The Quest for the Irish Celt: The Harvard Archaeological Mission to Ireland, 1932–1936

THE QUEST FOR

THE IRISH CELT

For Fiach and Aoife

THE QUEST FOR

THE IRISH CELT

THE HARVARD ARCHAEOLOGICAL MISSION

TO IRELAND, 1932–1936

MAIRÉAD CAREW

First published in 2018 by

Irish Academic Press

10 George’s Street

Newbridge

Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.iap.ie

© Mairéad Carew, 2018

9781788550093 (Cloth)

9781788550109 (Kindle)

9781788550116 (Epub)

9781788550123 (PDF)

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Jacket front: Harvard anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooton standing with skulls used in his research, Life magazine, 1 January 1936.

Jacket back: top: Mesolithic site at Cushendun, Co. Antrim (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University); bottom left: Adolf Mahr (National Museum of Ireland); bottom right: Dr. Hugh O’Neill Hencken (centre) with unidentified American Anthropologists, 1933 (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University).

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The Harvard Archaeological Mission in the Irish Cultural Republic

2. Adolf Mahr and the Possibilities of Harvard Archaeological Research

3. ‘Ireland belongs to the World’: Celtic Origins, Anthropology and Eugenics

4. Choosing Crannógs: Politics and Pragmatism

5. Lagore Crannóg: Archaeology in the Service of the State?

6. A United Ireland in Prehistory

7. A New Deal for Irish Archaeology

8. A Native School of Scientific Archaeology

9. ‘The Pageant of the Celt’: Archaeology, Media and the Diaspora

Appendix 1: Harvard Archaeological Mission Sites

Appendix 2: Unemployment Scheme Sites, 1934–7

Appendix 3: Contributors to Irish Archaeological Expedition

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Much of the research for this publication was carried out during the course of my PhD thesis, completed in 2011, under the supervision of Professor Mary Daly and funded by the Irish Research Council. I would like to thank the archivists and librarians of the following institutions who helped me with my research: the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University; UCD Archives; the National Museum of Ireland; the Royal Irish Academy; the National Archives of Ireland; the National Library of Ireland and the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.

I would also like to thank the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, for providing the space and beautiful surroundings in which I completed this book.

Introduction

This is the first full-length book on the history of the Harvard Archaeological Mission to Ireland, between the years 1932 and 1936. The Harvard Mission was one of the most important cultural undertakings in the history of the Irish Free State. It included three strands of study: excavations, physical anthropology and social anthropology. While the social anthropology strand has been explored in a comprehensive article by Anne Byrne, ¹ there have not been similar publications on the archaeological strand or the complementary physical examinations of thousands of Irish people during the thirties.

This eugenic anthropological survey was important in the context of Irish-American history. The Rockefeller Foundation, wealthy Irish Americans and the Irish Free State Government were involved in the funding of it as it was deemed politically and economically important to establish the identity of the Irish as white, Celtic and Northern European during this period. This book will explore why the American anthropologists came to Ireland at the time and why the project was considered to be important to Harvard University. It will place the Harvard Mission initiative in the context of the broader cultural regeneration projects driven by nationalism and Irish-Ireland ideology in the Irish Free State after independence. This study will explore what sites were excavated, who chose them and why, and how the disciplines of archaeology and physical anthropology were used to scientifically validate the identity of the Irish. The stereotype of Ireland as isolationist and culturally barren during the 1930s is challenged by this work. In the 1930s the study and celebration of native Celtic culture in a European and global context was both modernist and internationalist. The Harvard Mission can be considered as a cultural case study in the context of other cultural initiatives of the first two nationalist governments of the Irish Free State.

Chapter 1 places the Harvard Mission to Ireland in the context of the cultural republic of the 1920s and 1930s. The role of the Harvard Mission, as part of the revitalisation project of the Irish Free State which involved the institutionalisation of native culture and a repositioning of Ireland in terms of Europe and the diaspora, is examined. The role which archaeology, in particular, plays in this nation-building project is discussed. Themes of regeneration, anthropological modernism, race, nationalist cultural ideology and the writing of cultural history in Ireland are explored. Chapter 2 examines the reconnaissance trip undertaken in 1931 by the Harvard Mission anthropologists to evaluate the possibilities of their forthcoming survey and research, including the excavation strand. At that time the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) was at the centre of archaeological research and the role of amateur archaeologists and antiquarians was still important. The primary research question for the Harvard Mission archaeologists, influenced by the Director of the NMI, the Austrian archaeologist and Nazi, Adolf Mahr, was about the origin of the Celtic Race in Ireland.

