Russell Ó Ríagáin

Recent debates regarding Scottish independence and the centenary of the Irish 1916 Rising British rule illustrate that Britain and Ireland’s long relationship with colonialism continues to loom large in the insular collective conscience. This article focuses on one particular historically-attested medieval colonial episode which involved colonists from Scandinavia and, later, from among the Scandinavian diaspora from the ninth to the early eleventh . The geographic focus moves between Ireland and western Scotland, with the emphasis on a series of furnished burials on either side of the North Channel in Argyll and northeast. These furnished burials – dated to c.AD850–980 on the basis of radiocarbon and artefactual dating – take a number of forms, ranging from purpose-built mounds covering interred remains laid out in boats or stone-lined chambers and surrounded by markers of ascribed social status, to cremations and inhumations inserted into either pre-existing Christian and Bronze Age cemeteries or late prehistoric burial mounds and cairns.The article explores the way in which furnished burials can be used to (re)negotiate, propagate and legitimate asymmetric status-based relationships in a colonial setting where status is not expressed via conspicuous monumentality of settlement forms. Building on this, the article ends with a discussion of the use of burial as an emotive and identitive anchor in a new landscape. Both issues involve contested interpretations of the same physical spaces, connected to the (re)negotiation of individual and communal identities, social institutions and status asymmetry.

"This project examines Scandinavian and Anglo-Norman colonialism in two Irish case study regions, the south-east and the mid-west, by placing them on a continuum of social development. It analyses their spatial organisation and their impact on the landscape in terms of a model of colonialism based on three sub-phases: expansion, consolidation and domination. Campaign fortresses and other bridgeheads in the landscape such as the longphort and the ringwork largely belong to this phase. Mottes and Scandinavian urban settlement belong largely to the consolidation phase. The
Anglo-Norman domination phase was characterised by a hierarchical configuration of monuments, including those forms already mentioned, along with masonry castles, nucleated and dispersed rural settlement and continental religious houses. They
differed in a number of respects. Scandinavian colonialism was much more geographically limited, largely confined to a series of estuarine settlements which became towns over time, with possible accompanying hinterland settlement. It cannot be said to have had a domination sub-phase, rather it experienced a phase of incorporation, where the settlements came under the control of elements of the Gaelic elite. It has therefore been categorised here as non-imperial opportunistic colonialism.
In contrast to the elite replacement colonialism found in Anglo-Norman Ulster and Norman England, Anglo-Norman colonialism in the case-studies was totalising, characterised by plantation colonialism, which involved the inward movement of several orders of society, and the incorporation or displacement of native groups. It involved the total reorganisation of the landscape, with the introduction of several new monument forms in a hierarchical spatial organisation. However, this was largely unsuccessful in the mid-west, and can only be said to have been successful in
the south-east, and even then only until the fourteenth century, at which time the colony receded substantially. Both groups continued to be regarded as foreign elements long after the apogee of each of colonial period. While colonial acculturation was limited, over time their culture came to differ both that of their home regions and Gaelic society, which saw them become a “third nation” living in a “third space” (cf. Bhabha 1994). This was due to a combination of creolisation and hybridisation. There seems to have been extensive Gaelic acculturation in the areas of greatest contact, such as the towns in each period.

Copyright, Russell Ó Ríagáin, 2010."

The debate over the origins, function and date of the round towers of Ireland has been ongoing for a number of centuries. However, the majority of discussion has focused on their dating and possible continental origins, with little discussion of their function, symbolic significance, role in the exercise of medieval social power and the social relations behind their construction.  They were not based on some pre-existing continental model, from Ravenna or elsewhere.  They were not places of refuge as popular culture would have us believe, and it is argued here, as elsewhere, that these towers served as bell towers, although this does not preclude multi-functionality, the towers may well have served as reliquaries and storage areas.  Christianity has always been a highly symbolic religion whose adherents are often highly adept manipulators of symbols.  The possible role of sacred numbers in their planning and construction are discussed, in addition to the symbolic and ritual role of circularity itself.  Round towers were and remain highly conspicuous monuments in the landscape, with an important role in the materialisation of social power relations, with the role of patronage by those controlling military, economic and political power resources in their construction particularly important.

