The house and group identity in the Irish Neolithic

A connection is frequently made between the arrival of farming in Ireland and the beginnings of domestic life ' proper', i.e., the foundation of a permanent or semipermanent base around which activities and events relating to the agricultural year are focused. The appearance in the archaeological record of substantial timber buildings associated with early Neolithic ceramics, lithics and food waste would on first inspection seem to bear this out. Emerging detail on their construction, use and abandonment suggests that they represented a considerable social investment for at least several generations during the early Neolithic. The domestic architecture that characterises later periods— the middle and late Neolithic—leaves very different and generally more ephemeral traces in the archaeological record as well as diverging quite dramatically in terms of shape and design. Perhaps most significantly, these later shifts appear to coincide with changes in the form and scale of funerary and ceremonial architecture such as passage tombs and timber circles. In this paper, it is argued that exploring the space, content and design of these various domestic settings through the Neolithic can bring us closer to understanding earlier prehistoric society as a whole.