Chapter 3 attempts to answer the question posed by the Irish archaeologist, R.A.S. Macalister, in 1937: ‘Why should Harvard University thus concern itself with Ireland?’¹ An exploration of why the Harvard Mission came to Ireland and the political ideology underpinning its archaeological work, dominated by eugenic and racialist concerns, is examined. This work fitted easily with Irish nationalist aspirations for a proven scientific Celtic identity. American and Irish perspectives on Celtic Ireland will be included and their respective initiatives with regard to the study of Celtic Ireland examined. Chapter 4 explores the pragmatic and political reasons why the Harvard Mission undertook crannóg research at Ballinderry 1, Ballinderry 2 and Lagore. The establishment of an American school of archaeology was considered at Ballinderry. Chapter 5 explores the large-scale excavations at Lagore and how the interpretations and dating of the site by the leader of the Harvard Archaeological Mission, Hugh O’Neill Hencken and his team were influenced by the intellectual framework employed within a historical, social, political and racial context. It is examined as a case study of the influence of politics on the creation of archaeological knowledge by the Harvard Mission.

Chapter 6 explores what was meant by Irish prehistory in the 1930s and what was the motivation of the Harvard Mission in the excavation of Mesolithic sites in Northern Ireland. The politics of Irish prehistory in the 1930s was in the context of the focus on the recovery of archaeological evidence for the earliest Irishman. Did it matter if the Harvard Mission recovered this evidence in Northern Ireland or in the Irish Free State, and what, if any, were the political implications of that? Chapter 7 discusses the Unemployment Schemes for archaeological research inaugurated in 1934 by Éamon de Valera in an effort to help solve the social problem of rife unemployment in the 1930s. Cultural and economic protectionism included state-controlled excavations to retrieve knowledge that was crucial as scientific evidence for the cultural identity of the state as Celtic and Christian. Some of the Harvard Mission sites were excavated under these schemes. They also served as an important training ground for scientific archaeologists, where talented Irish archaeologists such as Seán P. Ó Ríordáin emerged.

Chapter 8 explores how classification and chronological concepts in archaeology affect interpretation of data and how political ideas are embedded in the methodology employed. The academic and personal background of Hugh O’Neill Hencken and his assistant Director, Hallam L. Movius, as well as employees and volunteers, are also relevant to this process. The Harvard Mission were to influence the subsequent development of a school of scientific archaeological research in Ireland where new excavation techniques were employed and specialised scientific reports commissioned in order to interpret the data. Chapter 9 explores the importance of the media to Celtic identity with particular reference to Celtic Art and ‘Celtic’ and ‘Christian’ archaeological sites excavated by the Harvard Mission and under the auspices of the Unemployment Schemes. The media reports in the American press helped to disseminate ideas about Irish Celts within the diaspora. The Pageant of the Celt was a re-enactment in 1934 of ‘Celtic’ history at the Chicago World Fair. Artefacts recovered by the Harvard Mission archaeologists were displayed at the fair in a special Irish Free State exhibition which centred on the National Museum collections.

1

THE HARVARD ARCHAEOLOGICAL

MISSION IN THE IRISH CULTURAL

REPUBLIC

The outstanding feature of Ireland’s cultural development and of her position in the civilised world may be stated thus: she is not the cradle of the Celtic stock, but she was its foremost stronghold at the time of the decline of the Celts elsewhere; she is the most wonderful artistic province of the Celtic spirit, its centre of missionary enterprise, its last refuge; pre-eminently the Celtic country. Ireland is now the only self-governing State with an uninterrupted Celtic tradition, and has the duty of becoming the country for Celtic Studies.¹

