Preface

Abstract

Preface Food and Drink is the second thematic volume to be published since the decision of the editorial board of Proceedings in 2007 to bring out an occasional thematic volume addressing a fundamental theme in Irish life. Like its predecessor, Domestic Life in Ireland (Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 111C), which was published in 2011, the current volume favours the multidisciplinary approach that is one of the defining features of the journal. It aspires thereby to provide a forum for new ideas and for syntheses of established approaches and findings. In keeping with the remit and tradition of the journal to explore the Irish past in la longue durée, it addresses food and drink between the Mesolithic and the present. As Stephen Mennell’s ‘introduction’ to this collection points out, despite the long tradition of collecting and assembling recipes and the cultural potential of printed cookery books, awareness of the rich and revealing potential of the history of food and drink is a comparatively recent development. The decision of Louis Cullen in 1981 to devote two chapters in his vastly influential exploration of the emergence of modern Ireland to ‘diet in a changing society’ and ‘hospitality and men’ was crucial in this respect, because it brought food and diet into the Irish historical mainstream.1 It did not, to be sure, herald a flood of publications on these or allied subjects. The history of alcohol consumption, for example, remained anchored in a world that answered more visibly to the politics of social control than to the new perspectives presented by sociability, conviviality of sociability.2 However, it did pave the way over time for more ambitious work, since as well as Regina Sexton’s helpful short survey, which appeared in 1998,3 the publication by Oxford University Press in 2001 of Feast and famine: a history of food in Ireland, 15001920 by Leslie Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford can justifiably be identified as a milestone, less for the novelty of its findings, than for the breadth of its conclusions, its temporal range and the eclectic range of sources upon which it draws.4 It certainly highlighted the riches to be gleaned from parliamentary enquiries and official surveys, which Ian Miller has * doi: 10.3318/PRIAC.2015.15 1 L. M. Cullen, The emergence of modern Ireland, 16001900 (London, 1981). 2 Colm Kerrigan, Father Matthew and the Irish Temperance Movement (Cork, 1992); Paul A. Townsend, Father Matthew, Temperance and Irish identity (Dublin, 2002); Diarmaid Ferriter, A nation of extremes: the Pioneers in twentieth-century Ireland (Dublin, 1999). 3 Regina Sexton, A little history of Irish food (Dublin, 1998). 4 Leslie Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford, Feast and famine: a history of food in Ireland, 15001920 (Oxford, 2001). Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 115C, viix # 2015 Royal Irish Academy demonstrated still more authoritatively and in greater detail in his recent pioneering engagement with the way in which science, medicine and social reform intersected to shape attitudes to food and diet in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 This is a most important development because for all their intrinsic interest as subjects in their own right, food and drink are still more revealing archaeologically and historically of the societies, peoples and eras in which they are located when they are appealed to amplify and to illuminate broader societal behaviours and tendencies. This is something that Irish archaeology does particularly well. The archaeological essays in this volume introduce several new themes around food-related behaviour and culinary material culture, supported by innovative theoretical frameworks and breakthroughs in scientific methodologies. Complexity has been recognised as a feature of Mesolithic diets and foodways, with belief exercising an influence on food consumption and identified in the archaeological record as specific rituals and patterns of discard. The potential of stable isotope analysis on lipid residues has been realised in its initial application to Irish Neolithic ceramic vessels. This method has revealed that vessels were used mainly to process dairy fats and other foodstuffs, thereby providing new insights into diet and food procurement among the earliest farming communities on the island and marking a beginning to the research journey...