that something similar could happen in Ireland considering that an influential Nazi had been director of the National Museum until 1939. By 1946, the Professor of Celtic Archaeology at UCD, Seán P. Ó Ríordáin was complaining about the ‘limited number engaged in the pursuit of archaeology’ in Ireland and made an appeal for financial aid for research, ‘whether it be provided through the Universities or through a special research institute. It is hoped that the State will prove as generous in this as it has been to other intellectual disciplines’.174 However, this was not to be and no archaeological institute was established.
2
ADOLF MAHR AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF HARVARD ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH
The collection is not a matter of mere local interest; it is of international importance. It contains the key of many problems in the past history of Europe at large. The Free State holds it in trust for the entire world, and it cannot be adequately controlled except by a scholar of European reputation.1
– R.A.S. Macalister (1928)
The rise of archaeology as a scientific discipline in nineteenth-century Ireland, according to John Hutchinson was ‘strongly driven by a nationalist desire to establish Irish descent from the ancient Celts, and thereby Irish claims to be one of the original civilizations of Europe’.2 In the twentieth century, after independence, this was still the case. Reference was made in a Hooton manuscript to ‘the peculiar importance of Irish archaeology’ and to the idea that ‘the traditions and beliefs of the prehistoric and ancient historic populations have been to a great extent perpetuated in their living descendants’.3 In his privately published memoir Hugh O’Neill Hencken described how he went to the Western Union office near Harvard Square and wrote out a long cablegram to Adolf Mahr at the National Museum of Ireland about the possibilities of Harvard excavating in Ireland. He received an ‘enthusiastic reply but with some reservations’.4 Mahr, an expert in European Celtic archaeology, strongly influenced the selection of archaeological sites for excavation by the Harvard Mission. He was convinced of the importance of Ireland to America and his enthusiasm for the work of the Americans was essential to their success. In his view Ireland’s ‘real world importance’ was its archaeological heritage, with its bearing on the formation of European civilisation. He wrote that ‘Irish archaeology is the only thing which can give us a status in European learning’.5 The shared understanding of Mahr and the American anthropologists and archaeologists was that the identity of the Irish was ‘Celtic’ and this belief underpinned the selection of sites for excavation. The initial Harvard proposal was to scientifically excavate archaeological sites for every prehistoric and proto-historic period, to study the monuments and artefacts discovered, to determine racial affinities of skeletal remains excavated and to collect folklore about ancient remains.6
Transitions: Archaeology and Society
Irish society in the 1930s was, the Harvard academics believed, a society in transition between traditional and modern and, therefore, ideal for study. Irish archaeology itself was going through a transition from traditional antiquarianism to modern archaeology. The gradual professionalisation of archaeology in Ireland resulted in scientific archaeologists taking the place of antiquarians over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. There were still debates and controversies raging in the 1930s in Britain between ‘scientific archaeologists’ and ‘antiquarians’ and the question of who had the right to control interpretation of the past, a debate which had been ongoing there since the nineteenth century.7 Adolf Mahr and the Harvard archaeologists were central to the process of change in Ireland. Amateur archaeologists played a key role in showing the Americans around during their reconnaissance trip in 1931 and in sharing their unique knowledge about local areas. The Harvard archaeologists were seen as objectivists who would rescue Irish archaeology from the narrow parochialism and speculative mire of antiquarianism, and give it a global resonance.
During the 1930s the National Museum of Ireland used antiquarians who were described as having ‘archaeological leanings’ and ‘correspondents’ in various parts of the country as opposed to university- or museum-trained archaeologists. These amateurs or antiquarians were not qualified as archaeologists, but they acquired antiquities for the museum and helped in the discovery of new archaeological monuments and the protection of existing ones. Some of them even undertook excavations at the behest of Mahr. This was simply a pragmatic solution as the number of professionally trained archaeologists in the state was miniscule. Seán P. Ó Ríordáin pointed out, in 1931, ‘the great dearth of trained workers in archaeology in Ireland’, and ‘the lack of opportunities for their training’.8 In the 1930s and 1940s there was the gradual phasing out of the use of unqualified individuals to direct archaeological excavations. The more important sites were left to trained archaeologists and museum staff.
However, the public perception of both archaeologists and antiquarians was often negative in character. When Myles na gCopaleen wrote in his Irish Times column ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ on 29 May 1942 about ‘Irish Iberian flint-snouted morons (c.6000 B.C.), who practised the queer inverted craft of devising posterity’s antiquities’, he was perhaps reflecting contemporary Irish society’s suspicion of archaeology and the ‘scholarly dirt-shovellers’ who practised it. Considering the fact that the Professor of Archaeology at UCC, Canon Patrick Power had the following to say about the discipline in 1925, this is hardly surprising: ‘For long Irish Archaeology had in fact been left to charlatans and dabblers, whence it acquired a rather dubious reputation which, to a certain extent, perhaps adheres to it still’.9 Eoin MacNeill noted that ‘the study of the prehistoric got a bad name, and deserved it’.10
Mahr was ambivalent in his attitude to antiquarians. He lamented the fact that many megalithic monuments in Ireland had been destroyed and ‘used as quarries’ and had served as ‘a happy hunting ground for members of field clubs and other people whom one can call only glorified stamp-collectors’.11 However, he continued to use those whom he regarded as having ‘archaeological leanings’. Trigger observed that antiquarians, did not employ a coherent methodology and ‘did little deliberate digging and had no sense of chronology’.12 This echoes Piggott’s view of antiquarians which was that they produced literary collections that included genealogical material, heraldic imagery and folk tales, along with occasional descriptions of artefacts.13 The collection’s focus of antiquarian pursuits during the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth century had also resulted in the damaging of archaeological monuments. This particularly affected the collection of ‘Celtic’ objects, usually associated with the La Tène Period of the Iron Age. Much of this material did not come from stratified contexts and it did not have a provenance.14
Brian Fagan described archaeology in nineteenth-century Ireland as being the preserve of the monied upper class, as ‘a gentleman’s pursuit, and often a country gentleman’s calling’.15 The transfer of power from an Anglo-Irish dilettante amateur elite to Irish Free State professional employees happened during the transition of Irish archaeology from a tool of colonialist endeavour to that of Free State nation-building. This gradual transition was reflected in the main personalities involved, from R.A.S Macalister, who served as Professor of Celtic Archaeology at UCD between the years 1909 to 1943, to S.P. Ó Riordáin who succeeded him, and their widely differing social and religious backgrounds. To many, Macalister was of the old school. Both he, and Harold G. Leask, were dubbed ‘ascendancy archaeologists’ by the archaeologist H.E. Kilbride Jones.16 Leask, the founder of the study of Irish medieval architecture, was the author of Irish Castles and Castellated Houses, published in 1941. There was a general lack of interest in this type of work as castles were seen as vestiges of colonial power and ‘an unwelcome guest at the academic feast in the new Irish state’.17 Indeed, Macalister had described medieval archaeology in 1928 as ‘a sad decline from the achievements of Celtic Ireland’.18 Not surprisingly, castles were not included in the research programme of the Harvard Mission. Before his appointment to UCD, Macalister, a Presbyterian of Scottish descent and son of Dublin-born Cambridge anatomist Alexander Macalister, had been