– Adolf Mahr, 1927

Archaeology and Politics in the Irish Free State

The Harvard Mission to Ireland² was a large-scale anthropological study of the Celtic race in Ireland, funded mainly through grants and donations administered by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.³ The Irish Free State made funding available for the archaeological strand from 1934 by defraying the costs of labour through Unemployment Schemes.⁴ While the project contained three strands: social anthropology, physical anthropology and archaeology, the focus of this chapter and the book as a whole is the archaeological strand and the corroborating evidence from physical anthropology.⁵ In America in the 1930s the academic discipline of anthropology was sub-divided into four topics for study: archaeology, physical anthropology, ethnology and linguistics. The Harvard School specialised in archaeology and physical anthropology.⁶ The aim of the Harvard Mission was to study the origin and development of the races and cultures of Ireland.⁷ Large-scale scientific excavations were carried out between the years 1932 and 1936 and the physical examinations of thousands of Irish people became part of the nation-building project of the Irish Free State, focussing on cultural revitalisation programmes (between 1922 and 1948) under the auspices of nationalist governments.⁸ The Harvard Mission archaeologists included Northern Ireland in their survey of the Irish Free State. This was because, as the Director of the archaeological strand, Hugh O’Neill Hencken asserted, ‘the territory was an integral part of Ireland’ prior to the seventeenth century.⁹ Excavations were carried out on both sides of the border. Academic journals such as the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy welcomed articles on Irish archaeology from all over the island. Neither organisation changed this policy after the establishment of the border. In contrast, The Ulster Journal of Archaeology had a regionalist policy and papers were primarily focussed on Ulster archaeological research.¹⁰ The Harvard Mission to Ireland included three years of fieldwork and two years of analysis and preparation of reports.

The Harvard Mission became part of the essentialist drive of the de Valera government to establish a cultural republic in the 1930s. The institutionalisation and professionalisation of native cultural endeavour began after 1922. It included archaeological initiatives as antiquities were considered crucial in the process of imagining the nation.¹¹ The ‘imagined community’ envisaged by Benedict Anderson¹² was given visual and tactile expression through material culture. Monuments and artefacts applied a sense of concreteness, permanence and longevity to the abstract concept of the nation. The Harvard Mission was also an expression of diaspora nationalism which saw an attempt to improve the social and economic circumstances of the Irish in America through Celtic cultural endeavour.¹³ Irish-Americans contributed financially to the Harvard research: this was facilitated by Judge Daniel O’Connell and his brother, the ex-Congressman Joseph O’Connell, who organised the Friends of the Harvard Anthropological Survey of Ireland.¹⁴

Hugh O’Neill Hencken, the leader of the archaeological strand, was of Irish and German extraction. His grandfather, also called Hugh O’Neill, left Newtownards, County Down in 1854 to travel to Belfast, where he sailed for New York. He became a well-known dry-goods merchant in New York and served as Patron of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Natural History Museum.¹⁵ Hencken was educated at Princeton University in America and Cambridge University in England. By 1931 he was Assistant Curator of European Archaeology at the Peabody Museum in Harvard. This success reflected the rising fortunes in social and economic terms of the Irish in America in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1934, the early Irish historian, Eoin MacNeill, expressed the view that ‘a right appreciation of Ireland’s place in history disseminated in America must contribute to the cultural and spiritual upbuilding of America’.¹⁶ Indeed, it was following MacNeill’s successful tour of universities in the United States in 1930 that the Harvard Mission began its work in Ireland in 1932.¹⁷

Irish Archaeology: The Playground of the Politician?