The appearance of the rectilinear house form in the Irish Neolithic landscape was both unprecedented and short lived. Their appearance coincided with the definite appearance of arable agriculture on the island. Their disappearance also coincided with the disappearance of this form of agriculture. The island wide similarity in their form and probable functions is remarkable. They served as both functional and symbolic focal points in the landscape for their inhabitants, and they had a major influence on burial practice. Evidence for both deliberate deposition and deliberate destruction has been found at a number of sites, indicating their ritual significance to contemporaries. They also had an important role in the socialisation of successive generations of agriculturalists.

History is a discipline based almost entirely on textual accounts of the past. Literary texts are one of these textual sources.  While they may only contain a minimum of useful detail for the political historian, there is much to be found in them for use in the study of cultural history.  This article assesses how much can actually be found in such texts for use in this field. It examines the debate in the 1980s surrounding  Robert Darnton's application of anthropological and semiotic theory to the subject. This debate involved the role of these disciplines in the analysis of this textual format, and the reliability of basing anything at all on literary texts.

This dissertation investigates the relationship between colonialism and settlement. It examines three episodes of colonialism in two case-study regions facing each other across the North Channel, corresponding to eastern Northern Ireland ('Ulidia'), and mid-western Scotland ('Ergadia'). By comparing different forms of colonial activity across several time periods and between two regions, the dissertation improves our understanding of colonialism and migration across time and space. The first episode involved the purported elite migration of the Dál Riata from northeast Ireland to western Scotland c.AD500. The second involved the arrival in both regions and beyond of raiders and settlers from Scandinavia c.AD790-850. The third involved a group of settlers mainly from England and Wales, who established the earldom of Ulster as part of a wider expansion into Ireland c.AD1167-1200. The analysis of the continuities and discontinuities in both case studies was based on a series of chronological syntheses drawing together the archaeological, architectural and documentary evidence for settlement in each region c.800BC-AD1400. It was further augmented by employing burial and toponymic evidence as proxies for settlement. Combined with the textual narrative, the archaeological syntheses enabled an examination of, firstly, whether colonial activity actually occurred, and, secondly, the form of colonialism that took place and the processes that lay behind it. To structure the interpretation, each colonial episode was broken down into contact, expansion, consolidation and domination phases, with further phases based on their socio-political and transcultural outcomes. The Dál Riata episode was probably not an example of colonialism. The documentary evidence was found to be unreliable and related to a late reshaping of a usable past. Moreover, there was no visible shift in settlement practices identifiable with incoming colonists. The Scandinavian episode differed on either side of the North Channel. There is no evidence that settlers got beyond a consolidation phase in Ulidia, with very little impact on traditional burial practices, settlement, and language use. Conversely, in Ergadia a major shift was apparent in secular settlement and burial practices. The appearance of a large number of Old Norse placenames also indicates settlement involving several social orders. This heavily influenced the socio-political makeup of the region to at least the fourteenth century. In the third episode, a domination phase was also reached in Ulidia. It involved the establishment of a new extractive elite, with shifts in settlement and toponymic, but not burial, practice.

Taking Europe's Atlantic seaboard as an area of study is by no means adopting a novel perspective, even if the majority of the scholarship on its constituent parts has been of a narrow spatial perspective, usually focussing on either a single region, or on immediately adjacent regions. Where a broader spatial remit has been adopted, it has usually been within a core-periphery paradigm, with designations such as 'Atlantic Fringe' bearing the imprint of a mixture of Classical bias and more modern social evolutionism. Conversely, the temptation of adopting a neo-Romantic exceptionalist approach to the wider region, emphasising its uniqueness and unity of shared traits must also be avoided. Therefore, this session will adopt a via media. Papers are sought examining regional similarities and differences, responses to environmental conditions and the movement of people, ideas and things within the arc. Furthermore, papers are also sought addressing the ways in which different areas of the arc interacted with their inland neighbours, both with social mega-configurations such as the Roman and Frankish Empires and on a more micro-political level, either affecting or not affecting cultural change and identity shift. Multidisciplinary papers treating these issues are particularly encouraged, as are papers adopted a comparative perspective, utilising case studies from across the Atlantic Arc. The focus will primarily be on the first millennium AD, but papers may also be accepted from beyond this chronological timeframe, so as to provide further insight by setting the main temporal remit in its broader processual context. Similarly, papers dealing with areas adjacent or otherwise connected to the session's spatial remit might also be accepted to set the Atlantic Arc in its wider geographical context. Abstracts to be submitted to the EAA by February 15th using the following link:

