Eileen Reilly – författare

What would it have been like to walk down the streets of Viking Age Dublin a thousand years ago? What would you have seen, heard and smelled? How would this urban settlement have been different from an early medieval rural dwelling of this time – a rath, a crannog or dún situated in the countryside? Such questions not only potentially interrogate the reality of people’s lives in the past, but also open up topics such as diet, health and disease in urban and rural settings, the alteration and management of past environments and emergence of new forms of urban and rural communities in Europe.Dirt, Dwellings and Culture explores the living conditions and environments as experienced by early medieval people in Ireland, touching upon a wide range of environmental, architectural, artefactual and historical datasets from significant archaeological excavations of settlement sites across Ireland and Northern Europe. At its heart it focuses on a new and significant body of insect analysis from one of the most iconic sites of Viking Dublin – Fishamble Street. These new data are discussed with reference to other excavated and previously published research, especially from the rural rath at Deer Park Farms, Co. Antrim, and some preliminary data from Drumclay Crannog, Co. Fermanagh.The book concludes with a wider discussion of dirt, disease and hygiene in early medieval Ireland: what can the environmental data and historical texts tell us about the way that people in early medieval Ireland felt about and interacted with ‘dirt’ and dirty places?

Persian Pottery in the First Global Age: the Sixteenth and Seventeeth Centuries studies the ceramic industry of Iran in the Safavid period (1501-1732) and the impact which the influx of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, heightened by the activities of the English and Dutch East Indies Companies after c. 1700, had on local production. The multidisciplinary approach of the authors (Lisa Golombek, Robert B. Mason, Patricia Proctor, Eileen Reilly) leads to a reconstruction of the narrative about Safavid pottery and revises commonly accepted notions. The book includes easily accessible reference charts to assist in dating and provenancing Safavid pottery on the basis of diagnostic motifs, potters' marks, petrofabrics, shapes, and Chinese models.