Irish-Ireland ideology and anthropological modernism underpinned the cultural regeneration of the nation-state between 1922 and 1948.¹⁸ De Valera sent the Saorstát Éireann Official Handbook of the Irish Free State, edited by Bulmer Hobson, and commissioned by the Cosgrave government, to the Chicago World Fair (1933–4) to accompany an Irish Free State cultural exhibition. It was intended to provide ‘a survey of the progress made’ by ‘the end of the first decade of national freedom’ and included essays on Irish history, archaeology, folklore, literature, Irish language, art, industries, geology and tourism.¹⁹ Despite this progress, R.A.S. Macalister, professor of Celtic Archaeology at UCD from 1909 to 1943, continued to worry about the intertwining of archaeology and politics, and expressed the view that ‘the archaeology of Ireland is worthy of a better fate than to become the playground of the politician’.²⁰ However, in Ireland between the years 1922 and 1948 it was virtually impossible to disentangle archaeology from political influence. This was because archaeology as a discipline does not function independently of the societies in which it is practised and has a value for the present.²¹ In order to understand the rise of archaeology as a discipline it must be examined in a socio-cultural and political context.²² This is important in the interpretation of the work of the Harvard Mission to Ireland, which began with a trip by American archaeologists to Ireland in 1931 in order to determine which archaeological sites would be selected for excavation as part of a five-year project.

The Harvard Mission excavations took place during a period, described by the Cambridge archaeologist, Grahame Clark, of ‘intense archaeological activity’ following the establishment of the Irish Free State.²³ However, while this comment is correct it is made without elaboration. Other important initiatives which could be included were the development of a native school of Irish scientific archaeology and the setting up of the Unemployment Schemes for archaeological research in 1934. These initiatives, driven by nationalist ideals, placed Ireland at the forefront of European archaeology in the 1930s. The Harvard Mission excavations were central to this development. After independence, Clark noted that the state continued to strive for a separate national identity through the medium of archaeology and described the process as the ‘nationalisation of archaeological activities’.²⁴ He points out that this intense activity did not fully survive the attainment of political objectives. Waddell agrees that ‘the bright promise of the 1930s is hard to discern in the following two decades’.²⁵ However, the important fact remains that Irish archaeology was a necessary ingredient to the attainment of political objectives as cultural activity often presages or acts as a catalyst for political activity. It was hugely important to the nation-building project during this period as it was then scientifically possible, through the practice and methods of archaeology, to recover proof of the antiquity of the Irish Celtic race. This cultural authority of science consolidated and validated political identity. The discipline of archaeology was rooted in the landscape and, therefore, the territory defined as the homeland, the definition of which was essential to the nationalist agenda. Attempts were also made in the 1930s to establish an American School of Celtic Studies at the National Museum of Ireland.²⁶ While this did not materialise, de Valera included a School of Celtic Studies in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1940, an idea initially mooted by Eoin MacNeill.²⁷

The Harvard Mission and Irish-Ireland Ideology

In the Irish Free State the native expression of cultural activity was the consolidation of the doctrine of Douglas Hyde when he pleaded for an Irish nation ‘upon Irish lines’ in his famous speech ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, delivered to the National Literary Society in Dublin on 25 November 1892.²⁸ Hyde (later to become the first President of the Irish Free State in 1938) postulated that it was ‘our Gaelic past’ which prevented the Irish from becoming ‘citizens of the Empire’.²⁹ He exhorted all Irishmen to speak the Irish language, revive Irish customs, buy Irish goods, and play Irish music and Irish sports. Hyde believed that ‘our antiquities can best throw light upon the pre-Romanised inhabitants of half Europe’.³⁰ This was important to the creation of an Irish national identity because it was believed that Ireland, unlike many other European nations, had developed independently and was, therefore, free of Roman influence. This belief, which the Harvard archaeologists shared, influenced their interpretations of the crannóg excavations.³¹ Archaeology was necessary to demonstrate the material culture of a nation which Hyde described as ‘the descendant of the Ireland of the seventh century, then the school of Europe and the torch of learning’.³²

With independence came the prioritisation of native cultural expression. There was also an impetus to institutionalise the cultural endeavours which had previously been the preserve of the educated middle and, particularly, the upper classes, such as the collection of antiquities and folktales. In his discussion of the Gaelic League Tom Garvin argues that politicians of independent Ireland ‘had imbibed versions of its ideology of cultural revitalisation’.³³ Archaeology became the material expression of this ‘cultural revitalisation’ in the 1920s and 1930s. These ideas were also reflected in D.P. Moran’s book The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, published in 1905. Eoin MacNeill expressed a similar view in the Irish Statesman on 17 October 1925 and commented that ‘if Irish nationality were not to mean a distinctive Irish civilisation, I would attach no very great value to Irish national independence’.³⁴