Irish Congress of Medievalists 2015. 
There has been much discussion/dispute regarding the colonial nature of the Dál Riata polity.  Much of it has been based on a naïve approach to the written evidence or outdated, essentialist culture-historical archaeological thinking, utilising far too narrow a conception of the nature of colonialism, culture and ethnicity.  The deceptively shaky datasets associated with the problem have not helped matters.  This paper will seek to build on the revisionist scholarship of the past decade, gain some new insights into Columba, his milieu and his later use as a political prop by introducing, evaluating and applying some concepts from diverse theoretical paradigms, including Bhabha’s third space concept and the notion of a contact zone from postcolonial theory on the one hand and a discussion of the related concepts of reification and legitimation from twentieth-century Western Marxism and post-Marxism on the other, not to mention the requisite level of source criticism.

Irish Congress of Medievalists 2015. 
This paper focusses on the exercise and maintenance of royal power in a region where various wider—and dynamic—political, ethnic and cultural configurations come into contact: the landscape and seascape centring on the passage of water separating modern Northern Ireland and Scotland.  It is intended here to move beyond issues such as colonialism to examine how the control over various ideological, military, economic and political power resources relates to the operation of the various polities set within the shifting political geography characteristic of the region in this period, looking at class, stände and party on the one hand, and the interplay between coercion and persuasion on the other, drawing on textual, archaeological and onomastic evidence to do so.

It would not be overstating the case to say that the work of Norbert Elias has been under-employed in the study of medieval Europe beyond the areas originally covered in On the Process of Civilisation.  There is a myriad of ways in which such a variegated, if interlinked, theoretical corpus might be applied to the numerous problematics associated with the period.  Naturally, only certain aspects of so broad a corpus can be addressed here, nor will they be employed exclusively at the expense of other theorists.  Temporal and geographical limitations must also be imposed, therefore, three case studies will be utilised, namely Ireland, Scotland and Norway, c.AD400-c.AD1200.  All three, as will be seen, are interlinked, and in different ways.  The first part of the paper will examine the evidence within each case study for various related processes and phenomena inspired by/adapted from Norbert Elias.  These include feudalisation, downward pressure caused by elite over-population, and centrifugal/centripetal political cycles visible in shifts from heterarchy to hegemony via dynastic or inter-polity elimination contests.  No social system exists in isolation, and second part of the paper is concerned with the points in time where these internal processes intersect transculturally, contingencies which often kick-start new processes, cycles and trajectories.  Having done this, the paper will close with suggestions regarding further applications of figurational sociology to problematics within the case-study regions.

This paper examines the ways in which  historically attested colonial activity  manifested itself in the medieval Irish landscape, c.700 to 1400AD.  Many of  the identities linked to the Irish  landscape, over which contestation continues to this day have their origins in this period.  This timeframe includes Scandinavian (i.e. Viking) colonialism  and Anglo‐Norman colonialism, from the ninth to the eleventh, and the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century AD respectively. 

Settlement evidence provides a sound  basis for comparison over time, maintaining a constant presence but changing form in t
he archaeological record, and is the primary base for the analysis here.  By mapping colonial settlement at various time slices using GIS software, it is possible then to examine the process of colonialism, which can be further illuminated by the introduction of other evidence, such as onomastic, documentary, genetic, burial and portable material culture evidence, all of which medieval Ireland has in abundance.

