Starting as we mean to go on. Why we need a theoretically informed historical archaeology in Ireland

Abstract

Dr Horning's paper touches issues of fundamental importance both to contemporary Ireland as a place of historically rooted cultural contestation and to the discipline of historical archaeology in Ireland. It has a core message: archaeologists can blunt some of those sharp edges of cultural-political division that originated in Plantation-era settlement by revealing how historical sites that seem on the surface to belong on one or other aggrieved side in the island's history are susceptible to more nuanced, and arguably more legitimate, interpretations.