methods’.49 All of these appointments in the 1930s and 1940s reflect the gradual democratisation and professionalisation of Irish archaeology – its ‘coming of age’.50
Mahr’s own ambition for the National Museum to take the place of universities in the training of future archaeologists seemed to have been temporarily achieved in the decades prior to the Second World War. With the appointment of Mahr as Keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland in 1927, a battle began for control of the interpretation of the Irish past between the National Museum of Ireland and Irish universities. This battle for intellectual supremacy was played out between Mahr and his museum allies on the one hand and the university men R.A.S Macalister and Eoin MacNeill on the other. The gradual change in attitude of younger archaeologists towards Macalister was, perhaps, fuelled by political and religious reasons, rather than professional ones. This was reflected, for example, in Macalister’s hesitation, when requested to deliver an address to the Royal Irish Academy in 1927. His choice of subject was ‘a matter of some difficulty, owing to the catholicity of the Academy’s interests’.51
When Ó Riordáin was promoted to the Chair of Celtic Archaeology at UCC, Mahr boasted that he had reason ‘to be proud that it was a pupil of mine who won this distinction, because it shows that the Museum is not only doing normal museum work but is even fulfilling the functions of a university’.52 Hencken, perhaps influenced by Mahr whom he described as ‘an old friend’,53 dismissed Macalister as ‘a nineteenth century antiquary’, commenting that:
Professor Macalister, it should be explained is British in origin rather than Irish and has the dislike of Americans common among the middle-class British combined with an unhealthy interest in American money. As the name of the chair which he holds might suggest, he is not an archaeologist in the modern sense but a 19th century antiquary. His British origin and lack of ability combined with his small stature and strict Methodism have put him at so grave a disadvantage in Dublin, at least in his own eyes, that he guards his position with the utmost jealousy.54
Macalister, as a scholarly and scientific man of his time, was very open to learning new archaeological techniques as they came into vogue and it is only in recent years that Macalister’s contribution to Irish archaeology has been fully recognised.55 Emphasis is often placed on Macalister’s lack of expertise. For example, Tarlach Ó Raifeartaigh dismissed Macalister’s reading of the ogham inscriptions in Kerry, stating that they ‘often owed more to imagination than observation’.56 Macalister’s excavation techniques were described as being ‘those of Schliemann rather than of Pitt Rivers’.57 However, Macalister was a prolific writer and produced over 350 texts, which included notes, articles and books. He was also involved in setting up the Archaeological Exploration Committee at the Royal Irish Academy. The derogatory description by Hencken does not fit with the fact that Macalister was pushing for an anthropological committee in the Royal Irish Academy in 1927 and the establishment of an Archaeological School within the universities.58 The archaeological work of the Harvard Mission, with its emphasis on extremely rich archaeological sites such as crannógs, which resulted in the retrieval of thousands of artefacts, allowed Mahr to reign supreme and to sideline the universities, who were not invited to participate. It also means that the Harvard Mission project became essentially a collections-driven exercise at that time. The reports produced were empiricist and descriptive while analysis and interpretation of archaeological data was limited. These ideas will be explored in more detail in subsequent chapters.
Harvard Mission Research Questions
By the time of the arrival of the Harvard Mission, the idea that Ireland was a Celtic country was deeply embedded. In 1920, Éamon de Valera, in an open letter to President Woodrow Wilson of the United States of America, stated ‘that the people of Ireland constitute a distinct and separate nation, ethnically, historically and tested by every standard of political science – entitled, therefore, to self-determination’.59 The question of when the Celts came to Ireland became an important research question for the Harvard Archaeological Expeditions. As Adolf Mahr was their main adviser and archaeological contact in Ireland his views on this matter were paramount. He did not agree with MacNeill’s and Macalister’s views that the Celts first came to Ireland in the Iron Age.60 He was convinced that the Late Bronze Age in Ireland represented ‘the conquest, by the Indogermanic world, of a very important stronghold of the pre-Aryans.’61 The idea of Goidels or Gaels, of Celtic origin, who introduced the Bronze Age in Ireland and Britain was popularised by Sir John Rhys in the nineteenth century with the publication of his book Celtic Britain.62 George Coffey was the first Irish archaeologist to suggest that the Celts came directly from the continent, bypassing Britain.63 Mahr expressed the views of Rhys in a lecture which he gave to the Royal Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1929 under the title ‘The Archaeological Aspect of the Goidelic Question: a critical survey of the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age of Ireland’. The ideas expressed were not new and had been previously discussed by writers including R.A. Smith, O.G.S. Crawford and Henri Hubert.64 Mahr referred to Ireland as ‘the Goidelic country’, a term which Eoin MacNeill apparently abhorred.65 In 1919, MacNeill had dismissed the idea of a Celtic invasion during the Bronze Age, stating that ‘There is, then, no evidence from archaeology, history, or language, sufficient to establish even a moderate degree of probability for the theory of a Celtic occupation of Ireland or Britain during the Bronze Age’.66 The ‘Celticization’ of Ireland remained a research question for many decades to follow despite the fact that Ireland’s archaeological record, according to John Waddell, ‘offers no clear evidence for the Celtic settlements so often postulated.’67
In the 1930s the Harvard Archaeological Expeditions and the corresponding excavations undertaken under the Unemployment Schemes enabled Mahr to test his hypothesis of a Celtic invasion occurring in the Bronze Age. Numerous sites potentially dating to the Bronze Age were scientifically excavated. The main question which needed to be answered, in Mahr’s opinion, was whether the megaliths represented new cultural types and religious notions, or whether they represented ‘a wave of racial invasion and presumably, conquest’.68 V. Gordon Childe, in his paper ‘Scottish Megalithic Tombs and their Affinities’, published in 1933, plays down the colonising aspect of the megalithic phenomenon in favour of cultural diffusion.69 In the 1930s cultural diffusion was an antidote to the more militaristic explanation of cultural change involving invasions, with a superior race armed with its more sophisticated cultural products conquering an inferior one. In The Prehistory of Scotland published in 1935, Childe stresses the aristocratic character of the megaliths.70 In 1931 Christopher Hawkes had published his ideas about the ABC of the British Iron Age, which he explained in terms of continental Celtic invaders.71 Mahr’s own view was that the megalith-building was more than a cultural innovation and that ‘there was also racial immigration involved’.72 Mahr’s theories on Bronze Age Celts may have had a more practical dimension also. He observed that the La Tène material from Ireland hardly filled more than one or two average-sized museum cases in comparison with the 50 or more that could be filled with Bronze Age finds.73 Perhaps this pragmatic approach to acquiring large numbers of artefacts for his museum influenced Mahr’s choice of sites. Mahr, probably because he believed that the Celts arrived in the Bronze Age and the fact that he knew that there was a ‘mystifying scarcity’ of Iron Age settlement sites, did not give any Iron Age sites to the Harvard Team to excavate.
Hencken and Movius cautioned in their report on the Bronze Age cemetery cairn at Knockast, Co. Westmeath, that ‘an association of racial type with cultural diffusion must be regarded, however, as hypothetical until we have further evidence on which to base such a claim’.74 The cultural diffusionism of the American anthropologists perhaps reflects the cultural imperialism of America in the 1930s, achieved by peaceful means through philanthrophy, the funding of cultural global projects, global media and the spread of capitalism. Ireland’s relationship with America (and in particular Irish-America), was played out on Irish archaeological sites, north and south, during the period 1932 to 1936. This reflects Bruce Trigger’s idea that archaeological research is ‘shaped to a significant degree by the roles that particular nation states play, economically, politically, and culturally, as interdependent parts of the modern world-system’.75
Museum
