MATERIALISING RULERSHIP IN FIRST-MILLENNIUM AD IRELAND: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2021-03-11

This paper explores the strategies of rulership employed by kings and related potentates in Munster, southern Ireland, during the first millennium AD, in order to examine the role of places in royal practices of governance and political reproduction. As the home of some of Irelabnd’s most powerful kings and famous royal landscapes, Munster is a unique case study. Its capital at Cashel is iconic but unusual in an Irish context, and this paper explores its wider north European significance, while also analysing the role that Cashel and other royal centres played for framing competing political discourses at national and international level. Drawing on recent fieldwork at Cashel and other sites in Munster, it analyses the materiality and spatiality of power, authority, and rulership in late Roman to Viking Age European society. By exploring how programmes of construction and monumental investment were implicated in strategies of rulership, it examines the wider context of political discourse and its evolution as a critique of state formation frameworks in archaeology more generally.


Author(s): Gleeson, Patrick (Queen’s University Belfast)