sites and was ‘the leading numerical science of biological determinism during the nineteenth century’.114 Howells accepted the limitations of this technique, acknowledging that the examination of morphological features were sometimes subjective, such as the measurement of the ‘degree of prognathism’. Two observers may differ in their personal perceptions of a classification, and, in his opinion, it was ‘difficult for a single observer to maintain a constant standard when he has no ‘standard’ outside of his own mind to which to refer’.115 Hooton remarked that ‘if they are somewhat unsatisfactory they are at least better than nothing at all’. He advocated that the standard should be ‘the typical development in the adult male cranium of the north of Europe’.116 Howells, despite using the technique was not convinced of its accuracy and wrote prophetically that ‘these conclusions with regard to the prehistoric people have been arrived at on the basis of craniology alone. Therefore, even though archaeology may in the future show them to be wrong, the cranial evidence will have been given its full weight’.117
The study of the Gallen skeletons was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy in 1941.118 Hooton referred to the work as an ‘admirable study’. Howells’s work was used as a basis for comparison of the modern Irish population as it was the largest skeletal series of the Irish that had ever been available for examination.119 Adolf Mahr was satisfied that the Gallen skeletons ‘will provide a welcome body of information, from which to draw conclusions also as to the racial characteristics of the population in the period immediately preceding the Early Christian centuries’.120 Howells observes in his study of the skeletal remains that three quarters of the Gallen skulls can be described as orthognathous, ‘as is to be expected among Europeans’.121
The comparative material used included Aleš Hrdlička’s work on the Irish in the USA, included in a general discussion on the white race, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 1932.122 Howells also based his work on that of G.M. Morant, who examined crania in England and Scotland and compiled series of cranial types for Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age peoples.123 Howells described the Neolithic type as ‘homogeneous, purely dolichocephalic, narrow-nosed and short-faced’. However, this changes in the Early Bronze Age ‘due to the incursion of a well-defined brachycephalic type’.124 Howells suggested that ‘the true time-sequence be violated’ and that the larger collections of Iron Age crania should be compared with those of later times.125 These larger collections included the Anglo-Saxons and seventeenth-century Londoners. He observed that ‘The evidence which the later groups afford has led Hooke and Morant, and Keith also, to conclude that the Iron Age folk, whatever their own origins, form the basis of the modern population without influences from the Anglo-Saxons’.126 Howells concluded that the Gallen type ‘can only be descended directly from the Irish Iron Age’.127 He ascertained that the skeletons represented an ‘homogeneous blend’ of dolicocephalic Neolithic and brachycephalic Bronze Age stock.128 This anthropological blending allowed for a solid continuity without compromising the purity of the stock.
In 1935, C.P. Martin, Chief Demonstrator of Anatomy at Trinity College Dublin, wrote that ‘The Iron age passes almost imperceptibly into the early Christian era so far as archaeology is concerned’.129 C.P. Martin’s work was dismissed by Howells because Martin had ‘published measurements on all of the known Irish crania of early and recent times, but without reaching any significant conclusions’.130 Martin himself conceded in his book Prehistoric Man in Ireland that his series of skulls was ‘small as a basis for compiling reliable statistics’.131 Howells saw similarities between the Iron Age, Crannóg and Early Christian skulls, arguing that ‘the Iron Age and crannóg skulls approach the Gallen type; the Iron Age skulls are very much like the British Iron Age series, or between this and the Gallen type; while the Crannóg skulls are near to the Gallen series, and the Early Christians [ …] are practically identical with it’.132 While Howells acknowledged that ‘archaeology makes it clear that in England the advent of iron was accompanied by invaders’ he also accepts Adolf Mahr’s theory that ‘in point of numbers the Iron Age immigration to Ireland was small and unimportant’.133 Howells corroborated Mahr’s stance, stating that the Gallen skeletons ‘gives a cranial type which calls for no Iron Age invasion’.134 Hooton published a paper entitled ‘Stature, head form and pigmentation of adult male Irish’ in 1940.135 In MacNeill’s view ‘the anthropometric statistics in this paper are deeply interesting and must have great significance. They should form a basis and give a stimulus for a more complete study’. However, MacNeill dismissed remarks made in Hooton’s paper which connected the Irish language with physical racial features.136
The Racial Celts: Modernist Fantasy or Scientific Fact?
The Australian prehistorian, V. Gordon Childe, described in Sally Green’s biography, as ‘the most eminent and influential scholar of European prehistory in the twentieth century’,137 influenced a generation of British and Irish archaeologists, including Macalister.
Childe was influenced by the racial ideology of the times, reflecting the pervasiveness of eugenic ideas and the nineteenth-century ranking of races which was still in vogue in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1926, he published a book The Aryans, expressing the view that the Aryans were ‘the linguistic ancestors’ of the Celts.138 He commented that the Aryans bequeathed to their linguistic heirs ‘if not skull-types and bodily characteristics, at least something of this more subtle and more precious spiritual identity’.139 This reference to the Celtic language reflected Childe’s interest in philology and Indo-European origins.140 He asserted that ‘it was the linguistic heirs of this people who played the leading part in Europe from the dawn of history and in Western Asia during the last millennium before our era’.141 While he was later to dismiss this tome and exclude it from his ‘Retrospect’,142 published towards the end of his life, it is worth noting that he too, came under the influence of prevailing political ideologies. Childe described the physical attributes of the Aryans as follows:
The physical qualities of that stock did enable them by the bare fact of superior strength to conquer even more advanced peoples and so to impose their language on areas from which their bodily type has almost completely vanished. This is the truth underlying the panegyrics of the Germanists: the Nordics’ superiority in physique fitted them to be the vehicles of a superior language.143
This physical description could equally be applied to the story of the Celtic invasion of Ireland. In 1935, Macalister described the Iron Age ‘invasion’ in terms of ‘the flashing iron blades of the tall, fair-haired newcomers, who landed one fateful day in or about the fourth century BC’.144 This white supremacist, Eurocentric worldview allowed for the Irish to be classified as European stock, with the implication of a Nordic dolichocephalic heritage. Andrew P. Fitzpatrick made the point that studies of the Celts creates ‘an essentially modernist fantasy.’145
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