology

Scoil na Seandálaíochta UCD

Settlement, Identity and Change on Connacht's Atlantic Isles, AD400-1100 (2009)
Sharon A. Greene

Supervisor: Dr. Aidan O'Sullivan
Funded by: The Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract

This project will take a critical look at both religious and secular settlement on the islands off the coast of counties Galway and Mayo during the early medieval period. Previous work on these islands has tended to focus heavily on ecclesiastical features such as the layout of the monastic enclosures and on the decorated cross-slabs found there. Any evidence for the presence of secular populations in the same period has not received the same attention . A few broader studies have been carried out on individual islands (e.g. High Island) but until now there has been no attempt to look at these islands as part of a wider landscape.

Inishkea North & South and Duvillaun Mor & Duvillaun Beg off the Belmullet Peninsula,
viewed from the summit of Slievemore, Achill Island (Photo: S. Greene)

Inishkea North & South and Duvillaun Mor & Duvillaun Beg off the Belmullet Peninsula, viewed from the summit of Slievemore, Achill Island (Photo: S. Greene)

This project will involve research of all the islands from Connemara to Belmullet in order to better understand a coastal landscape often dismissed as wild and remote but yet which attracted human settlement from prehistoric times. The relationships of the island communities to eachother and to the mainland over time will be explored, as well as the relationships between the religious and secular communities living in the same landscape and how the ecclesiastical sites developed and changed. Evidence for transport and trade will be important in helping to understand some of these relationships. The effects of a Scandinavian presence on this coast, the true nature of which is not yet clear, will also be investigated.

A multidisciplinary approach will be taken in this project, using archaeological, folkloric, historical and ethnographic evidence to put together as comprehensive a picture of island settlement in the early medieval period as possible.

Inishkea North & South and Duvillaun Mor & Duvillaun Beg off the Belmullet Peninsula,
viewed from the summit of Slievemore, Achill Island (Photo: S. Greene)

Inishkea North & South and Duvillaun Mor & Duvillaun Beg off the Belmullet Peninsula, viewed from the summit of Slievemore, Achill Island (Photo: S. Greene)

Inishkea North & South and Duvillaun Mor & Duvillaun Beg off the Belmullet Peninsula,
viewed from the summit of Slievemore, Achill Island (Photo: S. Greene)

Inishkea North & South and Duvillaun Mor & Duvillaun Beg off the Belmullet Peninsula, viewed from the summit of Slievemore, Achill Island (Photo: S. Greene)