study will explore what sites were excavated, who chose them and why, and how the disciplines of archaeology and physical anthropology were used to scientifically validate the identity of the Irish. The stereotype of Ireland as isolationist and culturally barren during the 1930s is challenged by this work. In the 1930s the study and celebration of native Celtic culture in a European and global context was both modernist and internationalist. The Harvard Mission can be considered as a cultural case study in the context of other cultural initiatives of the first two nationalist governments of the Irish Free State.
Chapter 1 places the Harvard Mission to Ireland in the context of the cultural republic of the 1920s and 1930s. The role of the Harvard Mission, as part of the revitalisation project of the Irish Free State which involved the institutionalisation of native culture and a repositioning of Ireland in terms of Europe and the diaspora, is examined. The role which archaeology, in particular, plays in this nation-building project is discussed. Themes of regeneration, anthropological modernism, race, nationalist cultural ideology and the writing of cultural history in Ireland are explored. Chapter 2 examines the reconnaissance trip undertaken in 1931 by the Harvard Mission anthropologists to evaluate the possibilities of their forthcoming survey and research, including the excavation strand. At that time the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) was at the centre of archaeological research and the role of amateur archaeologists and antiquarians was still important. The primary research question for the Harvard Mission archaeologists, influenced by the Director of the NMI, the Austrian archaeologist and Nazi, Adolf Mahr, was about the origin of the Celtic Race in Ireland.
Chapter 3 attempts to answer the question posed by the Irish archaeologist, R.A.S. Macalister, in 1937: ‘Why should Harvard University thus concern itself with Ireland?’1 An exploration of why the Harvard Mission came to Ireland and the political ideology underpinning its archaeological work, dominated by eugenic and racialist concerns, is examined. This work fitted easily with Irish nationalist aspirations for a proven scientific Celtic identity. American and Irish perspectives on Celtic Ireland will be included and their respective initiatives with regard to the study of Celtic Ireland examined. Chapter 4 explores the pragmatic and political reasons why the Harvard Mission undertook crannóg research at Ballinderry 1, Ballinderry 2 and Lagore. The establishment of an American school of archaeology was considered at Ballinderry. Chapter 5 explores the large-scale excavations at Lagore and how the interpretations and dating of the site by the leader of the Harvard Archaeological Mission, Hugh O’Neill Hencken and his team were influenced by the intellectual framework employed within a historical, social, political and racial context. It is examined as a case study of the influence of politics on the creation of archaeological knowledge by the Harvard Mission.
Chapter 6 explores what was meant by Irish prehistory in the 1930s and what was the motivation of the Harvard Mission in the excavation of Mesolithic sites in Northern Ireland. The politics of Irish prehistory in the 1930s was in the context of the focus on the recovery of archaeological evidence for the earliest Irishman. Did it matter if the Harvard Mission recovered this evidence in Northern Ireland or in the Irish Free State, and what, if any, were the political implications of that? Chapter 7 discusses the Unemployment Schemes for archaeological research inaugurated in 1934 by Éamon de Valera in an effort to help solve the social problem of rife unemployment in the 1930s. Cultural and economic protectionism included state-controlled excavations to retrieve knowledge that was crucial as scientific evidence for the cultural identity of the state as Celtic and Christian. Some of the Harvard Mission sites were excavated under these schemes. They also served as an important training ground for scientific archaeologists, where talented Irish archaeologists such as Seán P. Ó Ríordáin emerged.
Chapter 8 explores how classification and chronological concepts in archaeology affect interpretation of data and how political ideas are embedded in the methodology employed. The academic and personal background of Hugh O’Neill Hencken and his assistant Director, Hallam L. Movius, as well as employees and volunteers, are also relevant to this process. The Harvard Mission were to influence the subsequent development of a school of scientific archaeological research in Ireland where new excavation techniques were employed and specialised scientific reports commissioned in order to interpret the data. Chapter 9 explores the importance of the media to Celtic identity with particular reference to Celtic Art and ‘Celtic’ and ‘Christian’ archaeological sites excavated by the Harvard Mission and under the auspices of the Unemployment Schemes. The media reports in the American press helped to disseminate ideas about Irish Celts within the diaspora. The Pageant of the Celt was a re-enactment in 1934 of ‘Celtic’ history at the Chicago World Fair. Artefacts recovered by the Harvard Mission archaeologists were displayed at the fair in a special Irish Free State exhibition which centred on the National Museum collections.
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THE HARVARD ARCHAEOLOGICAL MISSION IN THE IRISH CULTURAL REPUBLIC
The outstanding feature of Ireland’s cultural development and of her position in the civilised world may be stated thus: she is not the cradle of the Celtic stock, but she was its foremost stronghold at the time of the decline of the Celts elsewhere; she is the most wonderful artistic province of the Celtic spirit, its centre of missionary enterprise, its last refuge; pre-eminently the Celtic country. Ireland is now the only self-governing State with an uninterrupted Celtic tradition, and has the duty of becoming the country for Celtic Studies.1
– Adolf Mahr, 1927
Archaeology and Politics in the Irish Free State
The Harvard Mission to Ireland2 was a large-scale anthropological study of the Celtic race in Ireland, funded mainly through grants and donations administered by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.3 The Irish Free State made funding available for the archaeological strand from 1934 by defraying the costs of labour through Unemployment Schemes.4 While the project contained three strands: social anthropology, physical anthropology and archaeology, the focus of this chapter and the book as a whole is the archaeological strand and the corroborating evidence from physical anthropology.5 In America in the 1930s the academic discipline of anthropology was sub-divided into four topics for study: archaeology, physical anthropology, ethnology and linguistics. The Harvard School specialised in archaeology and physical anthropology.6 The aim of the Harvard Mission was to study the origin and development of the races and cultures of Ireland.7 Large-scale scientific excavations were carried out between the years 1932 and 1936 and the physical examinations of thousands of Irish people became part of the nation-building project of the Irish Free State, focussing on cultural revitalisation programmes (between 1922 and 1948) under the auspices of nationalist governments.8 The Harvard Mission archaeologists included Northern Ireland in their survey of the Irish Free State. This was because, as the Director of the archaeological strand, Hugh O’Neill Hencken asserted, ‘the territory was an integral part of Ireland’ prior to the seventeenth century.9 Excavations were carried out on both sides of the border. Academic journals such as the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy welcomed articles on Irish archaeology from all over the island. Neither organisation changed this policy after the establishment of the border. In contrast, The Ulster Journal of Archaeology had a regionalist policy and papers were primarily focussed on Ulster archaeological research.10 The Harvard Mission to Ireland included three years of fieldwork and two years of analysis and preparation of reports.
The Harvard Mission became part of the essentialist drive of the de Valera government to establish a cultural republic in the 1930s. The institutionalisation and professionalisation of native cultural endeavour began after 1922. It included archaeological initiatives as antiquities were considered crucial in the process of imagining the nation.11 The ‘imagined community’ envisaged by Benedict Anderson12 was given visual and tactile expression through