Archaeology, Modernism and the Celtic Revival

In his book Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Gregory Castle refers to ‘the increasing cultural pessimism of the late nineteenth century and the claim that not only the population of cities but the world itself, that is the West, was degenerating’.³⁵ This resulted in an idealisation of rural life which is evident in the writings of W.B. Yeats and others from the Cultural Revival period. This was a rejection of urban culture with its associated side effects of industrialisation, including poverty and social problems. Hyde’s version of the nation, emphasising the soil, the Irish race and the Irish language was the vision of deAnglicisation which de Valera promoted. Eugen Weber discusses similar ideas in French culture in his book Peasants into Frenchmen. He explores how land, the soil, physical activity and health were essential to ruralist conservatism in France. This was interpreted as an expression of the nation’s soul with its hostility to modernity, urban life and cultural diversity.³⁶ de Valera’s much derided 1943 speech, broadcast on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Gaelic League, expressing ideas of rural romanticism, youthful health and racial purity, can also be seen in this light.³⁷

In his book Castle explores what he terms, ‘an underlying affinity between anthropology and modernism’.³⁸ He explains that anthropological observations and the study of the past was an essential part of the modernist agenda. The Harvard Mission to Ireland could be placed in this context whereby modern physical and social problems could be solved through the medium of science in the 1930s. Castle notes that ‘the desire to revive an authentic, indigenous Irish folk culture is the effect of an ethnographic imagination that emerges in the interplay of native cultural aspirations and an array of practices associated with the disciplines of anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, folklore, comparative mythology, and travel writing’.³⁹ In the 1890s anthropology, archaeology and ethnography were emerging scientific disciplines. The West of Ireland became important to the Celtic Revivalist and anthropologist alike. For example, J.M. Synge, author of The Aran Islands, was educated in continental Celticism and studied under the French Celtic scholar, Henri D’Arbois de Jubainville. Synge attended lectures on Celtic culture and mythology, philology and cultural anthropology at the Sorbonne in Paris.⁴⁰ Revivalists and anthropologists attempted to reclaim traditions, histories, and cultures from imperialism and ‘to reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land’.⁴¹ This pivotal role of anthropology in the Celtic Revival resulted in ‘autoethnography’, as native intellectuals attempted to represent themselves to the coloniser using the language and methodology of the colonial discipline of anthropology.⁴²

In the Irish Free State’s programme of native cultural revitalisation, anthropology, archaeology, Irish language, folklore and native traditions became important in themselves rather than as motifs illustrating Irish literature in the English language. The Harvard Mission as part of this revitalisation programme can be described as a modernist project in the sense that it was an anthropological survey to study scientifically a society in transition between tradition and modernity. John Brannigan, in his book Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture, explains that ‘the Harvard study should be contextualised as an important moment in the evolution of the modernist state, in which social and physical sciences were understood to be strategic instruments vital to the bio-political ambitions of the state’.⁴³ The scientific establishment of the credentials of the Celtic race by international archaeological and anthropological expertise was essential to these political aspirations.

The combined native and internationalist dimensions to cultural production fitted de Valera’s anthropological cultural vision, emphasising cultural heritage as a pathway to the future for an independent republic. Nicholas Allen, in his paper ‘States of Mind: Science, Culture and the Irish Intellectual Revival, 1900–1930’, makes the point that ‘Immediately after the Anglo-Irish and Civil Wars, we find the discourse of science applied widely in support of cultural, political, and economic development in the new state’.⁴⁴ While Allen doesn’t refer to archaeology in his article, his ideas can also be applied to the Harvard Mission’s work as the Harvard academics applied scientific techniques of American archaeology to their work in Ireland. American archaeology had become increasingly scientised in the early decades of the twentieth century.⁴⁵

