to the abstract concept of the nation. The Harvard Mission was also an expression of diaspora nationalism which saw an attempt to improve the social and economic circumstances of the Irish in America through Celtic cultural endeavour.13 Irish-Americans contributed financially to the Harvard research: this was facilitated by Judge Daniel O’Connell and his brother, the ex-Congressman Joseph O’Connell, who organised the Friends of the Harvard Anthropological Survey of Ireland.14
Hugh O’Neill Hencken, the leader of the archaeological strand, was of Irish and German extraction. His grandfather, also called Hugh O’Neill, left Newtownards, County Down in 1854 to travel to Belfast, where he sailed for New York. He became a well-known dry-goods merchant in New York and served as Patron of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Natural History Museum.15 Hencken was educated at Princeton University in America and Cambridge University in England. By 1931 he was Assistant Curator of European Archaeology at the Peabody Museum in Harvard. This success reflected the rising fortunes in social and economic terms of the Irish in America in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1934, the early Irish historian, Eoin MacNeill, expressed the view that ‘a right appreciation of Ireland’s place in history disseminated in America must contribute to the cultural and spiritual upbuilding of America’.16 Indeed, it was following MacNeill’s successful tour of universities in the United States in 1930 that the Harvard Mission began its work in Ireland in 1932.17
Irish Archaeology: The Playground of the Politician?
Irish-Ireland ideology and anthropological modernism underpinned the cultural regeneration of the nation-state between 1922 and 1948.18 De Valera sent the Saorstát Éireann Official Handbook of the Irish Free State, edited by Bulmer Hobson, and commissioned by the Cosgrave government, to the Chicago World Fair (1933–4) to accompany an Irish Free State cultural exhibition. It was intended to provide ‘a survey of the progress made’ by ‘the end of the first decade of national freedom’ and included essays on Irish history, archaeology, folklore, literature, Irish language, art, industries, geology and tourism.19 Despite this progress, R.A.S. Macalister, professor of Celtic Archaeology at UCD from 1909 to 1943, continued to worry about the intertwining of archaeology and politics, and expressed the view that ‘the archaeology of Ireland is worthy of a better fate than to become the playground of the politician’.20 However, in Ireland between the years 1922 and 1948 it was virtually impossible to disentangle archaeology from political influence. This was because archaeology as a discipline does not function independently of the societies in which it is practised and has a value for the present.21 In order to understand the rise of archaeology as a discipline it must be examined in a socio-cultural and political context.22 This is important in the interpretation of the work of the Harvard Mission to Ireland, which began with a trip by American archaeologists to Ireland in 1931 in order to determine which archaeological sites would be selected for excavation as part of a five-year project.
The Harvard Mission excavations took place during a period, described by the Cambridge archaeologist, Grahame Clark, of ‘intense archaeological activity’ following the establishment of the Irish Free State.23 However, while this comment is correct it is made without elaboration. Other important initiatives which could be included were the development of a native school of Irish scientific archaeology and the setting up of the Unemployment Schemes for archaeological research in 1934. These initiatives, driven by nationalist ideals, placed Ireland at the forefront of European archaeology in the 1930s. The Harvard Mission excavations were central to this development. After independence, Clark noted that the state continued to strive for a separate national identity through the medium of archaeology and described the process as the ‘nationalisation of archaeological activities’.24 He points out that this intense activity did not fully survive the attainment of political objectives. Waddell agrees that ‘the bright promise of the 1930s is hard to discern in the following two decades’.25 However, the important fact remains that Irish archaeology was a necessary ingredient to the attainment of political objectives as cultural activity often presages or acts as a catalyst for political activity. It was hugely important to the nation-building project during this period as it was then scientifically possible, through the practice and methods of archaeology, to recover proof of the antiquity of the Irish Celtic race. This cultural authority of science consolidated and validated political identity. The discipline of archaeology was rooted in the landscape and, therefore, the territory defined as the homeland, the definition of which was essential to the nationalist agenda. Attempts were also made in the 1930s to establish an American School of Celtic Studies at the National Museum of Ireland.26 While this did not materialise, de Valera included a School of Celtic Studies in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1940, an idea initially mooted by Eoin MacNeill.27
The Harvard Mission and Irish-Ireland Ideology
In the Irish Free State the native expression of cultural activity was the consolidation of the doctrine of Douglas Hyde when he pleaded for an Irish nation ‘upon Irish lines’ in his famous speech ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, delivered to the National Literary Society in Dublin on 25 November 1892.28 Hyde (later to become the first President of the Irish Free State in 1938) postulated that it was ‘our Gaelic past’ which prevented the Irish from becoming ‘citizens of the Empire’.29 He exhorted all Irishmen to speak the Irish language, revive Irish customs, buy Irish goods, and play Irish music and Irish sports. Hyde believed that ‘our antiquities can best throw light upon the pre-Romanised inhabitants of half Europe’.30 This was important to the creation of an Irish national identity because it was believed that Ireland, unlike many other European nations, had developed independently and was, therefore, free of Roman influence. This belief, which the Harvard archaeologists shared, influenced their interpretations of the crannóg excavations.31 Archaeology was necessary to demonstrate the material culture of a nation which Hyde described as ‘the descendant of the Ireland of the seventh century, then the school of Europe and the torch of learning’.32
With independence came the prioritisation of native cultural expression. There was also an impetus to institutionalise the cultural endeavours which had previously been the preserve of the educated middle and, particularly, the upper classes, such as the collection of antiquities and folktales. In his discussion of the Gaelic League Tom Garvin argues that politicians of independent Ireland ‘had imbibed versions of its ideology of cultural revitalisation’.33 Archaeology became the material expression of this ‘cultural revitalisation’ in the 1920s and 1930s. These ideas were also reflected in D.P. Moran’s book The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, published in 1905. Eoin MacNeill expressed a similar view in the Irish Statesman on 17 October 1925 and commented that ‘if Irish nationality were not to mean a distinctive Irish civilisation, I would attach no very great value to Irish national independence’.34
Archaeology, Modernism and the Celtic Revival
In his book Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Gregory Castle refers to ‘the increasing cultural pessimism of the late nineteenth century and the claim that not only the population of cities but the world itself, that is the West, was degenerating’.35 This resulted in an idealisation of rural life which is evident in the writings of W.B. Yeats and others from the Cultural Revival period. This was a rejection of urban culture with its associated side effects of industrialisation, including poverty and social problems. Hyde’s version of the nation, emphasising the soil, the Irish race and the Irish language was the vision of deAnglicisation which de Valera promoted. Eugen Weber discusses similar ideas in French culture in his book Peasants into Frenchmen. He explores how land, the soil, physical activity and health were essential to ruralist conservatism in France. This was interpreted as an expression of the nation’s soul with its hostility to modernity, urban life and cultural diversity.36 de Valera’s much derided 1943 speech, broadcast on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Gaelic League, expressing ideas of rural romanticism, youthful health and racial purity, can also be seen in this light.37
In his book Castle explores what he terms, ‘an underlying affinity between anthropology and modernism’.38 He explains that anthropological observations and the study of the past was an essential part of the modernist agenda. The Harvard Mission to Ireland could
