Conclusion

Concluding thoughts:

From the very outset of this dissertation I have always believed that fulachta fiadh would make excellent centres for textile production. Although Michael O’Kelly provided significant evidence that a fulachta fian could be used for cooking, I still did not believe that this was the sole purpose of a fulachta fian. Neither did I believe that their sole purpose was as baths. Hopping into a bath full of red hot stones is hardly practical. I also did not believe that fulachta fiadh were used as saunas. To have a sauna- a room or covering must be present in which the steam is contained. Only seven out of the c.20 000 fulachta fiadh in Ireland had associated structures, so it is unlikely that this is what they were used for. That leaves us with one last theory. Could fulachta fiadh be laundries/textile centres?

This was a question I hoped to answer and I believe in the course of this dissertation I have. I started by seeing if this idea was viable. Fulachta fiadh are a bronze age innovation, if they were used to produce textiles then the knowledge of washing, dyeing, spinning, weaving and fulling would be needed. Was this knowledge available to bronze age Ireland? I examined the history of all of these practises. I found washing garments probably went back as far as their invention. The discovery of detergents probably coming from the soiled nappies of children. The invention of dyeing probably came from accidental staining of fruit or mud and it seems it was also a bronze age innovation. The knowledge of spinning and weaving would have been around from the Neolithic as would the knowledge of fulling. We have evidence that all these processes were practised in Europe. In Ireland we have the Armoy bag and belt which date from the bronze age. Therefore it seems as thought the knowledge of spinning and weaving were in Ireland from the bronze age-around the same time that fulachta fiadh start appearing on the landscape.

It is all very well to theorise about the ‘when and wheres’ of textile production. The biggest question still has to be answered. Can fulachta fiadh be used for centres of textile production? To answer this question I built my own fulachta fian and conducted a number of experiments in it. Firstly I washed a raw woolly sheep’s fleece using stale human urine as a detergent. This experiment proved to be very successful. All the natural grease and other pieces of dirt were successfully removed. The fleece even turned more uniform in colour. I then experimented to see if wool could be dyed in a fulachta fian. Using ivy berries collected from the surrounding area as a dyestuff and the fulachta fian as my container I found that a large fleece could easily be dyed with little effort. The dyeing process involved simply heating up the water, adding the dyestuff and material and keeping the water at a constant temperature. By adding hot stones every 10 minutes, this was easily done. The end result was a beautiful green wool. Spinning and weaving the prepared wool was also possible. I succeeded in producing some spun and woven wool to aid in the next part of the experiment. From the photos they do not look that impressive but the results may be attributed more to my lack of experience and skill in these matters, than the inadequacy of the fulachta fian. The last experiment I conducted was to see if wool could be fulled in the fulachta fian. Fulling is a process in which cloth, once woven, is cleaned, shrunk and thickened. It involved agitating the cloth in hot water with a detergent until it started to thicken. This was done and once again the experiment proved successful. Although my test piece of cloth was small to begin with it ended up even smaller and thicker, thus proving the theory correct. So it seems that fulachta fiadh are exceedingly suitable for washing, dyeing and fulling cloth and I feel that some of them were used for this purpose. In undertaking this study I have had a long time to consider what fulachta fiadh were used for and I believe that it is wrong to assign one particular use to them. I do not feel they were exclusively ‘cooking places’ or ‘dyeing places’ I feel they may have had one or more purposes. Think of our present day kitchen sink. The purpose of a kitchen sink is to wash dishes but that is not all it is used for. In my home we have used our kitchen sink to wash clothing, steep the Christmas ham in, soak dirty rags and wash muddy old boots in. It is never solely used for washing dishes. I believe this to be the same for fulachta fiadh. They may have begun having one sole purpose but a container full of hot water can be very useful for a variety of things. I feel I have proved that fulachta fiadh can be used as centres for textile production. The finds of spindle whorls at some sites backs this theory up. Michael O’Kelly has proved that they can be used for cooking meat and Barfield and Hodder have argued convincingly that they could be used for hot baths. I believe all of these theories are correct and fulachta fiadh were nothing more than a bronze age kitchen sink.

Recommendations:

In the archaeological community today it is widely accepted that fulachta fiadh were used exclusively for cooking. Michael O’Kelly’s experiment at Ballyvourney proved a convincing purpose to an otherwise puzzling monument. After Ballyvourney any other experiments involving fulachta fiadh were merely a recreation of an already tried and tested idea - such a Christy Lawless’ cooking experiment. It is clear that more work is needed to clarify the purposes of fulachta fiadh. More theories need to be considered and tested, just as I have done in this dissertation. When this is done I believe we will find that fulachta fiadh had many uses and were not merely a large cooking pot.