By doing so, it is then possible to investigate issues relating to identity on a landscape scale.  Apart from the more ideology‐military‐economic‐political model of the colonial process a number of cultural processes can be associated  with colonialism, all of which are related to identity.  Included in the  analysis are concepts such as contact‐zones/third‐spaces and alterity, and processes such as othering, hybridity,  creolisation, acculturation and cultural‐conservativism.  These are strongly related to material 
culture, settlement included, and so lend themselves to archaeological analysis.  It will be argued that medieval Irish landscapes can be seen iconographic palimpsests in this context, acting as both prop and stage for the reproduction of not only social power relations, but also the group reproduction and anchoring of identity, both native and colonial. 

This paper will examine the links between art, the built environment and the maintenance of social power in medieval Ireland.  The paper must necessarily be brief, but by using the broadest possible brush here that some key abstractions can be made, abstractions that will in turn produce further discussion.

The physical environment provides a key interface between social structure, the symbolic universe of explanation and human action.  It is a palimpsest containing the outcomes of successive action by human and non-human (such as environmental and geological forces) agents.  It includes everything from hills and mountains sculpted by glaciers and carved stones sculpted by humans to man made sculpture.

It will be argued in this paper that the material encoding of power relation figurations into the landscape via monument construction and art patronage provides a crucial means for the (re)shaping of habitus and the internalisation and reproduction of social power relations.  It will be argued that in order to understand the hegemonic position of some elements of various societies, it is not sufficient to examine this in terms of physical force alone.  Therefore, other avenues of understanding and explanation must be explored, such as symbolic violence, persuasion and the materialisation/reification cycle, and their relationships to artistic and architectural activity.

The paper will use a two case studies to examine do so.  The first will be the relationship of royal power in early medieval Ireland (c.500 to c.1100) to the production of objets d'art and construction of architecturally innovative edifices.  It will then go on and examine colonial landscape transformation, in the high medieval period (c.1100 to 1400), focussing in particular on Anglo-Norman colonialism in the southeast and mid west of Ireland.  Episodes such as this provide an opportunity to examine the reinterpretation and/or reordering of place, i.e. space transformed by human interaction, and the use and agency of art and architecture in this.  Secular and ecclesiastic conspicuous monumentality are examined in this respect. Also under examination is the extent to which it can be said that there are archetypal monuments associated with different facets of power, proposing the castle, or elite defended residence, and the church, or monumental ritual centre, as two such archetypes with cross cultural parallels across space and time.

This paper will attempt a race through the human past in Ireland in terms of its varying levels of inclusion and participation with the trajectory of human historical development. It will briefly assess why at different points in time Ireland was part or not part of greater pan regional trends from the Palaeolithic to almost the present time. Human, such as socio-political, economic and cultural, in addition to non-human, such as climactic, topographic and geographic factors, will be taken into account to attempt an explanation of the longue durée processes at work over this huge sweep of time. The paper will also show that there can be conflicting movements of conceptual space contraction and expansion at different times in different spheres of human activity, such as the political and the ideological. Some periods will receive more focus than others for explanatory purposes, such as the early Neolithic, Iron Age, early medieval, and Viking Age.

This paper will examine the reasons behind why Scandinavian colonialism in Ireland took the form that it did.  Scandinavian colonialism can be seen as having had three main phases: expansion, consolidation and incorporation, which contrasts with the expansion-consolidation-domination process associated with many other colonial episodes across space and time, Norman and Spanish colonialism among them.

Settlement evidence provides a sound basis for comparison over time, maintaining a constant presence but changing form in the archaeological record, and is the primary base for the analysis here.  By mapping colonial settlement at various time slices using GIS, it is possible then to examine the process of colonialism, which can be further illuminated by the introduction of other evidence, such as onomastic, documentary, genetic, burial and portable material culture evidence, although a full treatment of these is beyond the scope of this paper.