Irish: The Language of the Celts

Albert Earnest Hooton⁴⁶, the American physical anthropologist and manager of the Harvard Mission, wrote about the importance of the Irish Free State, citing that one of the reasons for choosing it for a Harvard survey was because of ‘the Celtic tongue, an archaic Aryan language once spoken over a large part of Europe’.⁴⁷ Hugh O’Neill Hencken, like his contemporaries, took an interest in Celtic, an Indo-European language. He was later to publish a book entitled Indo-European Languages and Archaeology as a volume of the American Anthropologist in 1955.⁴⁸ According to G.R. Isaac in his paper ‘The Origins of the Celtic Languages: Language Spread from East to West,’ it is still impossible to discuss the origin of the Celts without reference to the Celtic language. He argues that ‘without language, there are no Celts, ancient or modern, but only populations bearing certain genetic markers or carriers of certain Bronze Age and Iron Age material cultures. The origin of the Celts therefore is the prehistory and protohistory of the Celtic languages’.⁴⁹ The Irish language, therefore, as well as the material culture of the Celts, were deemed important areas of study in Irish universities in the nineteenth century and this continued after independence in 1922.

In 1854, Eugene O’Curry had been appointed to the first Chair of Celtic Archaeology at the Catholic University. R.A.S. Macalister became the first Professor of Celtic Archaeology at University College Dublin in 1909. Douglas Hyde, president of the Gaelic League from its foundation in 1893 to his resignation in 1915 for political reasons, campaigned for and succeeded in making Irish a compulsory subject for matriculation to the newly established National University of Ireland in 1908.⁵⁰ The state took over the Gaelic League’s educational function by including Irish as a compulsory subject in the educational system and by setting up the special Government Publications Office, An Gúm, in 1926.⁵¹ The Irish language was established as the national language in Cosgrave’s 1922 constitution and was also given this status in de Valera’s 1937 constitution. By 1934, in his keynote speech at the International Celtic Congress held in Dublin from 9–12 July, Douglas Hyde was still advocating for the preservation and propagation of the Irish language. At this stage, Éamon de Valera, who was in the audience together with Maud Gonne, Agnes O’Farrelly and delegates from Brittany, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man, had pledged his backing for a permanent research institute where all the Celtic languages might be studied’.⁵²

Patrick Pearse, who had served as the editor of the League’s journal, An Claidheamh Soluis (1903-1909), aimed to create ‘a modernist literature in Irish’.⁵³ He argued that ‘Irish literature if it is to live and grow, must get into contact on the one hand with its own past and on the other with the mind of contemporary Europe’.⁵⁴ By the 1930s literary works of ‘an indigenous tradition of amateur self-ethnography’ appeared.⁵⁵ These included books such as Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty years A-Growing, The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island, Tomás Ó Crohan’s The Islandman, and Pat Mullen’s Man of Aran. Irish-speaking islanders were regarded in this period as pre-industrial and pre-modern. Ideas about degeneration in cultural and racial terms, a common discourse in the 1930s, fed into the need for regeneration through cultural, economic, political and moral projects in the Irish Free State. One of the most influential cultural critics in the interwar period in Ireland, the writer Seán O’Faoláin, criticised the Irish language revival, referring to ‘the poverty and degenerate nature’ of Gaeltacht culture’.⁵⁶ This rhetoric is similar to that of the nineteenth-century colonialist writers on Ireland. The use of the word degenerate is disingenuous as the impetus of the Irish language revival and native cultural regeneration in general was an attempt to address the perceived degenerate nature of culture, race and society at that time.⁵⁷ Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge (a new umbrella co-ordinating body for Irish-language organisations) was established in 1943.

The 1930s can be seen as the apogée of a native cultural revitalisation programme which began with Hyde’s speech and served as the cultural blueprint for the independent state. The Irish Free State, under Cosgrave in the 1920s and de Valera in the 1930s, favoured cultural activity which fitted into this ideological framework. Unfortunately, Irish-Ireland ideology got a bad name because of the vitriolic outpourings of journalists such as D.P. Moran.⁵⁸ The impetus for regeneration in the Irish Free State was part of a wider European project where nation-states across Europe defined their nationhood in terms of race, culture, language and purity. These modernist regeneration projects included the enactment of laws which institutionalised concepts of national culture, and embedded it in the political agenda of the state. The nationalist governments of Cosgrave and de Valera shared a similar Irish-Ireland cultural ideology. Attempts to establish the racial credentials of the Irish as Celtic dovetailed neatly with the American agenda of the Harvard anthropologists and archaeologists. They concentrated on rural dwellers for their anthropometric survey as they believed that ‘the country people were perhaps more truly representative of Irish racial types and less likely to be mixed with recent foreign blood than would be the city dwellers’.⁵⁹

