The house and group identity in the Irish Neolithic

Abstract

A connection is frequently made between the arrival of farming in Ireland and the beginnings of domestic life 'proper', i.e., the foundation of a permanent or semipermanent base around which activities and events relating to the agricultural year are focused.The appearance in the archaeological record of substantial timber buildings associated with early Neolithic ceramics, lithics and food waste would on first inspection seem to bear this out.Emerging detail on their construction, use and abandonment suggests that they represented a considerable social investment for at least several generations during the early Neolithic.The domestic architecture that characterises later periodsthe middle and late Neolithicleaves very different and generally more ephemeral traces in the archaeological record as well as diverging quite dramatically in terms of shape and design.Perhaps most significantly, these later shifts appear to coincide with changes in the form and scale of funerary and ceremonial architecture such as passage tombs and timber circles.In this paper, it is argued that exploring the space, content and design of these various domestic settings through the Neolithic can bring us closer to understanding earlier prehistoric society as a whole.Narratives of the Irish Neolithic have, for a long time, been based around the very prominent and very numerous megalithic monuments that dot the landscape of Ireland.While it is generally acknowledged that such undertakings were precipitated by changes in social organisation, diet and land-management practices,1 domestic archaeologies and archaeologies of everyday routine remainwith a couple of notable exceptionsa neglected dimension of Neolithic life.2However, the boom in construction and infrastructural development in Ireland over the last ten years or so has changed things considerably.Commercial rescue excavation carried out in advance of housing developments, pipelines and motorways has provided us with the 'invisible' archaeology of domestic life on a scale never before encountered, and which can now

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