Dirt, Dwellings and Culture : Living Conditions in Early Medieval Dublin

Abstract

What would it have been like to walk down the streets of Viking Age Dublin a thousand years ago? What would you have seen, heard and smelled? How would this urban settlement have been different from an early medieval rural dwelling of this time – a rath, a crannog or dún situated in the countryside? Such questions not only potentially interrogate the reality of people’s lives in the past, but also open up topics such as diet, health and disease in urban and rural settings, the alteration and management of past environments and emergence of new forms of urban and rural communities in Europe.Dirt, Dwellings and Culture explores the living conditions and environments as experienced by early medieval people in Ireland, touching upon a wide range of environmental, architectural, artefactual and historical datasets from significant archaeological excavations of settlement sites across Ireland and Northern Europe. At its heart it focuses on a new and significant body of insect analysis from one of the most iconic sites of Viking Dublin – Fishamble Street. These new data are discussed with reference to other excavated and previously published research, especially from the rural rath at Deer Park Farms, Co. Antrim, and some preliminary data from Drumclay Crannog, Co. Fermanagh. The book concludes with a wider discussion of dirt, disease and hygiene in early medieval Ireland: what can the environmental data and historical texts tell us about the way that people in early medieval Ireland felt about and interacted with ‘dirt’ and dirty places?