Connecting the global with the local through the prism of imprisonment: The case of Kilmainham Gaol, Ireland

The study of globalization from a material standpoint lends itself to historical archaeological approaches due to the centrality of modern, European expansion – and the global networks it necessitated, facilitated and maintained – to the broader concept (including Orser 2014). However in conducting these archaeologies, often a focus has been placed on the importance of moveable artefacts to tracing global networks and mobility. As the main and most direct means of materializing trade, the moveable commodity is the most recognizable and straightforward means of exploring the meaningful constitution of contacts and networks between people and things. However, there are pitfalls to connecting globalization so completely with trade objects and using them as proxies for human connections. Pitts has argued in this volume that there is a need for archaeologists to ensure that our studies are not simply contextualizing a series of otherwise unconnected local developments. Instead we should be careful to look for direct connections between micro-contexts and global phenomena through dierent forms of circulation. With this cautionary note in mind, this chapter aims to deviate from the norm of exploring networks of moveable things and focusing on trade. Instead it will view globalization through a static rather than moveable form, with an emphasis on deciphering personal and communal relations and meanings from those who deliberately left readable traces on a prison. By using a xed structure, and extant grati created in the closing years of its functional life, this chapter argues that we can access globalization and the complicated processes it created and materialized in a number of ways, including examining evolving ideas of individual and communal identity, locating local expressions of global events and identifying changing cultural norms and ideological perspectives during a period of cataclysmic change.