being carried out ‘either by ignorant labourers dreaming of treasure, or by equally ignorant and far more reprehensible collectors, in search of curiosities for their cabinets’.62 The main collection available for study was a number of crania dug up from a ‘charnel mound’ near Donnybrook in south Dublin in 1880.63 Other than this collection Macalister acknowledged that he could ‘discover nothing but isolated measurements of individual bones, scattered through books and the proceedings of societies’.64 Despite this lack of evidence he concluded that the results showed that ‘the pre-Norman population of Ireland was dolichocephalic, this belonging either to the Nordic or the Mediterranean Race.’65 In a supplementary examination of descriptions from the literature, Macalister deducted from a section which he selected specifically for the purpose that ‘all persons of importance native to Ireland are described as having golden hair’ and that ‘there is evidence that the superior classes had light-coloured eyes’.66 He acknowledged that this assertion was made despite the fact that while measurements of stature and of head-shape can be obtained from skeletons ‘the test of coloration cannot be applied except to a living person’.67 He was very much in favour of this new anthropological approach to Irish archaeology.
Ireland as a Microcosm of Celtic Europe
The notion of Ireland as a microcosm of Celtic Europe was explored by the Harvard Mission. The Aran Islands Survey itself could be seen as the precursor, in microcosm, of the Harvard Mission project with its three-stranded approach to the study of the Irish Celt. Apart from the difference in scale there was also a difference in political and cultural perspective. Haddon and Browne fused the old colonialist approach of a study of exotic natives on tiny secluded islands with the increasingly nationalistic outlook of the Royal Irish Academy. Previous work such as that by Beddoe reflects a nineteenth century colonialist perspective and the use of anthropology as an instrument of government information to control inferior, subject races. Liam S. Gogan, Assistant Keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, dismissed Beddoe in 1933 as ‘that old fool Beddoe who for the satisfaction of Victorian Britain demonstrated that a large section of our population was negroid’.68 The idea of the Celt in the 1930s was that of a noble, tall, blue-eyed and fair-haired warrior. The Harvard Mission represented an Irish-American rediscovery of the noble Celt of antiquity, which had a European and global resonance. In his privately published memoir Hugh O’Neill Hencken remembered Hooton saying to him ‘I think the Department should do something about Ireland and I think the Boston Irish would support it’.69 Wealthy Irish-Americans contributed to the funding of the project.70
The American Anthropologists and their Theoretical Framework
An understanding of the intellectual background and politics of the Harvard anthropologists is essential to the academic framework and the political context within which the Harvard Mission carried out its work. Hooton is best known for his anthropological work on human evolution, racial differentiation, the description and classification of human populations and criminal behaviour.71 He believed that ‘Physical anthropology is properly the working mate of cultural anthropology’ and in turn physical anthropology was ‘the hand-maiden of human anatomy’.72 A biological determinist, Hooton expressed admiration for the work of scholars engaged in scientific racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.73 He obtained a PhD in Classics at Harvard in 1911 and went to study under Sir Arthur Keith while he was on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. There, he developed his interest in human palaeontology and in particular palaeoanthropic fossils from England and Europe. He also studied classical archaeology, Iron Age and Viking archaeology and was involved in the excavation of Viking boat burials. In 1912 he took a diploma in anthropology under R.R. Marrett, an ethnologist who had established a Department of Social Anthropology at Oxford in 1914.74 In 1913, Marrett had helped Hooton to get a job as an instructor in anthropology at Harvard. It was noted in Life Magazine in 1939 that Marrett was one of the men at Oxford ‘who helped to mold Earnest Albert Hooton into what Hooton is today’.75 Before he embarked on his work in Ireland Hooton had gained extensive professional experience in organising large surveys, training personnel for field work, and the analysis of results obtained.76 During the 1930s he organised large-scale anthropometric surveys of human beings – students attending Harvard University and attendees at the Chicago and New York World Fairs.77 His statistical laboratory was located over the Peabody Museum at Harvard. The bone lab, over which he presided, held extensive collections of human skeletons from all over the world. For thirty years between 1920 and 1950 he was eminent in American anthropology and many students of physical anthropology came under his influence. This ultimately changed the composition of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.78
In the 1930s American anthropology came under the influence of British anthropologists who espoused theories of functionalism. This idea was that all structures and institutions of a social group work in a sort of physiological manner and to understand society the functional relationship of its component parts need to be understood.79 Those most associated with this school were the Cambridge anthropologists, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown who spent six years at Chicago and Bronislaw Malinowski who spent three years at Yale. Lloyd Warner, who was responsible for the social anthropological strand of the Harvard Mission’s work in Ireland, came under Radcliffe-Brown’s influence and was himself influential at Harvard in the early 1930s.80 At Cambridge in the 1930s the functionalist school of anthropologists, under Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, wished to remove themselves from the discipline of archaeology because that discipline had more in common with history. Malinowski believed that anthropology needed to discard ‘the purely antiquarian associations with archaeology and even pre-history’.81 Radcliffe-Brown was of the opinion that archaeology had a natural affinity with history.82 Hooton’s view was that ‘archaeology shares with history the function of interpreting the present through knowledge of the past’.83
Warner wanted to design a research framework which allowed the researcher to see ‘society as a total system of interdependent, inter-related statuses’.84 At that time Warner was working as a tutor and instructor in the Anthropology Division of Harvard University where he was an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology. He had carried out extensive studies in the social anthropology of primitive peoples and directed a survey of the social structure and functioning of a large New England town. He had previously carried out fieldwork among the Aborigines in Australia. He was also collaborating in anthropological research in the industrial field with the Harvard School of Business Administration. His job in Ireland was to participate in the sociological field work and to personally train and supervise the workers.85
Warner’s ideas reflect Hooton’s understanding that: ‘The function of the anthropologist is to interpret man in his entirety – not piecemeal’.86 Warner sought to study communities in the New World rather than in exotic locations. He was instrumental in bringing to American anthropology the ideas of the social scientist, Emile Durkheim.87 Hooton’s difficulty with social anthropology was that ‘they wilfully abstract social phenomena and divorce man’s activities as a social animal from man himself’. He believed that it was possible ‘to predict from the physical type of racial hybrid his occupational, educational, and social status’.88 This reflected his own view that biology was the main predictor of man’s place in the world and not environment or education. This idea is the essence of scientific racism. According to Stocking this ‘scientizing trend’ in American anthropology during the 1930s was a ‘renewal of Morganian tradition’.89 Lewis Henry Morgan was a lawyer, statesman and ethnologist who earned himself the title ‘Father of American Anthropology’ for his scientific work on social anthropology, which was heavily influenced by the ideas of Darwin.90 In 1875 he was responsible for forming the section of anthropology in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The physical anthropological expedition was the last strand of the Harvard Mission to start work in Ireland. At first it consisted of only one man, C.W. Dupertuis, who was an advanced student of Physical Anthropology at Harvard. In his lecture to the Experimental Science Association of Dublin University on 26 February 1935 entitled ‘Notes and Observations of Recent Anthropometric Investigations’, Dupertuis explained that for the first time in history an attempt had been made to make a racial survey of the population of
