Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns: Houses and Homes

Join Dr Rebecca Boyd for an afternoon lecture on Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns: Houses and Homes in the Helen Roe Theatre, Merrion Square on Saturday November 23rd.

The archaeology of Ireland’s Viking-Age towns is familiar to us from over fifty years of excavation. The deep stratigraphy and complex preservation requirements are both a challenge and an opportunity. The Viking house is one of the most commonplace finds from these excavations. My work takes as its basic consideration that houses are important spaces for the people who lived in them. Our houses represent us and our lifestyles and this is as true of Viking-Age houses as of our houses. If we can ‘read’ these archaeological houses, we can ‘read’ the lives and lifestyles of those who built and lived in these houses.

Over 480 Viking-Age houses have been excavated across Dublin, Cork and Waterford dating from the 9 th to the 12 th centuries. This is the largest collection of such houses in the Viking world and contains some of the most well-preserved Viking archaeology in Europe and the North Atlantic. Using this dataset, we can explore the realities of life in the Viking- age house and in Ireland’s earliest urban settings. This talk will showcase how we can use the data excavated to ask questions about the social life of the town, the composition of the households who lived in these houses, the age-old question of the transition from a farming lifestyle to an urban one, and the practicalities of day to day life in the Viking world.

Host or Publisher Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland