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

Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns explores the emergence of towns, urban lifestyles, and urban identities in Ireland during the Viking Age, using household archaeology as a lens. It examines how these houses were more than just buildings, providing homes, workplaces, and places of death. The book uses comparative analyses of houses and properties, artifact distribution patterns, and access analysis studies to investigate 500 Viking-Age urban houses. It discusses how these new urban households managed their homes to create a sense of place and belonging and develop a new urban identity.

Format: Hardback
Length: 274 pages
Publication date: 20 October 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Exploring Irelands Viking-Age Towns delves into the emergence of towns, urban lifestyles, and urban identities in Ireland, coinciding with the arrival of the Vikings and the construction of post-and-wattle Type 1 houses. These houses represent a significant transition to urban living, bringing about changes for individuals, households, and society as a whole. Through the lens of household archaeology, the book explores the materiality, variability, and day-to-day experiences of living in these houses. It moves from the intimate scale of individual households to the larger scale of Irelands earliest urban communities.

For the first time, this book recognizes that these houses were not just structures but homes, vital places where people lived, worked, and died. These new towns were bustling hubs filled with diverse people, ideas, and objects. By utilizing a vast array of archaeological data, the book conducts comparative analyses of houses and properties, artifact distribution patterns, and access analysis studies to examine approximately 500 Viking-Age urban houses.

The analysis is structured into three parts: an investigation of the houses themselves, the households that inhabited them, and the towns they formed part of. It sheds light on how these new urban households managed their homes to create a sense of place and belonging in these unfamiliar environments, enabling them to develop a distinct urban identity.

Exploring Irelands Viking-Age Towns is an invaluable resource for advanced students and specialists in the Viking Age in Ireland, as well as archaeologists and historians of the early medieval and Viking worlds. It also appeals to readers with interests in the archaeology of house and home, households, identities, and urban studies.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367482787