09/10/2026
History Seminar today at 4pm:
The early medieval Irish ringfort, a settlement form with a construction period largely between the 7th and 10th centuries AD, is one of Europe’s most numerous upstanding archaeological monument types, with anywhere between 40,000 and 60,000 spread throughout the island. Attempts to understand the logics of ringfort settlement have largely focused on how far we can use the 7th and 8th century Irish law tracts to explicate their social resonance. Alternatively, scholars have argued that the material complexity of the settlement record is not easily related to the idealised law tracts, but without attempting to demonstrate what might be involved in these dominant settlement processes. The formal evocation that is explicit in the architecture of the early Irish ringfort – an evocation that is integral to the dynamics of early Irish landscapes in a way that appears less widespread in the rest of early medieval western Europe – provides one route into investigating the strategies involved in the production of early Irish social formations.
By reconsidering the long-recognised logics of hierarchy produced through degrees of vallation on ringforts, this paper will examine the intersection of different kinds of stratification, particularly through spatial relations and recent hints of chronological nuance in the emergence of the ringfort type. Through this it becomes clear that the production of ringforts of differing degrees of vallation is only effective as a differentiating social technique in various localities by virtue of their being aspects of a common, universalising settlement form. Foregrounding these basic material statements regarding hierarchy, and using degrees of vallation as a means of considering the qualitative and quantitative dynamics of labour, for which they are a proxy, opens up further possibilities for investigating the integration and confusion of different processes of social hierarchy as they operated in early medieval Ireland at different scales.
Jonathan Murray-Gillott is a PhD candidate in the department of Irish and Celtic at Queen’s University Belfast. The topic of his doctoral research is the production of space in early medieval Ireland, through the analysis of spatial relationships between archaeological features and a holistic placename database for southern Ulster, coupled with historical reconstruction of territory.
He is particularly interested in building methodologies for the landscape study of placenames in Ireland through statistical analyses and the development and self-construction of early Irish communities, and the economic logics of pre-capitalist societies, especially questions of value theory in the tradition of a Marxian historiography.
To request online access, please email [email protected].
Eventbrite link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/history-seminar-jonathan-murray-gillott-tickets-2002392362459?aff=oddtdtcreator
