An investigation of the places in the Irish landscape where open-air Gaelic royal inauguration assemblies were held from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. This investigation considers the places on the Irish landscape where open-air Gaelic royal inauguration assemblies were held in the period c. 1100-1600. Specially designated inauguration sites played an important role in the political life of Gaelic lordships in later medieval Ireland. Gaelic ruling families often appropriated prehistoric ritual landscapes for their royal assemblies in order to attach the pedigree of a royal candidate to an illustrious past; such sites might be an alleged burial place of an eponymous ancestor or a legendary heroic figure, or an ancient landscape associated with renowned events. This study of their physical appearance, place-names, and geographicaland historical contexts ranges over all the archaeological sites identified as inauguration places - enclosures, sepulchral mounds, natural places, ringforts and churches, and associated inauguration furniture in the form of leaca and stone thrones, basin stones and sacred trees. Irish royal assembly places and practices are viewed in relation to sites elsewhere in Britain and greater Europe, and the circumstances that brought about the ending of the Gaelic practice of inauguration are also considered. ELIZABETH FitzPATRICK is Lecturer in Medieval Archaeology, National University of Ireland, Galway.

The period c. 1200-1600 was marked by the achievements and decline of the Anglo-Norman colony in Ireland, refashioning of Gaelic elite identity, Reformation, and reassertion of English control that led to Plantation projects, bringing new people and ideas to the island. This collection explores the complexities and predicaments of identity, and the cultural practices used to express and underpin them in this key period, ranging from the micro-scale and personal to the macro-scale emergence of ideas of national identity. The authors consider the extent to which there was a relational character to identities in Ireland, whereby senses of being were constructed through engagements with others, and how the power of the past, in both framing and providing stability for identity formulations, is explicit in the ways in which groups intentionally evoked their own histories and connections to place, to reaffirm and bolster identity and solidarity. Cultural practices could become naturalised through repetition and, as reflections of identity, they were formed, transformed or abandoned when necessary or expedient.