Afterwards Hencken and Macalister had lunch to discuss the matter. On 7 July 1931 the machiavellian Mahr took advantage of Macalister’s absence from Dublin to hold a meeting in his house between the Standing Committee of the NMAC, Hencken and Warner. Sir Philip Hanson, the Chairman of the Board of Works and Harold J. Leask, the Inspector of National Monuments, were present. Hencken concluded that those assembled were ‘enthusiastic’ about the project. Justice Liam Price suggested that General O’Hara of the Irish Air Force might arrange for some aerial photography. After this meeting Hencken was satisfied that he had all the necessary support of the Irish officials and specially Mahr. Mahr had suggested that the Royal Irish Academy might cooperate with the Harvard expeditions. Macalister was President of the Royal Irish Academy at that time and Hencken was hopeful that he might be persuaded.92
Hencken stressed to Macalister at their meeting that Harvard did not have a special interest in forming an Irish archaeological collection and only wanted a representative sample of material. He also emphasised that they would not interfere in sites that Irish archaeologists were planning to dig. As Hencken knew that Macalister had planned to dig both Newgrange and Tara, these would not be included in Harvard’s programme. At the end of the lunch Hencken felt that Macalister ‘was prepared to help rather than to hinder’. When Mahr was informed about their successful meeting he replied that ‘we could then be assured of a license to dig anywhere except at Tara and New Grange in twenty-four hours’.93
It was suggested in a Hooton manuscript that the Irish authorities were most anxious that copper mines in the south of Ireland be excavated by the Harvard Mission.94 These included six early mine shafts for copper working at Derrycarhoon, County Cork and others in Killarney, County Kerry. Grooved hammers dating to the Bronze Age had been found at Killarney. As Irish copper was important on the continent during the Early Bronze Age, these sites, which had never been excavated, might reveal very important information about metal-working. It was Hooton’s view that one of the mining sites in the south should be excavated as soon as possible because ‘this is an undertaking that Macalister, Mahr, and indeed every other British archaeologist would welcome with enthusiasm’.95 However, Hencken and his team did not act on Hooton’s suggestions.
During the 1931 trip, attempts were made to find a county which would fit the criteria of the social and anthropological requirements of the Harvard Mission while also being suitable from an archaeological point of view. The counties which were of immediate interest to Hencken were counties Clare, Sligo and Antrim. Hencken considered these counties and Co. Meath to have the best and greatest variety of archaeological sites suitable for excavation.96 Hencken was also very interested in Rathcroghan, in County Roscommon, the seat of Ailill and Maeve, which he believed to have been occupied in the first centuries of the Christian era. Hencken considered Meath an unsuitable county from the point of view of a social and anthropological survey but did not explain the reasons for this view in his report. In any event he considered Tara to be ‘a labor far beyond the scope of the expedition at present contemplated, and Meath without Tara would be unsatisfactory’.97 In his report Hencken noted that Mahr placed particular emphasis on County Sligo being the ‘best single archaeological area in the Free State’.98
When Hencken and his team arrived in Ireland in 1931 the site selection process would have been very difficult without the assistance of amateur archaeologists. On 3 July 1931, Mahr wired Henry Morris in Sligo of Hencken’s impending arrival there the following day. Morris, an Irish scholar and schools inspector, was an amateur archaeologist.99 He drove Hencken to approximately thirty-five sites over the course of two days, 4–5 July 1931. Hencken described Sligo as ‘a veritable Carnac and as yet awaits detailed exploration’.100 Hencken returned to Ireland on 17 July 1931 and travelled to Limerick. Mahr arranged for him to be met there by a local amateur archaeologist, J.N.A. Wallace, who had contributed a number of papers on Irish silver to the North Munster Antiquarian Journal.101 He was described by Hencken as an ‘eminent Limerick archaeologist’.102 Hencken and Wallace spent two days travelling around Clare and visited a total of twenty-four sites. The attention of the Harvard Mission archaeologists had been drawn to the Bronze Age burial site at Carrownacon, Ballyglass, County Mayo by one of the museum ‘correspondents’, Sean Langan of University College, Galway, who made arrangements to carry out the work. Movius explained that when the Harvard archaeologists expressed an interest in digging the site, ‘Mr. Langan kindly had it located by men sounding in the field with bars’.103 It was subsequently excavated by the Second Harvard Archaeological Mission. Hencken was shown the site at Lagore, County Meath by Patrick Ward of Dunshaughlin in 1933. The following year he excavated it under the auspices of the Third Harvard Archaeological Expedition to Ireland.
