them has resulted in the relative neglect of other, less
well-known areas. Principal among these is the world
of the Gaelic Irish, but also the small towns and rural
sites; no manor site has been excavated recently.
Two periods have been overlooked by archaeologists.
The 150 years before 1200 have been lost, between the
assumptions that life was a continuation of the fifth-
through eighth-century world and that the incursion of
English lords marked a fundamental change throughout
Ireland. The potential indications that changes had
occurred before 1150 have been neglected, other than
those in the Church, where there is a combination of
new sites (houses of the Continental Orders) and docu-
mentary accounts of reform. New forms of lordship may
have caused new sites to manage the landscape, but
these have not been sought. The period after the mid-
fourteenth-century population collapse associated with
the Black Death has been dominated by the documen-
tary historians’ picture of decline. The archaeological
evidence of modest but real prosperity, implied by the
widespread building of friaries or parish churches and
tower houses, has not been fully deployed, while the
difficulties of identifying pottery of the period has led
to a serious underestimation of the vitality of towns in
the period. Archaeology would stress the period as one
in which the process of cultural fusion, started in the
thirteenth century, between English and Irish and most
obviously represented in the development of a distinc-
tive Irish Late Gothic style of building, has been over-
shadowed by the documentary evidence for conflict. In
both these cases the archaeology has suffered from the
same problems. The context is dominated by political
history, which stresses short-term and military events
over the long-term processes that are the strength of
archaeology. A second problem is the tyranny of the
geographical fact that Ireland is an island, which leads
to the assumption that it is a unity. Regional differences
are downplayed in the face of the uniform literate culture
of the upper classes. This is best seen in the assumption
that the arrival of the English force in Wexford in 1169
would have changed the life of a Connacht peasant.
T. E. MCNEILL
References and Further Reading
Edwards, N. The Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland.
London: Batsford, 1990.
Mallory, J., and T. E. McNeill. The Archaeology of Ulster.
Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991.
O’Conor, K. The Archaeology of Medieval Rural Settlement in
Ireland. Dublin: Discovery Programme, 1998.
O’Keeffe, T. Medieval Ireland: An Archaeology. Stroud:
England Tempus Publishing, 2001.
Hurley, M., and O. Scully. Late Viking Age and Medieval Water-
ford: Excavations 1986–1992. Waterford, Ireland: Waterford
City Council, 1997.
See alsoBurials; Castles; Craftwork; High Crosses;
Houses; Inscriptions; Kells, Book of; Villages;
Walled TownsARCHERY
SeeWeapons and WeaponryARCHITECTUREEarly Medieval
Most of the architecture that survives from earlier-
medieval (pre-twelfth-century) Ireland was ecclesias-
tical in nature, and most of the individual buildings
that still stand to an appreciable height were churches.
One of the enduring puzzles about Ireland’s rich
Christian civilization at this time is that these churches
were buildings of almost willful simplicity; the skill
and energy invested in manuscript illumination, the
production of metalwork, and the carving of High
Crosses were rarely deployed to provide an appropri-
ately sumptuous architectural setting for worship.
The churches, most of which probably date from
the tenth or eleventh centuries, are invariably single-
cell structures of small size, with linteled west-end
doors, limited fenestration, and no architectural sculp-
ture; some of them have antae, pilaster-like projections
of the side walls past the end walls, which most writers
believe to have supported the end-timbers of the roofs.
There is also evidence for timber churches in early-
medieval Ireland. Some of the written accounts, such as
Cogitosus’s seventh-century Life of St. Brigit, suggest
carpentered and ornamented buildings of considerableBunratty Castle, Co. Clare. © Department of the Environment,
Heritage and Local Government, Dublin.ARCHAEOLOGY