Introduction What were early medieval dwellings and settlements in Ireland like? How did people live in them, sleep, eat, work and make things? How were they organised in social, economic and ideological terms? How did people live together as households, kin-groups or an extended community? What were the relationships between men and women (including those of different social classes), between the old and the young—and how did children learn their way in the world? Did the wealthy and powerful inhabit the same spaces as the poor or unfree? In other words, who did people think they were, what did they think they were doing, and to what end did they think they were doing it (questions that Glifford Geertz (1983) argued should be key in any anthropological study), when they were building, inhabiting or reconstructing their houses, sitting around fireplaces and telling stories, raising the enclosing banks that defined their settlements, or working in the fields that surrounded them? These are all questions about early Irish society that probably can best be answered through the use of a range of sources. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, we can thereby weave together a tapestry whose threads are the evidence from archaeological excavations, material culture studies, palaeoecological analyses and a wide range of early medieval historical sources, such as saints’ Lives, old Irish law tracts and some texts from narrative literature (which occasionally describe fantastic houses or dwellings, and thus give a sense of how people imagined dwelling spaces). For example, to reconstruct early medieval houses in the eighth century we can use site plans from excavations, legal descriptions of household property from such texts as Críth Gablach, and perhaps some anecdotes from a saint’s Life or a voyage tale to communicate a sense of their practical, symbolic and even cosmological properties. Indeed, a multidisciplinary approach is increasingly the only way through which the true richness and quality of data available on early medieval settlement can really be understood. Traditionally, archaeologists have tended to take a fairly descriptive, cultural-historical perspective to their own role in reconstructing early medieval settlement landscapes, seeing as their task the description of the physical features of dwellings and settlements that underpin wider social interpretations. More often, what they actually do is describe the archaeological features and then use a few texts (or their uncritical reading of secondary sources) to provide the social interpretation (when the latter is attempted at all). This might be described as the ‘history plus’ approach, the belief that historical sources describe past societies while archaeology provides the meaty detail—the stone walls, ditches or objects that would have been there passively in the background. More recently, however, some medieval archaeologists have begun to realise that approaches inspired by developments in post-processual theoretical archaeology can enable a more imaginative and perhaps realistic approach. In other words, if we recognise that it is in the materiality of people’s lives that we can trace much of their social relationships, then archaeology has a rather more ambitious task—that of interrogating and explaining the character of early Irish society itself. This is probably all the more obvious when we recognise that in early medieval Ireland the vast majority of the population was illiterate and texts remained accessible only to an educated few. In fact, as John Moreland (2001) has pointed out in his book Archaeology and text, most people’s means of communication in the Middle Ages were either oral (and their voices in conversation are utterly lost to us) or material, with texts and images reserved to those élite few capable of reading them. If we accept this, if materiality was so important to social communication (arguably far more than in our own lives today), then archaeology should play a key role in tracing not only the practicalities of people’s daily lives but also the very means by which people lived together, understood each other, inhabited space or experienced being-in-the-world, in a phenomenological sense. Material culture was not only, in the classic post-processual phrase, meaningfully constituted, it was also active—shaping people’s lives at the same time as they created, used and abandoned it. To grow up and experience life in an early medieval house or dwelling was to learn about society and your place in it. Early Irish society: household, community and knowing your place Early Irish society was bewilderingly different to our own, with complex ideas about social hierarchy, kinship and belonging. We have a wide range of sources that let us 343 23. Daily life and practice in an early medieval rath: encountering early Irish society through archaeology, history and palaeoecology Aidan O’Sullivan