The Archaeology of Livestock and Cereal Production in Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100

Abstract

Early medieval Ireland was an overwhelmingly rural landscape, with individual farmsteads (raths and crannogs), fields, and route-ways set in a highly managed agricultural landscape. In this rural landscape farming was the constant in people’s daily lives. The majority of the community, especially the ordinary and un-free members of society, such as the low-status commoners, hereditary serfs and slaves, would have spent most of their lives at work in the fields - herding cattle, sheep and pigs, ploughing, sowing and harvesting crops, or building and repairing field-walls. In the home, the daily lives of men and women would have been dominated by domestic activities relating to agriculture, whether this was in terms of preparing milk and cheeses, grinding grain for flour, salting meats for winter storage, or spinning and weaving wool.