An Archaeology of a Famine-Era Eviction

Abstract

New Hibernia Review 9.1 (2005) 45-58 [Access article in PDF] An Archaeology of a Famine-Era Eviction Charles E. Orser, Jr. Illinois State University Recent archaeology in Ireland has provided abundant new information about the history of the island's people and their culture. Archaeological research is distinguished by its ability to examine longterm trajectories of cultural change, with the parameters of study often encompassing several centuries. Because of the discipline's ability to investigate huge segments of time, many believe that archaeologists are unable to examine specific, unique events. The realities of archaeological research may, indeed, often prohibit the fine-grained interpretations available to local historians, but archaeologists are often afforded rare glimpses of unique occurrences. The opportunity to investigate specific events is enhanced when archaeologists use a multidisciplinary approach that combines excavated data, written accounts, landscape details, and other sources of information.1 A case in point is a recent series of excavations at Ballykilcline in northern County Roscommon, where archaeologists were able to examine the remains of a cabin whose residents were forcibly evicted in the 1840s. This investigation provides new information about the actual process of "ejectment" in both its general characteristics and its local manifestations. Ballykilcline was a townland of about 160 acres (65 hectares) located on the eastern shore of Lough Kilglass. In 1841, almost 500 people lived there as tenant farmers. The Mahons of Strokestown Park House, located about five miles, to the southwest, held a lease to Ballykilcline until May, 1834, when they were unable to renegotiate a new arrangement with the crown. The townland reverted to the administrative control of Her Majesty's Commissioners of Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Works, and Buildings. Upon taking control, the commissioners discovered that the townland was divided into "seventy-four distinct Tenancies."2 Two cabins, associated with the Nary family, were the subject of archaeological excavations during five summers from 1998 to 2002. [End Page 45] Click for larger view Figure 1 Remains of Nary cabin as discovered by excavation, 1998 –2002. [End Page 46] To archaeologists, the way in which people abandoned their homes is as important as the activities they conducted within them. The abandonment of liveable dwellings assumes major significance when investigating early nineteenth-century Irish rural history, because abandonment—through eviction, disease, death, or assisted emigration—helps to explain the human and natural transformations experienced in the Irish countryside after 1800. Site abandonment is both a deceptively simple, and a decidedly complex, obstacle to archaeological interpretation. In the simplest sense, we may easily imagine that men and women can walk away from their habitations with the intention of starting life in a new locale. Students of crosscultural human behavior have long studied transhumance and seasonal settlement patterns, and such movements and migrations are neither startling nor unique.3 The underlying concept of site abandonment is thus easy to conceptualize, as migration and movement constitute a significant aspect of the human endeavor. But abandonment appears more complex and multifaceted, when analysts acknowledge it as a process, rather than as a wholly unique set of events. With the general complexity of site abandonment acknowledged as a process, numerous ancillary issues come to the fore, and archaeologists must struggle to interpret the material components of site-specific examples of abandonment. For archaeological purposes, Michael Schiffer has provided the clearest synthesis and standardization of the concept of abandonment. Schiffer envisions abandonment as a process that has numerous material dimensions of relevance to archaeologists. One important material element of abandonment is that migrants do not always take all their possessions with them—even many possessions that are still usable. These artifacts are nonetheless deposited in the soil along with all the normal refuse of everyday living. Schiffer terms these still useful, but abandoned, artifacts "de facto refuse."4 The material character of the process of site abandonment rests upon two primary, albeit location-sensitive, conditions: the reasons for abandonment, and the eventual plans of the site's residents. The impetus for abandonment is [End Page 47] a centrally significant issue for archaeologists because it involves the possibility of...