Harvard Mission Research Questions
By the time of the arrival of the Harvard Mission, the idea that Ireland was a Celtic country was deeply embedded. In 1920, Éamon de Valera, in an open letter to President Woodrow Wilson of the United States of America, stated ‘that the people of Ireland constitute a distinct and separate nation, ethnically, historically and tested by every standard of political science – entitled, therefore, to self-determination’.59 The question of when the Celts came to Ireland became an important research question for the Harvard Archaeological Expeditions. As Adolf Mahr was their main adviser and archaeological contact in Ireland his views on this matter were paramount. He did not agree with MacNeill’s and Macalister’s views that the Celts first came to Ireland in the Iron Age.60 He was convinced that the Late Bronze Age in Ireland represented ‘the conquest, by the Indogermanic world, of a very important stronghold of the pre-Aryans.’61 The idea of Goidels or Gaels, of Celtic origin, who introduced the Bronze Age in Ireland and Britain was popularised by Sir John Rhys in the nineteenth century with the publication of his book Celtic Britain.62 George Coffey was the first Irish archaeologist to suggest that the Celts came directly from the continent, bypassing Britain.63 Mahr expressed the views of Rhys in a lecture which he gave to the Royal Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1929 under the title ‘The Archaeological Aspect of the Goidelic Question: a critical survey of the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age of Ireland’. The ideas expressed were not new and had been previously discussed by writers including R.A. Smith, O.G.S. Crawford and Henri Hubert.64 Mahr referred to Ireland as ‘the Goidelic country’, a term which Eoin MacNeill apparently abhorred.65 In 1919, MacNeill had dismissed the idea of a Celtic invasion during the Bronze Age, stating that ‘There is, then, no evidence from archaeology, history, or language, sufficient to establish even a moderate degree of probability for the theory of a Celtic occupation of Ireland or Britain during the Bronze Age’.66 The ‘Celticization’ of Ireland remained a research question for many decades to follow despite the fact that Ireland’s archaeological record, according to John Waddell, ‘offers no clear evidence for the Celtic settlements so often postulated.’67
In the 1930s the Harvard Archaeological Expeditions and the corresponding excavations undertaken under the Unemployment Schemes enabled Mahr to test his hypothesis of a Celtic invasion occurring in the Bronze Age. Numerous sites potentially dating to the Bronze Age were scientifically excavated. The main question which needed to be answered, in Mahr’s opinion, was whether the megaliths represented new cultural types and religious notions, or whether they represented ‘a wave of racial invasion and presumably, conquest’.68 V. Gordon Childe, in his paper ‘Scottish Megalithic Tombs and their Affinities’, published in 1933, plays down the colonising aspect of the megalithic phenomenon in favour of cultural diffusion.69 In the 1930s cultural diffusion was an antidote to the more militaristic explanation of cultural change involving invasions, with a superior race armed with its more sophisticated cultural products conquering an inferior one. In The Prehistory of Scotland published in 1935, Childe stresses the aristocratic character of the megaliths.70 In 1931 Christopher Hawkes had published his ideas about the ABC of the British Iron Age, which he explained in terms of continental Celtic invaders.71 Mahr’s own view was that the megalith-building was more than a cultural innovation and that ‘there was also racial immigration involved’.72 Mahr’s theories on Bronze Age Celts may have had a more practical dimension also. He observed that the La Tène material from Ireland hardly filled more than one or two average-sized museum cases in comparison with the 50 or more that could be filled with Bronze Age finds.73 Perhaps this pragmatic approach to acquiring large numbers of artefacts for his museum influenced Mahr’s choice of sites. Mahr, probably because he believed that the Celts arrived in the Bronze Age and the fact that he knew that there was a ‘mystifying scarcity’ of Iron Age settlement sites, did not give any Iron Age sites to the Harvard Team to excavate.
Hencken and Movius cautioned in their report on the Bronze Age cemetery cairn at Knockast, Co. Westmeath, that ‘an association of racial type with cultural diffusion must be regarded, however, as hypothetical until we have further evidence on which to base such a claim’.74 The cultural diffusionism of the American anthropologists perhaps reflects the cultural imperialism of America in the 1930s, achieved by peaceful means through philanthrophy, the funding of cultural global projects, global media and the spread of capitalism. Ireland’s relationship with America (and in particular Irish-America), was played out on Irish archaeological sites, north and south, during the period 1932 to 1936. This reflects Bruce Trigger’s idea that archaeological research is ‘shaped to a significant degree by the roles that particular nation states play, economically, politically, and culturally, as interdependent parts of the modern world-system’.75
Museum Display and the Creation of Archaeological Knowledge
Adolf Mahr, in his role at the National Museum, presided over the selection and display of artefacts. This invention of the nation through selective museum display was conditioned by the climate and thought of the day and was in turn influenced by social, political and ideological factors. Museums can be used as ‘instruments of state regulation’.76 For example, many totalitarian governments have sought to control the interpretation of archaeological data.77 This was the case with Germany and Italy, but democratic nation-states like Ireland were also involved in this process. The notion of studying archaeology as a way of gaining information about human history was accompanied by the development of modern nationalism.78 Nationalism influences the interpretation of culture and ‘sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures’.79
The commissioning of the Lithberg Report in 1927 was the first step in the direction of the control of interpretation of artefact assemblages.80 The focus of the Harvard Mission and the Unemployment Scheme archaeologists, under advice from Adolf Mahr, was to recover objects dating to the Early Christian Period and the Bronze Age, the two ‘Golden Ages’ of Irish History. The focus of the collections was Ireland’s important place in the history of Europe. This was to be reflected in the display of European comparative material.
British comparative material was not suggested in the Lithberg Report despite the geographical and cultural proximity of Britain to Ireland. With regard to the subject of political perspective in relation to the Irish past, Macalister commented with insight in 1925:
The Anglophile looks back to the dim ages of the past […] and he can describe nothing but hordes of naked savages, living mere animal lives, and expending their whole time and energies in devastating tribal wars: a savagery from which England has raised us. The Anglophobe scans the same horizon and sees the cloud-clapped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, of a cast and imposing civilisation, devoted to letters and learning: a civilisation which England has destroyed.81
This provenancing of Irish material culture within a European context set the scene for future interpretations of archaeological sites, artefacts, the writing of archaeology and, therefore, the writing of cultural history. Lithberg also recommended the removal of casts of non-Irish architectural monuments and copies of objects to storage.
The partition of Ireland came with the passing of the Government of Ireland Act (1920). However, the collections of the National Gallery and the National Museum were not divided. Therefore, the National Museum collections represented the past of all of the island of Ireland and not just the Irish Free State. This was cultural aspiration reflecting political aspiration of a united Ireland, the past in essence becoming an aspirational future. The political nation-state, considered incomplete by those aspiring to a United Ireland, was identified with the cultural nation-state which encompassed the whole island. The Museum exhibitions, therefore, no longer reflected the greatness of the British Empire and Ireland’s place within it. Instead, the artefacts symbolising the greatness of an ancient independent nation with