INSTAR Grant Award for Archaeology Department Researchers
Dr Tomás Ó Carragáin and John Sheehan of the Archaeology Department have been awarded a substantial grant under the Heritage Council’s Irish National Strategic Archaeological Research (INSTAR) Programme for Year 1 of a multi-year project entitled Making Christian Landscapes. Settlement, Society and Regionality in Early Medieval Ireland. This project will explore the physical and conceptual transformation of the Irish landscape during the early medieval period: a process which was intimately bound up with the arrival and development of a new religion – Christianity – and its attendant power structures.
Using GIS, ecclesiastical and secular sites recently excavated in advance of infrastructural developments will be placed in their landscape context and subsequently these landscapes will be systematically compared. In this way the project will determine where and how early medieval people lived, worshipped and were buried, how this changed over time and how it varied from region to region. The importance of illuminating this re-ordering of the Irish landscape cannot be overstated, for the basic pattern of ecclesiastical settlement and land-divisions was established by 1100 and persists in modified form to the present day.
The Making Christian Landscapes team includes Dr Sam Turner of the University of Newcastle, Aegis Archaeology Ltd, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Dr Paul MacCotter, and IRCHSS scholars Gill Boazman and Bernadette McCarthy.
