The massive excavations undertaken between 1974 and 1981 by the National Museum of Ireland in the area of Wood Quay, Dublin, at the heart of one of northern Europe's most intriguing early medieval towns, are a cornerstone of Viking Age archaeology. The extensive excavated area comprised substantial parts of at least 14 urban plots (‘yards’) in a densely built-up area with a well-preserved, 3m-deep stratigraphy with evidence for about 600 buildings distributed across 14 chronological levels from the early tenth to the twelfth centuries AD. The extraordinary evidence for house plans and areas, combined with the remarkable preservation of organic materials and a rich environmental archive, and with a wealth of artefacts of every kind, from toy boats to artisans’ trial pieces, and with a finely meshed stratigraphy, has allowed researchers to follow the development of Ireland's first urban community in high-definition detail. The results are documented in the fascicules of the series Medieval Dublin Excavations 1962–81, and have been reviewed in a host of books and papers.
The volume under review presents a synthesis by the researcher who directed the excavations as well as the subsequent decade-long research programme. According to the subtitle, the book concerns the Wood Quay excavations, but it is in fact based on a larger group of some 20 major area excavations undertaken at Wood Quay, Fishamble Street and St John's Lane. The author also seeks to incorporate evidence from subsequent excavations of early Dublin.
Despite its inviting format and a wealth of attractive illustrations, this is far from a coffee-table book. Nor is it a book written for a general archaeological audience. From the first page of the opening chapter, it assumes firm knowledge of the topography and streetscape of modern Dublin; of Irish medieval history and the vocabulary that goes with its study; of the personnel and sites of Dublin's archaeological research history; of the technicalities of urban archaeology; and of the general study of the Viking Age (which, for Dublin, is considered to continue up to AD 1169, p. xiii).
Once acclimatised to these expectations, one can join a fascinating journey of almost 500 pages through town layout, buildings, defences and harbour facilities (Chapters 1–5), environmental evidence (Chapter 6) and a wealth and diversity of finds (Chapter 7–11). Two concluding chapters analyse the wider historical (Chapter 12) and archaeological (Chapter 13) context of the discoveries. The book is supplied with an extensive apparatus, including a glossary of technical and vernacular terms, and a detailed index of places, names and subjects.
The text is engaging and allows many opportunities to note the author's thorough combination of written sources with excavated evidence, marking this study as a truly integrated effort. For an account written by one of the key participants in the excavations, it is remarkable to note that Wallace has chosen not to focus on the process of discovery. Even if sometimes written as a first-person narrative, and occasionally panegyric about the significance of the excavations, there are few biographical elements in the book; only occasionally are the problems and surprise revelations of the research process highlighted (as, for example, when discussing the unexpected results of recent entomological studies by Reilly); and perhaps most remarkably, there is hardly an anecdote about the excavations, or the animated political process that surrounded them, as chronicled in books by Bradley (Reference Bradley1984) and Hefferman (Reference Hefferman1988).
Instead, we are offered a thorough and conscientious review of the wide range of outcomes from the project, headed by the author, with detailed readings into the many lines of research opened up by the Wood Quay excavations. This certainly goes (and is intended) to emphasise the impressive scale and complexity of this particular enterprise; but it also serves to showcase more generally the huge potential and rewards of urban archaeology as a singularly rich archaeological resource for the study of complex societies. It makes apparent how much more is still to be done. Surprisingly, for example, the complex task of analysing the finds contextually in relation to features—the precondition for assigning function and social meaning to this unique archive of early medieval buildings and the wider townscape—is largely left for “future workers” (p. 55).
Wallace's analysis of the archaeology of early Dublin confirms the evidence of the written sources that present the settlement as an essentially alien (Scandinavian) maritime trading place on Irish ground. This view is argued in particular with reference to the settlement layout and building traditions, both of which are seen to have more convincing roots in continental north-western Europe and in Scandinavia than in Ireland. An older view that Dublin was founded on the experience of English towns by an Irish-Norse army returning to Ireland in AD 917 lingers in the text, but is effectively dismissed on the basis of new chronological evidence. That leaves Scandinavian towns, in particular Kaupang in Norway, as the most obvious candidates for the origin of early Dublin's distinctive mode of urbanity. This striking long-distance link between nodes in the maritime urban network is another key finding that deserves further exploration, including in relation to Kaupang's sister cities in Ribe (Denmark), Birka (Sweden) and Hedeby (Germany).
For a book of this scope and thoroughness, it is disappointing to note the typos and repetitions that could have been easy targets for a meticulous proofreader. A more serious editorial issue is the fact that the main text provides no reference to the illustrations. This is an inexplicable impairment to a work concerned with such complex visual issues as site layout, house plans, details of building constructions and artefact typologies. The reader is left to search across the book in order to identify the intricate web of sites, areas, levels, yards and buildings that form the matrix of the discussion. Eventually, one may discover that the numbers of yards in some levels can be gleaned from fig. 2.7 (p. 39) or fig. 2.22 (p. 51); or that a table of the associations of buildings with yards and levels is given as fig. 2.38 (p. 74). But what is the reader to make of the instruction that sites are mapped “numbering the sites for reference in groups within notional adjoining segments of the overall settlement” (p. 69), when no corresponding map can be found? By a process of search and elimination, a reasoned guess is that the numbers are those identified on fig. 1.1 (p. 3), which, however, does not identify any segments, and no key is provided to match the numbers with the site names that are more frequently used to refer to the individual sites in the text. Lacking such basic cross-referencing frustrates attempts to follow discussions in Chapters 2–5 in particular, and lets down the efforts of the reader and author alike.
These limitations should not dissuade students from tackling what is certainly a very important contribution to the study of the Viking Age, of early medieval Ireland and of urban archaeology. A newcomer to the archaeology of Dublin may be advised to come armed with a map and some amount of patience, but the rewards will merit the effort. The excavation of Dublin's extraordinary early medieval remains at Wood Quay, and the associated sites, was a landmark achievement of north European archaeology. The first-hand synthesis of these excavations in a book of impressive detail, keen observation and insightful discussion is another major accomplishment, the result of decades of scholarship and endeavour. The work of an astute copy-editor would have been a comparatively small additional investment and is greatly missed. It is rare these days even for key scholarly monographs to appear in revised editions; one hopes that the enduring interest in the archaeology of Dublin will make this book an exception.
