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 hat did the early Irish eat for breakfast? I was asked this question when I mentioned I was doing research on food development in Ireland. As for the answer, well that's a different story depending on what time frame we're looking at. Since this article is the first in a series looking at the development of food sources in Ireland, we'll begin at the beginning with the foraging 1 people of the early Mesolithic. In the long ago far away, bands of foragers moved across the land of Europe. Semi-nomadic, they followed the seasons and the foods they relied on moving to and from camps as their needs required. The last Ice Age was over and as the ice retreated, forest grew where once there was only tundra and grassland. The large mammals that the people once relied on for food had given way to smaller beasts, there was a greater diversity of available plant foods, ocean and river levels were rising. From the continent they moved into Britain and from there, sometime during the 8th millenium, they arrived  on the eastern shores of Ireland. Some speculate that they walked, crossing what remained of a strip of land connecting Ireland to what is now Britain. Others say that this "land bridge" was probably a broad increasingly marshy floodplain with an sea river at it's center...they would have crossed the open water in dugout or skin covered canoes.
Regardless of their method of travel, these first true inhabitants of Ireland initially kept to the northeast near the sea-coast and the shores of the Bann river where they continued a fairly similar semi-nomadic style. Later as more people came or as these people began to wander the land, their population began to explore the more southern and interior regions. For the most part though they remained in the northeastern regions, keeping to the coast and riversides. Some 130 sites have been studied, revealing stone tools, post-holes outlining habitations, fire and refuse pits, and bits of worked wood. Of all of these sites, only 13 have thus far revealed food remains, most of these are of fish and animal bones, some nut shells and fruit seeds. The first people came to an Ireland that was heavily forested, with a warmer, less stormy climate and warmer seas than today. They found a forest dominated by Silver Birch, Hazel, some Aspen, Scots Pine, and the first of the Elm and Oak that would eventually make up the majority of species. Breaks in the forest were in the form of forest glades and the shores of rivers, lakes and the sea. Over the next thousand years or so, the weather became moister and the composition of the forest began to change. Birch and Aspen declined and Holly and Rowan began to make inroads. An east/west division of species developed within the forest, with a northeastern mix of Hazel, Elm and Oak with few Scots Pine and a southwestern woodland with more Pine and less Hazel, Elm and Oak. With the moister climate came Alder. By the time agriculture began to be practiced some time in the 4th millenium, the forest was changing again with Alder, Oak and Pine becoming the dominant elements. Though we don't have a great deal of information on the Irish, by taking it and data from concurrent British and Continental sites we do have enough to build a general picture of how these people lived. I rarely engage in this kind of cross-cultural approach to anthropological research, however in this case these people had not yet been separated from their place or people of origin long enough to develop a distinct culture. There is some disagreement among scholars as to the kind of life style, sedentary or migratory, that the earliest people chose. The reasons for on-going discourse are many and varied. Part of the problem lies in the lack of real information and the scant archeological record. The evidence from the sites themselves is inconclusive. Some scholars maintain the early people migrated according to season and food availability much as they had done on the continent for thousands of years. Other say that they lived in semi-permanent base camps and had satellite camps for specialized work such as hunting and tool making. Personally I tend to favor the latter theory. I say this because of three main factors, the location of the sites: near water, the food remains found: mostly fish, and the climate. Even today the climate of much of Ireland is temperate in the truest sense with temperatures only having a swing of about 20 degrees over the course of the year, never truly hot or cold, especially on the eastern shore. |
