Irish Iron Age Settlement and Society: Reframing Royal Sites

Abstract

This paper attempts to resituate the Irish so-called ‘Royal’ sites within our vision of the Iron Age by challenging current understanding of their function as primarily situated in a ceremonial or ritual realm. While the evidence from these sites speaks to the complexity of their function, conceptualisation, and symbolic relevance, it is argued here that they are integral focal points of settled landscapes. Their architecture is suggested to address very specific concerns of the agrarian communities that built them and, in its very distinct change over the course of the Iron Age, to reflect broader societal developments, namely the emergence and decline of new society formations. Artefacts and ecofacts, architecture and landscape context of these sites contain a wealth of information on the activities that were taking place on and near them. It is argued that, freed from a binary ritual/profane interpretational framework, this evidence becomes readable as a record of Iron Age society and its dramatic changes over time.

Reframing the first millennium AD in Ireland: archaeology, history, landscape

“…Yet, these imperatives also appear most overt in analyses of myth, cult and kingship, particularly surrounding royal sites, where the analysis of pre-Christian belief has been subsumed by considerations of mythology and ideological discourse, both within work by the present author and others (Schot et al 2011;Gleeson 2012;Waddell 2014;. The empirical and ontological basis of this vogue was recently challenged by Katharina Becker (2019), who emphasises the more mundane and domestic elements of such landscapes, in a critique that chimes with Joanna Brück's (1999; compelling rejection of phenomenological concerns and ritual as a discrete category. Recent analysis concerned with communality, governance and kingdoms might equally be charged with engaging half-heartedly with analyses of power and authority, negating the strictures of the material turn so pertinent to such analyses (e.g., Smith 2015), in favour of schematic accounts imbued with myth (Gleeson 2015;FitzPatrick 2004;.…”

“…Arguably the Iron Age apogee of these centres does proclaim a commonality in certain respects, but these places can no longer be viewed as an exclusive group with complementary 'provincial' functions. A wider corpus of comparable landscapes is now recognised, which underlines apparent and revealing differences, and belies any single cosmogonic exegesis (Armit 2007;Becker 2019;Dowling 2015). Indeed, the need to place these centres in a wider northwest European context is pressing.…”

“…Of course, the differences between the chronology and monumental character of Ireland's so-called 'royal sites', as well as analogues elsewhere, are keenly understood and widely acknowledged in scholarship of Iron Age Ireland (e.g., Becker 2019). Yet, that recognition has not been paired with similarly critical reflection on wider interpretive frameworks for the ritualised nature of these buildings, landscapes and wider symbolism.…”

Reframing the first millennium AD in Ireland: archaeology, history, landscape

“…Yet, these imperatives also appear most overt in analyses of myth, cult and kingship, particularly surrounding royal sites, where the analysis of pre-Christian belief has been subsumed by considerations of mythology and ideological discourse, both within work by the present author and others (Schot et al 2011;Gleeson 2012;Waddell 2014;. The empirical and ontological basis of this vogue was recently challenged by Katharina Becker (2019), who emphasises the more mundane and domestic elements of such landscapes, in a critique that chimes with Joanna Brück's (1999; compelling rejection of phenomenological concerns and ritual as a discrete category. Recent analysis concerned with communality, governance and kingdoms might equally be charged with engaging half-heartedly with analyses of power and authority, negating the strictures of the material turn so pertinent to such analyses (e.g., Smith 2015), in favour of schematic accounts imbued with myth (Gleeson 2015;FitzPatrick 2004;.…”

Bringing the Country to Town: ‘Rurban’ Landscapes in Iron Age Europe

“…Hill 1995), places for the anointing of kings and ritual practices. This may obscure, however, more complex roles of these sites and simplify a more heterarchical social structure (Becker 2019).…”