Scandinavian settlement in Ireland changed both settler and native, and in ways often beyond the remit of traditional scholarship of the period.  Native responses to it must also be taken into consideration, as does the overall settlement pattern and process of state formation in Ireland ongoing before, during and after the period of Scandinavian colonialism.  Several cultural processes and concepts related to (post)colonialism must also be taken into account when considering Scandinavian colonialism in Ireland, concepts such as contact-zones/third-spaces and alterity, and processes such as othering, hybridity, creolisation and acculturation.  These are strongly related to material culture, settlement included, and so lend themselves to archaeological analysis.

The paper will end by placing the findings related to Scandinavian colonialism in the overall context of colonialism across space and time.

This paper examines the relationship between the known Hiberno-Norse settlements and ecclesiastic institutions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The appearance of significant wealth deposits in the form of coinage at ecclesiastic sites from the tenth century onwards warrants further examination. It is significant that these deposits coincide with what can only be termed an ecclesiastic building boom, which saw the construction of round towers and large stone churches at a number of major institutions. It is argued here that the association of these sites with grain production is important, and it may be that excess grain was traded with Hiberno-Scandinavian towns, bringing them into the towns’ wider interconnected socio-economic network, which in turn could have generated great wealth for these institutions. Naturally, wealth was also generated by other means; throughout human history religious institutions have been principal agents of reification and legitimation of secular authority, and medieval Ireland was no different. The patronage of ecclesiastic institutions by local and regional magnates was another important source of wealth and resources, and must be explored in conjunction with the other themes already mentioned. The original source of some of this wealth donated by the magnates could itself have often been derived from their relationship with the colonial settlements, and this also must be explored.

The physical environment provides a key interface between social structure, the symbolic universe of explanation (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1967) and human action. It is argued in this paper that the material encoding of power relation figurations into the landscape via monument construction provides a crucial means for the (re)shaping of habitus and the internalising of social power relations. This is especially true in episodes of colonial landscape transformation, such as that which occurred in south-eastern Ireland in the Anglo-Norman period. These episodes provide an opportunity to examine the reinterpretation and/or reordering of place, i.e. space transformed by human interaction.
Secular and ecclesiastic conspicuous monumentality are examined in this respect. Also under examination is the extent to which it can be said that there are archetypal monuments associated with different facets of power, proposing the castle, or elite defended residence, and the church, or monumental ritual centre, as two such archetypes with cross cultural parallels across space and time.

"Europe’s Atlantic periphery has been underutilised in studies of European state formation.  Well chosen case studies in Ireland can shed further light on the colonial process, and on issues such as identity, state formation, population movement, acculturation, and shifting patterns of the exercise of social power over time, all salient issues in the study of past and contemporary societies. 
In order to examine the factors determining the successes and failures of the various “population movements” on the Atlantic periphery, this paper will primarily focus on settlement evidence, taking the Viking and Anglo-Norman periods in the south-east and mid-west of Ireland as case studies.  Settlement form and pattern provide a sound basis for comparison over time, maintaining a constant presence but changing form in the archaeological record spatially and temporally.  The overview provided in this paper will examine four key characteristics of each phase as illuminated by an analysis of this dynamic at the landscape scale: the control over economic, ideological, military, and political resources, and the relationships between them.
A study of this type has been made feasible by the growing centralisation of readily available information on archaeological monuments and the development of Geographical Information Systems software, such as archmap 9.2, meaning that it is now possible to deal with large amounts of such data in manageable timeframes.  GIS can be used to assess changes in settlement patterning and layout, and to examine each phase of colonial activity, utilising additional physical geographical layers in order to assess the influence of environmental features and conditions on each phase of activity.  Groups of contemporary monuments can be set as layers in a computer generated map, with each layer representing a phase of colonial activity.  This is extremely effective for identifying and abstracting patterns within colonial activity: those of expansion, consolidation, domination and acculturation, each with its own configuration of the relationships between the exercise of military, political, ideological and economic power.
"

