CRAFTWORK
as opposed to traditional, domestic craftworking.
Towns are increasingly prominent in this research.
Areas and buildings associated with specific crafts,
including amber-working, woodworking, and comb
making, have been identified in excavations in Dublin
and Waterford. Unfortunately, because this evidence
tends to be relatively early (no later than the thir-
teenth century), it cannot readily be reconciled with
late-medieval documentary evidence for craft guilds
and craft areas. As the mass of data produced by
urban excavation is digested and analyzed, however,
further progress should be made on these and other
issues.
Woodworking and Carpentry
Wood was perhaps the most important natural resource
in medieval Ireland, used to construct buildings and
machinery and as the raw material for a wide range of
artifacts. Problems of preservation have deprived us of
the bulk of early medieval wooden structures and arti-
facts, but Ireland is relatively fortunate in its abundant
bogs and wetland sites (notably crannogs), which pro-
vide important glimpses of what once existed. Wooden
structures are least likely to survive, but horizontal
mills provide evidence of high-quality carpentry tech-
niques as early as the seventh century. Unexpectedly,
a ringfort (normally a “dry” site where organic pres-
ervation would not be expected) at Deer Park Farms,
County Antrim, preserved in waterlogged deposits
substantial remains of post-and-wattle walling of a
series of houses dating from around 700. Such chance
survivals point to the existence in early medieval Ire-
land of well-established woodworking and carpentry
traditions (also attested in documentary sources) and
complement the mass of later evidence for buildings
in Dublin and Waterford.
Shipbuilding, a specialized form of carpentry, was
clearly practiced in several towns. Danish scholars
have demonstrated that the Skuldelev 2 ship, perhaps
the finest known Viking warship, was almost certainly
made in Dublin in the 1040s. McGrail’s study of Dub-
lin ship timbers provides strong evidence for a con-
tinuing shipbuilding tradition, capable of producing
even large ships, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries. Documentary evidence exists for shipbuild-
ing in thirteenth-century Waterford, Limerick, and
Drogheda, and these industries may well have func-
tioned over extended periods.
The almost endless range of artifacts carved from
wood, most of them strictly utilitarian, includes excep-
tional objects like the gaming board from Ballinderry
crannog, County Westmeath, and the decorated objects
from Dublin, published by Lang. The scarcity of pottery
on most early medieval sites underlines the importance
of wood as the raw material for bowls, buckets, barrels,
and other vessels. Coopering, a highly skilled craft, is
attested in the eighth century at Moynagh Lough cran-
nog, County Meath, and by later vessels such as the
oak butter churn from Lissue ringfort, County Antrim,
and the yew bucket from Ballinderry crannog, County
Westmeath. A number of exceptional stave-built buck-
ets with decorative metal bindings and fittings are
thought to be high-status vessels for both secular and
ecclesiastical use. Carving of single-piece vessels
(from solid blocks of wood) continued from prehistory
and was enhanced in the early medieval period by the
technique of lathe turning. Little evidence survives for
lathes per se, but the products of turning—both fin-
ished vessels and waste cores—are known from many
sites, including the early crannogs of Lagore and
Moynagh Lough. Later sites, especially in Dublin,
Waterford, and Cork, have produced abundant evi-
dence for coopering and turning; indeed, large
amounts of turning waste at High Street, Dublin, were
interpreted as evidence for a lathe turning workshop
in the vicinity. Woodworkers were clearly familiar with
and exploited the different properties of various spe-
cies, as seen, for instance, in the consistent use of ash
wood for turned bowls and plates.Stone Carving and Masonry
Stone carving was practiced in many different contexts
and for different purposes, but the production of archi-
tectural stone was always a major area of activity. PriorCeramic cooking pot, Derrymagowan, Co. Armagh.
Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees
of the National Museums and Galleries of Northern Ireland.