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Central questions

Our research questions focus on two central strands: the nature and dynamics of (1) the communities of interest and (2) the research process itself.

Communities- New and Old

• Although the fabric of the city is ever-changing, vestiges of older fabric survive in neglected spaces – backlanes, for example – where their survival is incidental rather than a result of heritage policy. These residues, as we choose to describe them here, are important touchstones for local community memory and identity. They are stray references to disappeared but still-recalled residents and businesses. They are stray survivals from once-familiar landscapes. They go unnoticed as archaeological excavation digs past them and modern development rises over them. Can we quantify the contemporary urban landscape-as-palimpsest through the recording of the complex stratigraphies of these residues? And in doing so, can we establish the value of recording such residual materialities in urban environments to the point at which such recording becomes a matter of archaeological policy?

• What do the new migrant communities of our study areas understand by ‘identity’, and to what extent do these understandings tally with the often-unconscious articulation of identity in material culture, landscape and movement through the landscape? What constitutes ‘heritage’ among these communities? How do they understand debates about preservation and conservation? How do they evaluate, if at all, the dominant nationalist paradigm in current debates about heritage (as at Tara, or the 1916 house on Moore Street)? Do they recognise the presence of this paradigm in their urban landscapes? What effect do these dynamics have on their own sense of home-building and belonging?

• Can we draw down the meanings of these residues by engaging with local community members, long-resident and indeed newly-settled? Specifically, can we measure how these communities diverge in their comprehending of them? To what extent are these residues the signifiers of place and territory, and the aides de memoire, for native working-class communities? (And, to what extent is the low heritage value placed in residual spaces such as backlanes problematic for those immigrant communities which occupied these spaces upon first arrival in Ireland?). What are their implications for weaving a new social fabric of intercultural and cross-community relations?

Research Process and Evidence-Based Practice

• Does the process of recording these contemporary landscapes have to exclude those who live within them? Is the conventional end-product – the stratigraphic drawing, the Harris Matrix, the scaled photograph – the only end-product? Can we so engage local communities in the data-collecting and data-representing aspects of our archaeological project that they are empowered as participants and stakeholders? Is the mural, or the installation, or the performance, as legitimate a mode of presenting heritage as the archaeological drawing? Is it more culturally appropriate?

• Can we recycle the results of archaeological excavations into our dialogue with local communities, so that this evidence, garnered from invasive operations conducted without any local input, is actively put at the service of the local community? And can we facilitate local communities to see archaeological excavation as a type of public performance, a carefully choreographed procedure that demands to be viewed by the public. Does the archaeological excavation have a purpose beyond providing the archaeologist with data on the one hand, and meeting a developer’s legal obligation on the other?