Adolf Mahr and the Harvard archaeologists were interested in extending the Irish Free State archaeological programme to Northern Ireland. County Antrim was considered to be unsuitable for a social and physical anthropological survey because of its history of colonisation. Antrim was rich archaeologically with plenty of forts, ‘dolmens’ and lake-dwellings. In Hencken’s view its main importance was that there were ‘a series of sites which have produced evidences of post-Palaeolithic stone cultures, said to be Asturian and Campignian’ providing ‘the earliest traces of man in the island’.104 He believed that these early inhabitants of Ireland ‘had made their way into Northern Ireland from the Continent when both Ireland and Great Britain were joined together and to the rest of Europe by land-bridges’.105 Hencken considered that it would be easy to excavate in the North without prejudicing Harvard’s work in the Irish Free State. Also, they would be likely to discover more finds which they could export to the United States. Movius carried out an examination of the lithic sites in Northern Ireland between 18 July and 1 August 1933.106 This work was facilitated by the Ancient Monuments Advisory Council, whose chairman, William Patrick Carmody, the Dean of Down, extended to them ‘every hospitality and facilitated our work in every possible way’.107 Excavations in Northern Ireland commenced during the Third Harvard Archaeological Expedition in 1934.
Adolf Mahr could see how potentially useful the archaeologist Claude Blake Whelan’s knowledge and assistance would be to the Harvard Expedition in Northern Ireland. Blake Whelan was later credited by Hencken as ‘the only archaeologist in Ireland who has any real knowledge of the Irish Stone Age’.108 In 1933, Blake Whelan brought Movius on a guided tour of the lithic sites in Northern Ireland. He was from Belfast and worked for the Electricity Board of Northern Ireland and was a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Hencken noted that it was often hard to discern the places where Stone Age man lived as ‘his graves are largely unknown and his presence can only be detected by the well-trained eye in the small pieces of flint and other stones that he shaped into tools’.109 According to him, local archaeologists who were familiar with such sites were unlikely to guide foreign excavators to them. This was not the case in Ireland as they had ‘an excellent and unselfish supporter’ in Blake Whelan, who had ‘an unrivalled knowledge of the homes of prehistoric hunters of the Irish Stone Age.’110 Hencken admitted that without Blake Whelan’s help their work ‘could not have been accomplished’.111 Mahr made the suggestion that Blake Whelan should be encouraged to carry out an excavation with Hencken and Movius, which should be subsequently published under Blake Whelan’s name. This was to be financed by the Harvard Mission.112 Movius and Blake Whelan dug at Rathlin Island, in 1934.113 This was a site which had been found by Blake Whelan some years previously but it had not been excavated or published. Blake Whelan was elected a delegate for Northern Ireland to the Prehistoric Society of France in 1932, on the proposal of Dr Marcel Baudouin, the honorary president of the society, with whom Whelan had collaborated on a paper on the diorite axes of Rathlin Island.114
The sites which Blake Whelan showed Movius included the Mesolithic raised beach site of Larne; Island Magee with its lower estuarine deposits ‘containing probably the oldest cultural horizon in Ireland’; the raised beach at Glenarm; the raised beach at Cushendun, below which ‘is an industry possibly allied to Azilian’; Bronze Age middens at Whitepark Bay; the Bann Valley with its Neolithic stone industries; and Lough Neagh.115 A Mesolithic site at Glenarm, County Antrim, which had been discovered by Blake Whelan, was excavated between 5–25 July 1934 by Movius and his team. Hooton was informed that, except for Larne, this was the first Irish raised beach section
