Life at Home in Ireland's Viking-Age Worlds

The stereotypical 'Viking' is usually a hairy, male warrior, intent on destruction, pillaging and looting. But this is not the 'Viking' who we should associate with the 10th, 11th and 12th century occupation of Viking-Age Dublin, Cork, and Waterford. While this urban population did include a number of those ‘Viking warriors’, there were far more people who were not warriors. The urban household was a diverse household, consisting of men and women at different ages and stages of their lives. In this lecture, we will look at the houses and streets where these households made their lives and homes. Using the huge amount of archaeological evidence we have excavated over the past 60 years, we can use this to reconstruct life at home in Ireland’s Viking-Age Worlds.

Rebecca Boyd is an expert in Ireland’s Viking-Age and early medieval archaeology. She is the author of Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns: Houses and Homes (Routledge, 2023) and regularly publishes and speaks to academic and public audiences on topics relating to Ireland’s Viking Age. She has worked in commercial and research archaeology for over 20 years and has lectured in UCD, NUI Maynooth and UCC on both the archaeology and history of medieval Ireland. Rebecca is Senior Research Archaeologist with IAC Archaeology on the Drumclay Crannog Post-Excavation Programme.

Rebecca's new book Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns: Houses and Homes is available here: http://www.routledge.com/9780367482787