TERRY O'HAGAN

In Tírechán's Footprints: an archaeology of the early medieval Collectanea

Supervised by: Dr Aidan O’Sullivan, UCD School of Archaeology and Mr Charles Doherty, UCD School of History & Archives.

Aims

• Identify, analyse and map key sites and features of the seventh century landscape of Connacht.
• Explore how Tírechán constructs a model of the Patrician landscape within the seventh century, focusing especially on the strategies he uses in manipulating the landscape of the past to create the present.
• Interpret an emerging regional and national social identity, expressed through performance and perceptions of early Christian landscapes.
• Provide a distinctive case study of the importance of interdisciplinary studies to understanding early medieval Irish scholarship, society and the past, through archaeology and early Irish history

Methodology
Textual analysis, historical mapping, aerial photographs, placename evidence, folklore, existing archaeological data intergration, landscape survey & fieldwork investigation.

Digital Aspects
The author is currently compiling a database of all previous placename identifications for Connacht sites mentioned in Tírechán's Collectanea. It is also intended to produce several GIS distribution maps for the region. A paticular interest is the possibility of producing an OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
version of the Collectanea (translation based) in order to facilitate key word searches and patterns.