Introduction to Irish Geography, Geology and Anthropology

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course and associated field-trips are designed to introduce the student to the Settlement History and Anthropology of Ireland. "If there is one lesson from the whole History of Ireland, it is that its story has been of adapting new ideas to local circumstances", Professor Peter Woodman, 2018. There have been six well-documented migrations/invasions into Ireland since the Mesolithic, three of these are from the Prehistoric Era and the remainder from the Medieval period onwards, culminating in the Plantations of Ulster in the early 17 th Century by Scottish and English settlers. The geological and glacial geography of the country had a profound impact on the extent and density of these settlements and their impacts will be woven into the lectures and field trips. 50 years of research has begun to produce the first tentative evidence for Palaeolithic presence while transforming our understanding of the Mesolithic or New Stone Age, a period which saw the first major migration of hunter-gatherer groups into Ireland after the last Ice Age. The Neolithic (4000 to 2400BC) saw the arrival of early farming-communities who were later reinforced and fundamentally altered by a great migration during Bronze Age (2400 to 500BC). The so-called "Celtic Iron Age" (500BC to 400AD) is altogether more elusive in terms of landscape archaeology than the two preceding eras, yet Ireland contains two of the great Sacred Landscapes of the European Iron Age, at Tara and Rathcroghan. From the 400AD onwards Ireland entered a Golden Age of creativity and cultural expansion, both at home and abroad, triggered by the adoption of Roman Christianity and the opening-up of the population to a vast new inter-connected world. Germanic invasions, the first by Viking Danes and Norwegians, beginning in 795AD, and more drastically by the English in 1169AD, began a series of fundamental changes to the Irish landscape, people and culture which, reverberate to the present day. The most obvious of these were a gradual a shift from a rural to progressively more urban settlement pattern and from the Gaelic Irish language spoken in various forms for millennia to the Germanic English which had come to dominate the neighbouring island since the collapse of the Roman Empire. The resulting cultural and religious contacts and conflicts define the Irish physical and cultural landscape.