The Quest for the Irish Celt. Mairéad Carew

physical and mental, of nobility, while the latter are the serfs’.49 Macalister’s idea of aristocrats and serfs is an observation based more on social prejudice than scientific fact. Macalister wrote in his book Ireland in Pre-Celtic Times (1921) that there was evidence for two stocks in Ireland ‘separated from one another by social position running parallel with racial character’.50 This correlation between race and social position was a common eugenic notion. Greta Jones has described how eugenic societies ‘showed a clear bias toward seeing eugenic worth as reflected in superior social status’.51 In the United States there was also a belief in the eugenic superiority of the North European.52 Macalister’s belief that ‘the distinction was maintained by obstacles to intermarriage’ may reflect the global debates about miscegenation that were current in the 1920s. He was also of the opinion ‘that the ruling classes were an importation, a tribe of conquerers, who had subdued and reduced the original inhabitants to a subordinate position, if not to actual serfdom’.53 This view reflected the nineteenth-century colonialist attitude of archaeologists to wards human progress. Macalister was aware of the problems associated with the issue of race in physical anthropological surveys, noting that ‘Mankind is scientifically divided into races, a term too often misused’.54 He defined race as follows:

      It must be clearly understood that Race depends simply and solely on physical characteristics, and on psychical and temperamental idiosyncrasies: the peculiarities with which a man is born. It has nothing to do with religion, language, political and social connexions or sympathies, or with any other of the peculiarities which a man acquires from his environment as he grows up.55

      Macalister and Eugenics

      Race was integral to nineteenth-century archaeological scholarship and continued to be important in the twentieth century, particularly in the interwar period. The 1930’s Harvard eugenic survey of the Celtic/Irish race side by side with the archaeological study of human remains was an example of this. In his address to the Royal Irish Academy in 1927 Macalister had expressed the view that ‘there is the greatest need’ for an Anthropological Committee, commenting that ‘there are few countries in the world of whose ethnology we know less than we do of Ireland’.56 He had also observed in his book, Ireland in Pre-Celtic Times, that ‘the subject of Irish craniology, both ancient and modern, is as yet an almost untilled field’.57 He was familiar with the physical anthropologist’s use of the cephalic index which was used to determine skull type and explained the cephalic index as a figure which ‘expresses the breadth of the head as a percentage of the length’.58 A Swedish professor of anatomy, Anders Retzius, was first to use the cephalic index in physical anthropology in the nineteenth century, to classify ancient human remains found in Europe. He classified brains into three main categories, ‘dolichocephalic’ which were long and thin, ‘brachycephalic’ which were short and broad and ‘mesocephalic’ which were of intermediate length and width. These ideas were later used by the eugenic theorist Georges Vacher de Lapouge who in L’Aryan et Son Role Social (1899) divided humans into hierarchical races with the Aryan white dolichocephalic at the top.

      It was Macalister’s opinion that these physical measurements of Irish skeletons showed that the Bronze Age culture was introduced into Ireland by trade and not by conquest or invasion and that, ‘until the process of contamination began after the Anglo-Norman conquest, no brachycephalic race found a footing in the country’.59 Similar classifications had been used by the American anthropologist William Z. Ripley in The Races of Europe in 1899. Ripley’s book was rewritten in 1939 by Carleton S. Coon, a student of Hooton’s.60 Coon believed that Caucasians had followed a separate evolutionary path from other humans and that the earliest Homo Sapiens were long-headed white men. Coon attempted to use Darwinian adaptation to explain the physical characteristics of race.61

      Macalister expressed disappointment that the study of the Irish race was hampered by the limited amount of skeletons available for examination. This was because most of the burials found were cremations. There was also the problem of excavations being carried out ‘either by ignorant labourers dreaming of treasure, or by equally ignorant and far more reprehensible collectors, in search of curiosities for their cabinets’.62 The main collection available for study was a number of crania dug up from a ‘charnel mound’ near Donnybrook in south Dublin in 1880.63 Other than this collection Macalister acknowledged that he could ‘discover nothing but isolated measurements of individual bones, scattered through books and the proceedings of societies’.64 Despite this lack of evidence he concluded that the results showed that ‘the pre-Norman population of Ireland was dolichocephalic, this belonging either to the Nordic or the Mediterranean Race.’65 In a supplementary examination of descriptions from the literature, Macalister deducted from a section which he selected specifically for the purpose that ‘all persons of importance native to Ireland are described as having golden hair’ and that ‘there is evidence that the superior classes had light-coloured eyes’.66 He acknowledged that this assertion was made despite the fact that while measurements of stature and of head-shape can be obtained from skeletons ‘the test of coloration cannot be applied except to a living person’.67 He was very much in favour of this new anthropological approach to Irish archaeology.

      Ireland as a Microcosm of Celtic Europe

      The notion of Ireland as a microcosm of Celtic Europe was explored by the Harvard Mission. The Aran Islands Survey itself could be seen as the precursor, in microcosm, of the Harvard Mission project with its three-stranded approach to the study of the Irish Celt. Apart from the difference in scale there was also a difference in political and cultural perspective. Haddon and Browne fused the old colonialist approach of a study of exotic natives on tiny secluded islands with the increasingly nationalistic outlook of the Royal Irish Academy. Previous work such as that by Beddoe reflects a nineteenth century colonialist perspective and the use of anthropology as an instrument of government information to control inferior, subject races. Liam S. Gogan, Assistant Keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, dismissed Beddoe in 1933 as ‘that old fool Beddoe who for the satisfaction of Victorian Britain demonstrated that a large section of our population was negroid’.68 The idea of the Celt in the 1930s was that of a noble, tall, blue-eyed and fair-haired warrior. The Harvard Mission represented an Irish-American rediscovery of the noble Celt of antiquity, which had a European and global resonance. In his privately published memoir Hugh O’Neill Hencken remembered Hooton saying to him ‘I think the Department should do something about Ireland and I think the Boston Irish would support it’.69 Wealthy Irish-Americans contributed to the funding of the project.70

      The American Anthropologists and their Theoretical Framework

      An understanding of the intellectual background and politics of the Harvard anthropologists is essential to the academic framework and the political context within which the Harvard Mission carried out its work. Hooton is best known for his anthropological work on human evolution, racial differentiation, the description and classification of human populations and criminal behaviour.71 He believed that ‘Physical anthropology is properly the working mate of cultural anthropology’ and in turn physical anthropology was ‘the hand-maiden of human anatomy’.72 A biological determinist, Hooton expressed admiration for the work of scholars engaged in scientific racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.73 He obtained a PhD in Classics at Harvard in 1911 and went to study under Sir Arthur Keith while he was on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. There, he developed his interest in human palaeontology and in particular palaeoanthropic fossils from England and Europe. He also studied classical archaeology, Iron Age and Viking archaeology and was involved in the excavation of Viking boat burials. In 1912 he took a diploma in anthropology under R.R. Marrett, an ethnologist who had established a Department of Social Anthropology at Oxford in 1914.74 In 1913, Marrett had helped Hooton to get a job as an instructor in anthropology at Harvard. It was noted in Life Magazine in 1939 that Marrett was one of the men at Oxford ‘who helped to mold Earnest Albert Hooton into what Hooton is today’.75 Before he embarked on his work in Ireland Hooton had gained extensive professional experience in organising large surveys, training personnel for field work, and the analysis of results obtained.76 During the 1930s he organised large-scale anthropometric surveys of human beings – students attending Harvard University and attendees at the Chicago and New York World Fairs.77 His statistical laboratory was located over the Peabody Museum at Harvard. The bone lab, over which he presided, held