Habitation site, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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Settlement Sites

Habitation site, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

High Street in Dublin's old city sits on one of the oldest thoroughfares in the capital, and when construction crews began digging foundation trenches at numbers 4 and 5, they broke into something considerably older than the buildings they were replacing.

What emerged was a compressed record of everyday urban life stretching from the eleventh century to the middle of the thirteenth, the kind of evidence that rarely survives in a city that has been continuously built over and rebuilt for a thousand years.

Archaeological monitoring of the foundation trench, documented by Murtagh in 1989, uncovered two principal features: a cesspit and a post and wattle structure. Post and wattle construction involved weaving thin branches or rods between upright timber posts to form walls, a technique common in Viking-Age and early medieval Dublin, where timber was the default building material. The finds associated with this occupation were varied enough to sketch an outline of the people who lived here. Bronze cloak pins and combs suggest personal adornment and grooming; knives and spearheads point to more practical and occasionally martial concerns; nails indicate carpentry of some kind nearby. The pottery is particularly telling, including wares produced locally in Dublin alongside pieces imported from the south-west of England, which indicates that even at this early period the site's occupants had access to goods moving through the port trade that made Dublin's economy function.

The site itself is no longer accessible as an archaeological feature; it was investigated during construction and is now built over. High Street runs through the Liberties area, close to Christ Church Cathedral, and the surrounding streetscape still broadly follows its medieval alignment, which gives some sense of the density and continuity of settlement in this part of the city. For those interested in the material culture recovered from sites like this one, the National Museum of Ireland at Kildare Street holds substantial collections from Dublin's urban excavations, where objects comparable to the cloak pins, combs, and imported pottery found here can be examined in detail.

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