From Hyde to Lithberg

As part of the deAnglicisation project Douglas Hyde had written about the importance to the Irish nation of the collections of a national museum and the necessity of gathering antiquities and ‘enshrining’ each one of them in ‘the temple that shall be raised to the godhead of Irish nationhood’.⁶⁰ When Hyde penned these words, no doubt, he was not referring to all vestiges of the past but to selected items from what he perceived to be a Celtic, Irish and Christian past. The idea that ‘relics’ of the Gaelic past should be displayed or contained in a sacred building such as a temple expresses the veneration of an idyllic past, or Golden Age, which was a central tenet of the doctrine of Irish nationalism. The raising of this building to ‘the godhead of Irish nationhood’ further expands on the idea that the past and how its interpretation was controlled through museum display became important in terms of imagining and defining the nation.⁶¹ These museum exhibits were a means of transmitting ideas about national territory, history and homeland, and reflect the nation in microcosm. The selection process itself was part of this nationalist endeavour. The Dublin Museum of Science and Art was opened in 1890 and was formally renamed the ‘National Museum of Science and Art, Dublin’ by its Director, George Noble Count Plunkett, in 1908. Count Plunkett, a cultural nationalist and Home Ruler, was father of the executed 1916 leader Joseph Mary Plunkett. The new title, according to Plunkett, was ‘more appropriate for the institution having regard to its representative position in the capital as the Museum of Ireland and the treasury of Celtic antiquities’.⁶²

A State Framework for Irish Archaeology

Archaeology, as a useful political tool, underpinned visually the identity of the state as Celtic and Catholic. The process whereby ‘culture became a surrogate for politics’ applied to the discipline.⁶³ It is described by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh as a ‘cultural vision of decolonisation’.⁶⁴ This decolonisation process, involving the reclamation, culturally and politically, of archaeological monuments and artefacts, had already begun in the nineteenth century. This is exemplified in the media furore over the British Israelite excavations for the Ark of the Covenant at the Hill of Tara in 1899–1902. Cultural nationalists, including Arthur Griffith, Douglas Hyde, W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne and George Moore were involved in the protests to get the digging stopped as they regarded it as a ‘desecration’ of Tara, the capital of an ancient and independent Ireland. At the time, British Israelites regarded Tara as a royal site in the British Empire. They wished to recover the Ark and present it first to Queen Victoria and later to her son Edward VII.⁶⁵

Another controversy of note at the end of the nineteenth century was the contested ownership of the Broighter hoard, discovered in 1896 in Co. Derry. The hoard, deposited some time after 100 BC consisted of gold objects, including two bar torcs, two necklaces, a bowl, a buffer torc and a beautiful model boat with oars and a mast. The objects were sold to a Derry jeweller, who sold them to Robert Day, an antiquarian, who sold them to the British Museum. The prominent Unionist, Edward Carson, represented the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) at a subsequent court case. The hoard was deemed to be ‘treasure trove’ and handed over to King Edward VII, who gave it to the RIA and the hoard later became part of the celebrated gold collection of the National Museum of Ireland.⁶⁶

