The Study of the Celts in Ireland
The quest for the recovery of scientific evidence for the long-headed Celt and ancestor of the European white man was pursued by Hooton through the work of the Harvard Mission. By the time the American academics arrived in Ireland in 1932 to study the Celtic race, using new archaeological science and physical anthropology, academic interest in Celtic origins and identity was well established. While the idea of a Celtic race was fixed in literature, attempts were made initially in the nineteenth century to classify it scientifically. The inhabitants of the Aran Islands were a case in point. They were deemed to be primitive and therefore an uncontaminated race. The traditional belief was that the Aran islanders were descended from the Celts. Samuel Ferguson had written about them in 1852: ‘If any portion of the existing population of Ireland can with propriety be termed Celts, they are this race’.27 William Wilde, the polymath, eye-surgeon, archaeologist and father of Oscar, led the Ethnological Section of the British Association to Aran in 1857.28 The famous archaeologist, George Petrie, was also interested in the islands and wrote that ‘In the Island of Innishmain alone, then, the character of the Aran islander has hitherto wholly escaped contamination, and there it still retains all its delightful pristine purity’.29 The so-called purity of race and culture of the inhabitants were viewed in nationalistic terms by some writers and was described by Scott Ashley as follows:
The Aran Islands were being invented as bastions of the ancient sublime, so the islanders themselves were endowed with nationalist and racial significance. They were modern primitives, insulated from the deadening hand of progress and Anglicization, true Irishmen and women, models for an Ireland freed from British dominion. They were a pure Gaelic stock uncorrupted by infusions of degenerate blood from the mainland; they were perhaps, the last true descendants of the Fir-Bolgs, the primeval inhabitants of Ireland.30
A.C. Haddon and Dr C.R. Browne, who carried out a scientific survey of the Aran Islanders in 1892, were also influenced by the work of J.T. O’Flaherty who published ‘A Sketch of the History and Antiquities of the Southern Islands of Aran, lying off the West Coast of Ireland; with Observations on the Religion of the Celtic Nations, Pagan Monuments of the early Irish, Druidic Rites, & Co’ in Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy for 1825. O’Flaherty in his paper asserted that ‘In no part of the Celtic regions are the Celtic habits, feelings, and language better preserved than in the southern Isles of Aran’.31 Like other nineteenth-century romantics writers, he believed that Aran was a microcosm of Ireland which in turn was a microcosm of Celtic Europe. He pointed out that Gaul, Spain, Britain and the other Celtic States had lost all their records of remote antiquity but that Ireland had preserved historic evidence ‘illustrative not only of her own antiquities, but, in a great measure, of those of Europe’.32 The Aran Islands survey was carried out by the Anthropometric Committee of the Royal Irish Academy. A study of the ethnography of the Aran Islands was to be the first in the series of such studies to be undertaken around the country by the committee. The emphasis was on the routine observations made in the Anthropometric Laboratory and in researches in country districts.
Eoin MacNeill got his own anthropometric chart completed at the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, Trinity College Dublin.33 It was dated 11 February 1893 and signed by Professor A.C. Haddon. Haddon, described by H.J. Fleure as ‘a pioneer of modern anthropology’, and a ‘keen and vigorous evolutionist’ was a demonstrator in zoology at Cambridge from 1879 until he left his position to take up a Professorship at the Royal College of Science in Dublin in 1880.34 Haddon co-founded the Anthropometric Laboratory at Trinity College which was modelled on the London Laboratory of Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin’s. Galton set up his laboratory in 1884, a year after he had first coined the term ‘eugenics’. The aim of the work conducted at the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory was to gain an ‘understanding [of] the racial characteristics of the Irish people’.35 Haddon and Browne expressed the opinion that ‘the ethnical characteristics of a people are to be found in their arts, habits, language, and beliefs as well as in their physical characters’.36 However, this survey was not undertaken under the auspices of any specific eugenics society even though the direction of the research had eugenic overtones. There was no eugenics society established in Dublin but one was set up in Belfast in 1911, and eugenic ideas permeated the social sciences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Ireland.37
Race could be scientised by categorising it using instruments of measurement common in physical anthropology.38 There was in turn the scientising of social status by correlating it with race. The methods employed in the examination of the physical characteristics of the Aran natives were based on those employed by John Beddoe, outlined in his influential book, The Races of Britain, published in 1885. Beddoe had paid a visit to Inis Mór in 1861. Haddon and Browne also made use of Beddoe’s ‘Index of Nigresence’ which worked out the degree of prognathism (protrusion of the lower jaw) of each skull. John Messenger described the conflicting results between literary and scientific interpretations of cultural reality in the Aran Islands. One of the reasons for this, he argued, was primitivism, a type of utopianism and nativism which was influenced by nationalism. This led to beliefs about the Aran Islanders which ‘run counter to scientific opinion’ and included the idea that they were ‘direct descendants of Celts;’ that the Irish were a ‘pure Celtic race’ and that ‘Celtic civilization developed long before and was superior to Greek and Roman civilizations’.39 The racial aspect of Celtic identity was expounded by Douglas Hyde in his 1893 speech, ‘The Necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland’: ‘We must strive to cultivate everything that is most racial, most smacking of the soil, most Gaelic, most Irish, because in spite of the little admixture of Saxon blood in the north-east corner, this island is and will ever remain Celtic at the core’.40 Eoin MacNeill developed this idea, writing in 1921 that: ‘In ancient Ireland alone we find the autobiography of a people of European white men who come into history not moulded into the mould of the complex East nor forced to accept the law of imperial Rome’.41 The previous year, de Valera, during his fundraising tour of the United States, attempted to get political recognition for the Irish Republic by arguing that ‘Ireland is now the last white nation that is deprived of its liberty’.42
Macalister asserted in 1927 that Ireland and Scandinavia were the most important European countries to the ethnologist and social historian because ‘all the rest have been forced into a Roman mould which has distorted or destroyed the native institutions’.43 When Eoin MacNeill published Celtic Ireland in 1921, the author had clearly accepted the premise that Ireland was indeed a Celtic country, explaining that he had ‘sought to establish the foundations of our early historical polity on a supposed Celtic colonisation coincident with the Roman conquest of Britain. 44 MacNeill was wary of the misuse of historical sources for political reasons and warned that ‘superficial methods of expounding history are perhaps the main cause of modern race-delusions’.45 As archaeology was interpreted as scientific evidence for historical events, MacNeill was satisfied that Macalister, whom he described as ‘the highest Irish archaeological authority’, believed that the Celtic colonisation of Britain and Ireland began in the Late Celtic or La Tène Period of the Iron Age.46 Macalister expressed the view in an address delivered to the RIA in 1927 that ‘on the current, and most probable, hypothesis, the Celtic culture was introduced into this country by a body of invaders – or, rather, a succession of invaders – who came at some time during the course of the European Iron Age’.47
Archaeology as a discipline is intimately connected with the political and social context in which it is interpreted. The author of the interpretation is invariably influenced by his/her own social background and education. As Christopher Evans explained it, ‘the practice of archaeology is never divorced from its times’.48 Macalister, for example, was of the view that the putative invaders of Ireland abstained from intermarriage with the natives and that: ‘The