Transhumance and the Making of Ireland's Uplands, 1550-1900

Costello, Eugene

doi:10.2307/j.ctvxhrm1w

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Long-term occupation begins around the time of the Anglo-Norman conquest, but we have insufficient historical evidence to evaluate whether the activity represented in the pollen record was influenced, directly or indirectly, by Anglo-Norman activity in the region. A similar expansion of activity, including cultivation, is seen in pollen diagrams from elsewhere in the Antrim uplands at this time [ 110 ], which McNeill [ 57 ] regards as evidence of transhumance, a practice documented in Ireland from at least the first millennium CE [ 111 ]. Prior to the late 17th century, the scale of activity represented in the record is broadly comparable to that observed around the turn of the 20th century.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Bucking the trend: Population resilience in a marginal environment

Plunkett

Swindles

2022

PLoS ONE

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Evaluating the impact of environmental changes on past societies is frequently confounded by the difficulty of establishing cause-and-effect at relevant scales of analysis. Commonly, paleoenvironmental records lack the temporal and spatial resolution to link them with historic events, yet there remains a tendency to correlate climate change and cultural transformations on the basis of their seeming synchronicity. Here, we challenge perceptions of societal vulnerability to past environmental change using an integrated paleoenvironmental and land-use history of a remote upland site in the north of Ireland. We present a high-resolution, multi-proxy record that illustrates extended occupation of this marginal locality throughout the climate oscillations of the last millennium. Importantly, historically-dated volcanic ash markers enable us to pinpoint precisely in our record the timing of major national demographic crises such as the Black Death and the European, Irish and Great (Potato) Famines. We find no evidence that climate downturns or demographic collapses had an enduring impact on the use of the uplands: either the community escaped the effects of these events, or population levels recovered rapidly enough (within a generation) to leave no appreciable mark on the palaeoenvironmental record. Our findings serve to illustrate the spatial complexity of human activity that can enable communities to withstand or quickly bounce back from largescale calamities. In neglecting to consider such local-scale variability in social and economic organization, generalized models of societal collapse risk overplaying the vulnerability of populations to long- and short-term ecological stressors to the detriment of identifying the social constraints that influence a population’s response to change.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Bucking the trend: Population resilience in a marginal environment

Plunkett

Swindles

2022

PLoS ONE

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“…Childe ([1928Childe ([ ]1954Gamble 1985;Pluskowski 2007;Jordan 2004;Dobat et al 2015;Overton & Taylor 2018), and how animals are used as food resources (Fjellström 2020) or as sacrifices (Kaliff & Oestigaard 2020). Animals also make themselves known in settlements, infields, outfields and other uses of the landscape (Pedersen & Widgren 2011;Costello 2020). Animals (and mixes between humans and animals) are widely represented in art (e.g.…”

Section: Human-animal Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Entanglement

Fredengren

2021

csa

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This keynote discusses how human-animal relationships can be studied as entanglements to understand more of the situatedness of human and animal bodies and lives. It provides a selection of thinking tools from critical posthumanist feminism and new materialism which should prove useful for studying more-than-human worldmaking through archaeology. These tools can be used to study how humanity and animality are produced, how to recognise animal agentiality, and to highlight challenges on the way. Key issues are identified in concepts such as taxonomies, hybridity, othering and killability. Examples are drawn from recently published research on human-animal relations in archaeology on rock art, depositions, sacrifices, burial practices and more. The paper also tests how speculative methods can be a way of approaching more-than-human exposedness, situatedness and agentiality. It makes an argument that while it is important to study the entanglement of bodies as material-semiotic phenomena, it is of equal importance to also address questions on inequalities and injustices, and who carries the burden in particular situated entanglements and thereby move beyond the study of entanglement on its own.

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“…Facing out onto the Atlantic, pastoralists in the south of Ireland had even more extensive networks. Large numbers of Irish cattle hides and sheep skins were reaching ports in southern England, France and Flanders in the later medieval period (Power & Postan, 1933, p. 198) and, from the 17 th century, upland dwellers in Kerry and Cork who were wealthy enough to keep dairy cows contributed to a burgeoning trans-Atlantic provisions trade in butter (Costello, 2015(Costello, , 2020Dickson, 2005, pp. 143-147).…”

Section: Transcending the 'Traditional': Change And Diversity In Histmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hill farmers, habitats and time: the potential of historical ecology in upland management and conservation

Costello

2020

Landscape Research

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This article responds to calls for the historical sciences to inform adaptation in the Anthropocene, in this case, the sustainability of hill farming in view of EU habitat conservation. Focusing on Kerry, Ireland, it highlights the difficulties that conservation of upland bog, heath and grassland habitats faces due to rural depopulation. It then uses landscape history to assess the long-term feasibility of conserving/restoring these habitats according to EU directives, pointing to the remarkably recent disappearance of woodland due to grazing and deforestation. Instead of being 'traditional', as conservation discourse holds it to be, historical management of uplands by farmers could vary greatly depending on sociopolitical factors and economic trends. I discuss how this historical ecology of change helps to explain the failure of conservation in parts of Ireland, and outline how 'lessons from the past' may contribute to sustainable upland management if co-evolution is accepted as an ongoing process.

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Transhumance and the Making of Ireland's Uplands, 1550-1900

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Bucking the trend: Population resilience in a marginal environment

Bucking the trend: Population resilience in a marginal environment

Beyond Entanglement

Hill farmers, habitats and time: the potential of historical ecology in upland management and conservation

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