Exploring the ‘somewhere’ and ‘someone’ else: an integrated approach to Ireland’s earliest farming practice

One of the great successes of Childe’s concept of the Neolithic Revolution was the emphasis it placed on the new – on a ‘package’ of related innovations in subsistence, technology and social relations as a rupture, a break, a new beginning. This is especially important given long-standing characterisations of hunting and gathering groups as unchanging over time and without historical agency or dynamism (Sassaman and Holly, 2011). Since Childe, the Neolithic revolution has been substantially unpacked, and in areas of primary domestication, we recognise that the process was long, variable and multi-faceted (e.g. Finlayson, 2013; Larsen et al., 2014). The Neolithic package has also been dismantled in Europe, but at times our descriptions of the process can still emphasise the novel and the new, which may lead to neglect of longer-term continuities. For example, the claim that ‘domesticated plants and animals come from somewhere else’ (Gron, this volume, Introduction) is undoubtedly true: but in the Mesolithic period, hunter-gatherers imported wild and domestic animals to new landscapes. Ireland, for example, sees the importation of wild boar (Sus scrofa) and domesticated dog (Canis familiaris) early in the Holocene in a truly pre-agricultural context (Warren et al., 2014). The presence of domesticated cattle (Bos taurus) in the mid-late fifth millennium BC at Ferriter’s Cove is more contentious but given that the majority of activity on site is of Later Mesolithic character is probably best understood in a hunter-gatherer context rather than that of failed agricultural colonisation (Woodman et al., 1999). Bringing new species into an environment was not a new practice in the Neolithic. Even an emphasis on new processes of food production must be understood against a recognition that many hunter-gatherer groups are characterised by ‘low-level food production’ (Smith, 2001), or preferably ‘low-level resource production’ (Crawford, 2011).