Project background and case-study choice

The impetus for this project came from a cross-disciplinary workshop in UCD in September 2007 which explored the future of Irish Studies as a discipline, especially in the context of in-migration and the related citizenship debate. In that setting, we recognised the urgent need to embrace and give voice to communities that are de facto ‘othered’ by the so-called heritage industry, and the necessity of developing new strategies of investigation and representation for this purpose.

The project will focus on two geographical areas in which preliminary work has already been undertaken by various members of the research team, because they have classic ‘multicultural’ profiles and because they have seen developer-funded archaeological excavations of their pre-contemporary histories. The first area is centred on Clanbrassil Street. Originally a medieval suburb, this is a traditional, Liberties-style, working-class area which is fast disappearing under new apartment blocks, and in which a century-old Jewish population is declining and a Muslim population enlarging. The second area stretches from Parnell Street and Moore Street towards Amiens Street. It encompasses low-rent residential and commercial spaces of immigrant African and Chinese communities, as well as former working-class tenements and, in the vicinity of Railway Street, the city’s nineteenth-century red-light district.

In designing this Archaeology in Inner-City Dublin project we surveyed the archaeological literature pertaining to the historic city. That survey revealed ‘historic’ to mean medieval and early modern, the corollary being that the contemporary city is assumed not to be archaeological. The survey also revealed that much of the research on Dublin as an archaeological locus over the past fifteen years has been concerned with finding (a) historical evidence correlative to the material which is excavated from below ground or surveyed above ground, and (b) comparative archaeological evidence which helps to explain Dublin’s material remains according to the normative models. We note that these are standard concerns for archaeologists working in urban environments across Europe. We also note, however, that global patterns of research in urban archaeology differ markedly from the European, both in their use of explicit (commonly Marxian) social theory to interpret their data, and in their recognition that archaeology in a living urban environment is, ultimately, a political project which can be inadvertently complicit in sustaining class differences and ‘othering’ minorities and sub-alterns. The research questions which underpin our proposal have benefited greatly from observing the success of North American and Australian experiences in particular of creating feedback loops between archaeological knowledge and local community knowledge, between academic, vernacular and artistic modes of representation, and between data extracted from the ground as relict evidence and data which are created in the present.