After independence the dominant cultural vision of nationalist elites was embedded into the discipline, reflected in the policies and practices of Irish archaeology. In 1927 the creation of a state framework for Irish archaeology was achieved by the provision of a new cultural policy document for the National Museum of Ireland: the 1927 Lithberg Report, prioritising Celtic and Christian artefacts; and the framing of the National Monuments Act, 1930, which defined a ‘National Monument’ for the first time. These important initiatives not only provided the framework within which Irish archaeology was practised under state control but also reflected the influence of Gaelic League ideology. Professor Nils Lithberg of the Northern Museum of Stockholm was commissioned to write a report on the purpose of the National Museum by the Irish Government. He was chosen for the task because the Northern Museum of Stockholm was ‘one of the most notable national museums in Europe’.⁶⁷ Lithberg had been appointed as the first holder of the position of Professor of Nordic and Comparative Folklife Research there in 1918. The Northern Museum of Stockholm was described by Barbro Klein as a ‘culture-historical museum’.⁶⁸ Culture-historical archaeology became popular towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was influenced by nationalist political agendas and used to prove a direct cultural or ethnic link from prehistoric peoples to modern nation-states. Growing nationalism and racism, according to Bruce Trigger ‘made ethnicity appear to be the most important factor shaping human history’.⁶⁹ The Lithberg Report was the blueprint for a culture-historical museum in Ireland. It was very important in the context of the politics of museum display and was a key document in the nationalisation policy of the government for Irish archaeology.⁷⁰ It was recommended that the collections should be ‘firmly based on Ireland’s native culture’ and that the gold ornaments from the Early Bronze Age, the artefacts from the pre-Roman Iron Age and the Early Christian Period should be kept separate so that ‘the collections will receive the glamour of ancient greatness to which they are entitled’.⁷¹ In the process, as Elizabeth Crooke put it, ‘The Museum and the Irish nation was reinventing itself’.⁷²

The Lithberg Report was also important in the context of European identity. The American involvement in Irish Free State archaeology gave it a global resonance and satisfied an American desire in the 1930s for roots in old Europe. Thousands of artefacts recovered by the Harvard Mission archaeologists during their five-year project in Ireland were deposited in the National Museum. How the past was packaged for the viewer and how selected artefacts were displayed in the museum illustrated the official narrative of the nation’s history. This reflects Ernest Gellner’s view of the political principle of nationalism that ‘the political and the national unit should be congruent’.⁷³ Culture, as represented by archaeology in the Irish Free State and its strategic display in a national institution was a politically aspirational endeavour. The emphasis on archaeology in the National Museum was heavily criticised by Sir Thomas Bodkin. He blamed this on the two former directors of the National Museum, the prehistorians Walther Bremer and Adolf Mahr, writing that ‘neither of them professed interest in the Fine Arts, and their well-nigh exclusive preoccupation with archaeology worked to the great disadvantage of the Museum’.⁷⁴

The introduction of new legislation for the protection of archaeological heritage was also politically aspirational. In an address delivered to the Royal Irish Academy in 1927, R.A.S. Macalister, President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, stated that ‘Ireland must remember that she holds in trust for Europe a large number of ancient monuments of unique importance: and the sooner legislation is obtained to facilitate the nationalisation of these monuments, the better it will be for the national credit of the Free State’.⁷⁵

In the legislation enacted finally in 1930, a ‘National Monument’ was defined as ‘a monument or the remains of a monument the preservation of which is a matter of national importance by reason of the historical, architectural, traditional, artistic, or archaeological interest attaching thereto’.⁷⁶ The word ‘national’ was a political rather than a cultural designation.⁷⁷ The definition of ‘national monument’ caused difficulty because if politicians decided that the preservation of particular monuments was not a matter of ‘national’ importance, in theory at least, they didn’t have to be protected. The Dáil debates surrounding the National Monuments Bill give an insight into the political opinions involved in the interpretation of key concepts contained in the legislation. The embeddedness of a desired identity, reflected in the type of monument deemed to need protection, served the cultural and political needs of the state at that time.⁷⁸

The debate about the validity of protecting Big Houses, seen as a vestige of Protestant identity, also surfaced. According to Terence Dooley, this was because the landed class ‘had come to symbolise colonial rule and their houses were symbols of an old order.’⁷⁹ Apart from the symbolic and political difficulties inherent in their preservation there was also the prohibitive cost to consider’.⁸⁰ For example, Coole Park, the residence of Lady Gregory, was sold to the Department of Lands in 1927 and demolished in 1941. There was some disquiet about its demolition expressed in newspaper coverage of the time because of Lady Gregory’s association with the Irish Literary Revival, W.B. Yeats and the founding of the Abbey Theatre. At the time, Lady Gregory and Coole Park were not seen as culturally valuable from an Irish-Ireland perspective.⁸¹ The Chairman