This wide-ranging book covers the period in Ireland from the closing stages of the Middle Ages to the contemporary period. Its subject matter is the archaeological evidence - landscape, architectural and artefactual - for this 500-year period, and the social history this reflects. The author covers such key topics as the plantations of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the era in the eighteenth century of great Georgian houses, the nineteenth-century rise of industries such as linen production and mining, the great mid-nineteenth-century workhouses and famine, the influence of Roman Catholicism, the advancement of law and order, the relationship between Dublin and Belfast, and the twentieth-century social and cultural revolutions as Ireland took its place in the global system - not forgetting overseas immigrants and modern travellers.