Darwin’s. Galton set up his laboratory in 1884, a year after he had first coined the term ‘eugenics’. The aim of the work conducted at the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory was to gain an ‘understanding [of] the racial characteristics of the Irish people’.35 Haddon and Browne expressed the opinion that ‘the ethnical characteristics of a people are to be found in their arts, habits, language, and beliefs as well as in their physical characters’.36 However, this survey was not undertaken under the auspices of any specific eugenics society even though the direction of the research had eugenic overtones. There was no eugenics society established in Dublin but one was set up in Belfast in 1911, and eugenic ideas permeated the social sciences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Ireland.37
Race could be scientised by categorising it using instruments of measurement common in physical anthropology.38 There was in turn the scientising of social status by correlating it with race. The methods employed in the examination of the physical characteristics of the Aran natives were based on those employed by John Beddoe, outlined in his influential book, The Races of Britain, published in 1885. Beddoe had paid a visit to Inis Mór in 1861. Haddon and Browne also made use of Beddoe’s ‘Index of Nigresence’ which worked out the degree of prognathism (protrusion of the lower jaw) of each skull. John Messenger described the conflicting results between literary and scientific interpretations of cultural reality in the Aran Islands. One of the reasons for this, he argued, was primitivism, a type of utopianism and nativism which was influenced by nationalism. This led to beliefs about the Aran Islanders which ‘run counter to scientific opinion’ and included the idea that they were ‘direct descendants of Celts;’ that the Irish were a ‘pure Celtic race’ and that ‘Celtic civilization developed long before and was superior to Greek and Roman civilizations’.39 The racial aspect of Celtic identity was expounded by Douglas Hyde in his 1893 speech, ‘The Necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland’: ‘We must strive to cultivate everything that is most racial, most smacking of the soil, most Gaelic, most Irish, because in spite of the little admixture of Saxon blood in the north-east corner, this island is and will ever remain Celtic at the core’.40 Eoin MacNeill developed this idea, writing in 1921 that: ‘In ancient Ireland alone we find the autobiography of a people of European white men who come into history not moulded into the mould of the complex East nor forced to accept the law of imperial Rome’.41 The previous year, de Valera, during his fundraising tour of the United States, attempted to get political recognition for the Irish Republic by arguing that ‘Ireland is now the last white nation that is deprived of its liberty’.42
Macalister asserted in 1927 that Ireland and Scandinavia were the most important European countries to the ethnologist and social historian because ‘all the rest have been forced into a Roman mould which has distorted or destroyed the native institutions’.43 When Eoin MacNeill published Celtic Ireland in 1921, the author had clearly accepted the premise that Ireland was indeed a Celtic country, explaining that he had ‘sought to establish the foundations of our early historical polity on a supposed Celtic colonisation coincident with the Roman conquest of Britain. 44 MacNeill was wary of the misuse of historical sources for political reasons and warned that ‘superficial methods of expounding history are perhaps the main cause of modern race-delusions’.45 As archaeology was interpreted as scientific evidence for historical events, MacNeill was satisfied that Macalister, whom he described as ‘the highest Irish archaeological authority’, believed that the Celtic colonisation of Britain and Ireland began in the Late Celtic or La Tène Period of the Iron Age.46 Macalister expressed the view in an address delivered to the RIA in 1927 that ‘on the current, and most probable, hypothesis, the Celtic culture was introduced into this country by a body of invaders – or, rather, a succession of invaders – who came at some time during the course of the European Iron Age’.47
Archaeology as a discipline is intimately connected with the political and social context in which it is interpreted. The author of the interpretation is invariably influenced by his/her own social background and education. As Christopher Evans explained it, ‘the practice of archaeology is never divorced from its times’.48 Macalister, for example, was of the view that the putative invaders of Ireland abstained from intermarriage with the natives and that: ‘The fair-complexioned and the dark-complexioned people are rigorously kept apart: the former are the aristocrats, with the attributes, physical and mental, of nobility, while the latter are the serfs’.49 Macalister’s idea of aristocrats and serfs is an observation based more on social prejudice than scientific fact. Macalister wrote in his book Ireland in Pre-Celtic Times (1921) that there was evidence for two stocks in Ireland ‘separated from one another by social position running parallel with racial character’.50 This correlation between race and social position was a common eugenic notion. Greta Jones has described how eugenic societies ‘showed a clear bias toward seeing eugenic worth as reflected in superior social status’.51 In the United States there was also a belief in the eugenic superiority of the North European.52 Macalister’s belief that ‘the distinction was maintained by obstacles to intermarriage’ may reflect the global debates about miscegenation that were current in the 1920s. He was also of the opinion ‘that the ruling classes were an importation, a tribe of conquerers, who had subdued and reduced the original inhabitants to a subordinate position, if not to actual serfdom’.53 This view reflected the nineteenth-century colonialist attitude of archaeologists to wards human progress. Macalister was aware of the problems associated with the issue of race in physical anthropological surveys, noting that ‘Mankind is scientifically divided into races, a term too often misused’.54 He defined race as follows:
It must be clearly understood that Race depends simply and solely on physical characteristics, and on psychical and temperamental idiosyncrasies: the peculiarities with which a man is born. It has nothing to do with religion, language, political and social connexions or sympathies, or with any other of the peculiarities which a man acquires from his environment as he grows up.55
Macalister and Eugenics
Race was integral to nineteenth-century archaeological scholarship and continued to be important in the twentieth century, particularly in the interwar period. The 1930’s Harvard eugenic survey of the Celtic/Irish race side by side with the archaeological study of human remains was an example of this. In his address to the Royal Irish Academy in 1927 Macalister had expressed the view that ‘there is the greatest need’ for an Anthropological Committee, commenting that ‘there are few countries in the world of whose ethnology we know less than we do of Ireland’.56 He had also observed in his book, Ireland in Pre-Celtic Times, that ‘the subject of Irish craniology, both ancient and modern, is as yet an almost untilled field’.57 He was familiar with the physical anthropologist’s use of the cephalic index which was used to determine skull type and explained the cephalic index as a figure which ‘expresses the breadth of the head as a percentage of the length’.58 A Swedish professor of anatomy, Anders Retzius, was first to use the cephalic index in physical anthropology in the nineteenth century, to classify ancient human remains found in Europe. He classified brains into three main categories, ‘dolichocephalic’ which were long and thin, ‘brachycephalic’ which were short and broad and ‘mesocephalic’ which were of intermediate length and width. These ideas were later used by the eugenic theorist Georges Vacher de Lapouge who in L’Aryan et Son Role Social (1899) divided humans into hierarchical races with the Aryan white dolichocephalic at the top.
It was Macalister’s opinion that these physical measurements of Irish skeletons showed that the Bronze Age culture was introduced into Ireland by trade and not by conquest or invasion and that, ‘until the process of contamination began after the Anglo-Norman conquest, no brachycephalic race found a footing in the country’.59 Similar classifications had been used by the American anthropologist William Z. Ripley in The Races of Europe in 1899. Ripley’s book was rewritten in 1939 by Carleton S. Coon, a student of Hooton’s.60 Coon believed that Caucasians had followed a separate evolutionary path from other humans and that the earliest Homo Sapiens were long-headed white men. Coon attempted to use Darwinian adaptation to explain the physical characteristics of race.61
Macalister expressed disappointment that the study of the Irish race was hampered by the limited amount of skeletons available for
