Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns

Rebecca Boyd is an archaeologist with a special research interest in the emergence of towns and urban life in Ireland’s Viking Age. She held a Government of Ireland Fellowship at the Department of Archaeology, University College Cork from 2019 to 2021. She obtained her PhD from University College Dublin in 2012. Her research interests span Ireland’s Viking Age, the archaeology of houses and households, crannogs, and public perceptions of heritage and archaeology.

• Introduction: An Archaeology of Houses, of Towns and of Households; Part 1 – The Houses; 2. Ireland’s 9th century Viking-Age Settlements; 3. Ireland’s 10th- to 12th-century Viking-Age Towns; 4. Exploring the Houses; Part 2 – The Households; 5. Artefact Distribution Studies: Visible and Invisible Work Practices; 6. Access Analysis: Moving Around the House; 7. Exploring the Properties; Part 3 – The Town; 8. Urban Worlds and Urban Lives; 9. Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns: Where Next?

The vagaries of document survival often lead to top-down historical analysis: a handful of royals take up more pages than thousands of ordinary people. Rebecca Boyd's Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns: Houses and Homes is the perfect antidote to this problem. ... This is an academic book, dense with detail, research and references, but running through it all is a human story and one which Boyd is careful to keep at the forefront of her analysis. ... A fantastic work of scholarship"Grace O'Keeffe, Editor, Archaeology IrelandThis book offers a compelling and richly detailed examination of the residential architecture and urban development in Viking-Age Ireland. The author brings her expertise to bear in this comprehensive study that combines excavation data, archaeological theory and contemporary scholarship to illuminate the lives of Ireland's first townspeople. As the first book to explicitly compare the Viking-Age houses from Dublin, Cork and Waterford in detail, it is an essential resource for archaeologists and historians of the Viking period as well as those who research medieval Ireland and/or the past built environment. As such, this will no doubt be an essential addition to reading lists for students and a crucial reference point for understanding how these early urban centres shaped the cultural landscape of medieval Ireland.Dr. Sarah Kerr, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 2024