In the 1930s American anthropology came under the influence of British anthropologists who espoused theories of functionalism. This idea was that all structures and institutions of a social group work in a sort of physiological manner and to understand society the functional relationship of its component parts need to be understood.79 Those most associated with this school were the Cambridge anthropologists, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown who spent six years at Chicago and Bronislaw Malinowski who spent three years at Yale. Lloyd Warner, who was responsible for the social anthropological strand of the Harvard Mission’s work in Ireland, came under Radcliffe-Brown’s influence and was himself influential at Harvard in the early 1930s.80 At Cambridge in the 1930s the functionalist school of anthropologists, under Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, wished to remove themselves from the discipline of archaeology because that discipline had more in common with history. Malinowski believed that anthropology needed to discard ‘the purely antiquarian associations with archaeology and even pre-history’.81 Radcliffe-Brown was of the opinion that archaeology had a natural affinity with history.82 Hooton’s view was that ‘archaeology shares with history the function of interpreting the present through knowledge of the past’.83
Warner wanted to design a research framework which allowed the researcher to see ‘society as a total system of interdependent, inter-related statuses’.84 At that time Warner was working as a tutor and instructor in the Anthropology Division of Harvard University where he was an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology. He had carried out extensive studies in the social anthropology of primitive peoples and directed a survey of the social structure and functioning of a large New England town. He had previously carried out fieldwork among the Aborigines in Australia. He was also collaborating in anthropological research in the industrial field with the Harvard School of Business Administration. His job in Ireland was to participate in the sociological field work and to personally train and supervise the workers.85
Warner’s ideas reflect Hooton’s understanding that: ‘The function of the anthropologist is to interpret man in his entirety – not piecemeal’.86 Warner sought to study communities in the New World rather than in exotic locations. He was instrumental in bringing to American anthropology the ideas of the social scientist, Emile Durkheim.87 Hooton’s difficulty with social anthropology was that ‘they wilfully abstract social phenomena and divorce man’s activities as a social animal from man himself’. He believed that it was possible ‘to predict from the physical type of racial hybrid his occupational, educational, and social status’.88 This reflected his own view that biology was the main predictor of man’s place in the world and not environment or education. This idea is the essence of scientific racism. According to Stocking this ‘scientizing trend’ in American anthropology during the 1930s was a ‘renewal of Morganian tradition’.89 Lewis Henry Morgan was a lawyer, statesman and ethnologist who earned himself the title ‘Father of American Anthropology’ for his scientific work on social anthropology, which was heavily influenced by the ideas of Darwin.90 In 1875 he was responsible for forming the section of anthropology in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The physical anthropological expedition was the last strand of the Harvard Mission to start work in Ireland. At first it consisted of only one man, C.W. Dupertuis, who was an advanced student of Physical Anthropology at Harvard. In his lecture to the Experimental Science Association of Dublin University on 26 February 1935 entitled ‘Notes and Observations of Recent Anthropometric Investigations’, Dupertuis explained that for the first time in history an attempt had been made to make a racial survey of the population of a whole country. In an Irish Times article the following day it was reported that Dupertuis believed that the survey ‘would go a long way towards clearing up the racial problems of Europe’. The reasons given for the expression of this eugenic ideal were as follows:
Ireland being more or less an isolated country, was probably not so mixed racially as Continental countries, and he [Dupertuis] felt that in certain parts of this country the descendants of more or less pure racial types which came in from across the waters would be found. He hoped to be able, at the end of the survey, to answer such questions as who were the Celts, and what was their racial type or types, and what element in the present day population represented the descendants of the earliest inhabitants of this island and just where they were to be found today.91
Dupertuis spent a lot of time in many districts of Ireland and grants were put at his disposal by the Irish Free State Government to help him during the later stages of his work. He already had two years of experience in anthropometry at the Century of Progress International Exposition, 1933–4, in Chicago, where he organised the Harvard Anthropometric Laboratory, which measured and observed visitors to the fair. After the first year of anthropometric work in Ireland Dupertuis returned to America. The following year he came back to Ireland accompanied by his wife, Helen Dawson. She worked as his recorder and collaborator in the Irish survey. She held a National Research Council Fellowship in Anthropology and used this to study Irish women of the West Coast. She collected an anthropometric sample of some 1,800 women for analysis in an effort to establish the characteristics of the Celtic race.92
Hooton acknowledged that Seosamh Ó Néill, Secretary of the Department of Education for the Irish Free State was very cooperative with the physical survey of the Harvard Mission. Ó Néill was instrumental in coaxing members of his and other government departments to submit themselves to an anthropometric examination. He was also responsible for administrating the grant of £40 given by the Government for the work towards defraying of expenses incurred during the collection of data.93 De Valera not only manifested keen interest in the anthropometric survey, but also offered helpful suggestions, and Sir Richard Dawson Bates, the Home Secretary for Northern Ireland, also gave his official sanction to the work there.94 Dupertuis interviewed Major-General W.R.E. Murphy, the Deputy Commissioner of the Garda Síochána, who agreed to provide letters of introduction to the superintendents of the Civic Guard in various parts of the country. This was approved by the Commissioner of the Garda Síochána, Colonel Éamon Broy. The Gardaí therefore became, ‘active co-workers in the gathering of anthropometric material’. The cooperation of the Royal Ulster Constabulary of Northern Ireland was also acquired and their members helped in collecting or facilitating the collection of anthropometric data. Bishops and parish priests around the country were useful to the survey and ‘helped round up subjects’ for examination.95
Measuring Celtic Skulls
To ascertain the race to which skulls recovered during archaeological excavations belonged, the Harvard Mission anthropologists employed the discredited nineteenth-century technique of mustard seed measurement. This technique, used to assess cranial capacity, was designed by a physician from Philadelphia, Samuel George Morton (who died in 1851), to find out the average size of human brains. Morton attempted to rank races according to the sizes of their brains. Stephen Jay Gould describes Morton’s technique and his abandonment of it in his book The Mismeasure of Man:
He [Morton] filled the cranial cavity with sifted white mustard seed, poured the seed back into a graduated cylinder and read the skulls’ volume in cubic inches. Later on, he became dissatisfied with mustard seed because he could not obtain consistent results. The seeds did not pack well, for they were too light and still varied too much in size, despite sieving. Re-measurements of single skulls might differ by more than 5 per cent, or 4 cubic inches. Consequently, he switched to one-eighth-inch-diameter lead shot ‘of the size called BB’ and achieved consistent results that never varied by more than a single cubic inch for the same skull.96
The physical anthropological examinations conducted by the Harvard team on skeletons from archaeological sites showed whether the skeletons had large brow ridges, pronounced prognathism or very long arms. Simian-type stereotyping of the Irish Celt, with negroid features, had been popular in American and British newspapers published in the nineteenth century.97 Scientific results obtained by the Harvard academics rivalled these imaginative and discriminatory depictions.
Hooton made helpful suggestions with regard to the reconstruction of the skeletons at the Bronze Age cemetery-cairn at Knockast in County Westmeath, excavated by the Harvard archaeologists,