"Europe’s Atlantic periphery has been underutilised in studies of European state formation.  Well chosen case studies in Ireland can shed further light on the colonial process, and on issues such as identity, state formation, population movement, acculturation, and shifting patterns of the exercise of social power over time, all salient issues in the study of past and contemporary societies. 
In order to examine the factors determining the successes and failures of the various “population movements” on the Atlantic periphery, this paper will primarily focus on settlement evidence, taking the Viking and Anglo-Norman periods in the south-east and mid-west of Ireland as case studies.  Settlement form and pattern provide a sound basis for comparison over time, maintaining a constant presence but changing form in the archaeological record spatially and temporally.  The overview provided in this paper will examine four key characteristics of each phase as illuminated by an analysis of this dynamic at the landscape scale: the control over economic, ideological, military, and political resources, and the relationships between them.
"

William FitzWarin (ob. 1299) was a royal administrator active in England, Ireland and Scotland in the second half of the thirteenth century. One of two-if not four-similarly named contemporary figures, his career presents an ideal case study for exploring the tensions between settlers, natives and the metropole at the high point of the 'First English Empire', as R.R. Davies so famously described it. These tensions lay behind the de Mandeville-FitzWarin feud that began in the early 1270s and came to involve an array of allies on both sides. These extended from the Ua Néill, creole lords and knights settled in the Earldom of Ulster for several generations to the young Earl Richard de Burgh on the de Mandeville side, and the Uí Echach Cobo, more recently arrived lords and knights such as the Bysets, Henry III and Edward I on the FitzWarin side. However, this paper will go beyond this episode to treat FitzWarin's career prior to his appointment as Seneschal of Ulster in 1269 by exploring his origins, his holdings, his marriages, his subsequent career under Edward I-especially in Scotland-and the career of his son Alan, including the final settlement of the feud with the de Mandevilles in the late 1320s. Each of these sheds important life on Insular society and politics c.1250-1330.

European Association of Archaeologists, 25th Annual Meeting, Bern

https://youtu.be/kaTjwdxGtww

Session 288: Comparative Kingship: The Early Medieval Kingdoms of Northern Britain and Ireland in their European Context, 7 September 2019

Even though the historical data are often back-projected and unreliable and the associated archaeological evidence frustratingly low resolution, comparatively much can be said of the overkingdoms on either side of the body of water connecting the Irish Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. However, this paper intends to look beyond well-known groups such as the Dál Riata, Dál Fiatach and Dál nAraide to the polities they displaced or incorporated in the historiographical record, if not the landscape itself. To do so, the results of a long-term project that sought to refine settlement distributions in time and space in the North Channel in the Iron Age and medieval period using archaeological, textual and toponymic evidence will be employed. It will be demonstrated in this paper that the cloud of ink associated with the better-known overkingdoms obscures several other polities. A source-critical transdisciplinary approach makes it possible to identify information related to these 'lost' kingdoms and how they were later written out of the historical record and what traces they have left on the landscape. Understanding their form and obsolescence c.AD400-600 is key to understanding how the later state of affairs came about and might potentially provide a model for identifying other polities in Ireland, Britain and Continental Europe subsumed due to similar processes.

European Association of Archaeologists, 25th Annual Meeting, Bern

Session 355: The Politics of the Roman Past in the 21st Century,
7 September 2019

In contrast to several other nearby regions of Europe, a strong element of Irish national sentiment has been constructed around the island of Ireland having lain outside the Roman Empire. The treatment received by the Roman world in a series of twentieth-century textbooks intended for secondary school history teaching will be outlined and critiqued, as will the ways in which it has fed into both popular and academic discourse. It will be discussed how this treatment developed out of a colonial opposition in which the British Empire was seen as a core territory, progressive and equated with the Roman past and Ireland peripheral and equated with a timeless barbarian Europe. This opposition was internalised and embraced by Romantic nationalists and pan-Celticists on both islands and has strongly informed post-colonial discourse in Ireland, not least in the education system. Recent work on Ireland in the late Iron Age and early medieval period has begun to break down this opposition; this paper will close with a transcultural critique of the main elements of the Roman-Irish opposition, recognising instead, as several recent scholars have, that the Roman Empire had a strong, if not quite defining, influence on ideological and material cultural practices and the political changes ongoing in Ireland c.300-600 CE-transculturation, if not Romanisation.