2003:0581 - DUBLIN: Smithfield, Dublin

The excavation of this four-acre site, bounded by Smithfield, North King Street, Queen Street and Haymarket, continued until mid-March 2003. The focus of this third phase of excavation was on the development of the southern third of the block. A historical background to the site appears in Excavations 2002, No. 577.

The earliest deposits were interpreted as the sod layer and late medieval occupation strata associated with Oxmantown Green. The recovery of merchants’ tokens and of several Nuremberg jettons, minted by Hans Kravwinckel and dating from between 1562 and 1586, attest to significant commercial activity on the site prior to the formal establishment of the market as an architectural space c. 1665. A single burial, disturbed by 18th-century building activity, cut the sod to the rear of the Haymarket plots. The burial was supine and extended and was probably that of a young adult male. The teeth showed little wear, but the first molar in right maxilla was missing pre-mortem.

The most significant finding during this phase of the excavation was evidence for the first flint glassworks in Dublin, established on Plot 1 in 1675 by John Odacio Formica. The evidence was recovered from a latrine, which in addition yielded a gold two-livre piece of Louis XIV. The glassworks debris consisted of crucible fragments (one with a sixteen-inch rim diameter), glass cullet and frit, fragments of two furnace doors and an example of an ‘end of day piece’. There was no evidence remaining for the glasshouse itself and it is hoped that chemical analysis of the material will establish the type of furnace used and other questions relating to the techniques of glass manufacturing during this period of fundamental change in the industry.

This analysis will form part of a larger study being promoted by the English Heritage Centre for Archaeology to establish a research framework for late 17th-century crystal glass. The recovery of the material has already aroused considerable interest in glass studies circles, despite its provenance from a secondary context. This will be the second occasion when material from this period will undergo such analysis and it will hopefully make a major contribution to our understanding of the European glass-making revolution, which will be complemented by the archaeological and historical analysis being presently undertaken on Smithfield.

Evidence for the 17th-century occupation of the site in the other plots consisted of several latrines, with associated occupation surfaces and walls. A striking aspect of the structural and spatial evidence was the close correlation of the plots and structures recorded with those depicted on John Rocque’s 1756 Exact Survey of the City of Dublin.

A layer of redeposited subsoil conveniently sealed the late 17th- and early 18th-century deposits. This probably came from the digging of Dutch Billy cellars on the Haymarket frontage. Two such structures were emptied of their backfill; one had been structurally altered and reused as a casting house for a small foundry towards the end of the 18th century. Twentieth-century demolition removed the evidence for the houses fronting onto Smithfield itself, but it is unlikely that any fabric from the primary 17th-century structures had survived 18th- and 19th-century development.

Evidence for the 18th century was recovered from occupation strata and the fills of latrines, which followed the typology as reported in Excavations 2002. The quality of the imported wares recorded decreased dramatically from the first decades of the 18th century onwards as the area became less residential and much of the land behind the plots would appear to have been underused. By the end of the 18th century, the decline of the area as a residential suburb was obvious as the market prospered and, with it, ancillary industries such as farm equipment manufactures, grain, seed and feed merchants, smithies, tanneries and distilleries, some of which are represented on the archaeological record. The general area later developed a parallel function as a military, hospital and penitentiary quarter. Queen Street, separated from the main market but directly connected to the Haymarket, retained something of its middle-class population until the middle of the 19th century.

Smithfield was conceived in the 1660s as a fashionable residential suburb and market place, an axial projection across the city of the contemporaneous development on St Stephen’s Green. The linear nature of the street grid still contrasts with the medieval meanders of Bow Street and North King Street nearby. The redevelopment scheme presently under way will obliterate one such linear 17th-century passage, Thundercut Alley. It is being replaced by a new curved street, of a type fashionable within large-scale developments for a brief period in the 1980s.

2 Killiney View, Albert Road Lower, Glenageary, Co. Dublin