The Quest for the Irish Celt. Mairéad Carew

anthropologist, served on the anthropometric sub-committee of the American Eugenics Society (AES) with Hooton. They were both also on the Committee of the Negro with the leading American eugenicist Charles Davenport. This committee was established in 1926 by the American Association of Physical Anthropology and the National Research Council. Classifications of skulls at Knockast were deemed by the Harvard team to be significant as a large skull contained a brain which ‘from point of size is well above the average for modern Europeans’.99 The skull was described as dolichocephalic and orthognathous and the cranial capacity was established using mustard seed measurement.100 The archaeologists interpreted some skeletons at Knockast to be of a type which ‘one would normally expect on the basis of the present data with respect to Bronze Age man in Ireland’ a type which had been identified by Professor Shea of University College Galway. Professor Shea compared this type with that of the ‘short-cist people of Scotland’.101 The Harvard archaeologists believed that they could identify different races of people in the archaeological record based on physical anthropology, which they associated with differentiated cultural activities. For example, the ‘small cremating people’ identified at Knockast were deemed to represent a different physical type to those contained in the inhumation burials at the site.102 It was extrapolated from this that they represented an intrusive element at Knockast. The cairn was considered to have affinities with similar Late Bronze Age types in Britain. The conclusion was made that ‘the Late Bronze Age in Ireland must be considered intrusive, and Knockast the result of these new elements mingling with indigenous Bronze Age culture’.103

      The idea that the cremating people were a different race, based largely on their different funerary practices, was contradicted by other evidence from Knockast where cremation and inhumation were for a time at least, contemporary rites. Bones from a cremated burial of a young woman were mixed with the skeleton of a child and some cremated remains were found under the child’s skull.104 These difficulties associated with correlating racial types with particular cultural assemblages or practices were acknowledged by the excavators.105 But, despite the limitations, much interesting information from an archaeological viewpoint was gleaned from physical anthropology about the lifestyle and health of the inhabitants of the site. For example, one male individual at Knockast had been badly crippled by arthritis and had recovered from a bad ear infection, leading Hooton to muse that ‘his recuperative powers must have been extraordinary’. There was also evidence for right-handedness and squatting.106 Sir Arthur Keith wrote about the skeleton found in the flexed position in the cairn at Knockast that it ‘may have Round Barrow (or beaker) blood in him’.107 The concept of equating a particular race with a specific artefact, pottery type, or monument type was popular in 1930s archaeological discourse.

      Most of the human remains found in the Harvard excavations were sent to America for examination by physical anthropologists. A huge survey of skeletal remains was undertaken by the Harvard Mission at Gallen Priory, County Offaly in 1934 and 1935. T.D. Kendrick108 from the British Museum directed the excavation. He was assisted by Michael V. Duignan109 of the National Museum and the site was excavated under the Unemployment Schemes. Kendrick had invited the Harvard anthropologists to examine the site as ‘such quantities came to light that he felt the anthropological opportunities should not be wasted’.110 Gallen Priory was included in Harold G. Leask’s report on the more important archaeological results obtained from the Unemployment Schemes in 1935.111 Hooton along with William White Howells112 undertook the examination of the skeletons. They were both members of the Anthropometry sub-committee of the AES. Howells was Research Associate in Physical Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, New York (and later became a director of the AES in 1954). He pioneered cranial measurements in world population studies. In his study of the skeletons at Gallen Priory he observed that ‘the series has been described by the ordinary methods of craniometry’.113 Craniometry was a technique employed by Harvard anthropologists on the Irish sites and was ‘the leading numerical science of biological determinism during the nineteenth century’.114 Howells accepted the limitations of this technique, acknowledging that the examination of morphological features were sometimes subjective, such as the measurement of the ‘degree of prognathism’. Two observers may differ in their personal perceptions of a classification, and, in his opinion, it was ‘difficult for a single observer to maintain a constant standard when he has no ‘standard’ outside of his own mind to which to refer’.115 Hooton remarked that ‘if they are somewhat unsatisfactory they are at least better than nothing at all’. He advocated that the standard should be ‘the typical development in the adult male cranium of the north of Europe’.116 Howells, despite using the technique was not convinced of its accuracy and wrote prophetically that ‘these conclusions with regard to the prehistoric people have been arrived at on the basis of craniology alone. Therefore, even though archaeology may in the future show them to be wrong, the cranial evidence will have been given its full weight’.117

      The study of the Gallen skeletons was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy in 1941.118 Hooton referred to the work as an ‘admirable study’. Howells’s work was used as a basis for comparison of the modern Irish population as it was the largest skeletal series of the Irish that had ever been available for examination.119 Adolf Mahr was satisfied that the Gallen skeletons ‘will provide a welcome body of information, from which to draw conclusions also as to the racial characteristics of the population in the period immediately preceding the Early Christian centuries’.120 Howells observes in his study of the skeletal remains that three quarters of the Gallen skulls can be described as orthognathous, ‘as is to be expected among Europeans’.121

      The comparative material used included Aleš Hrdlička’s work on the Irish in the USA, included in a general discussion on the white race, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 1932.122 Howells also based his work on that of G.M. Morant, who examined crania in England and Scotland and compiled series of cranial types for Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age peoples.123 Howells described the Neolithic type as ‘homogeneous, purely dolichocephalic, narrow-nosed and short-faced’. However, this changes in the Early Bronze Age ‘due to the incursion of a well-defined brachycephalic type’.124 Howells suggested that ‘the true time-sequence be violated’ and that the larger collections of Iron Age crania should be compared with those of later times.125 These larger collections included the Anglo-Saxons and seventeenth-century Londoners. He observed that ‘The evidence which the later groups afford has led Hooke and Morant, and Keith also, to conclude that the Iron Age folk, whatever their own origins, form the basis of the modern population without influences from the Anglo-Saxons’.126 Howells concluded that the Gallen type ‘can only be descended directly from the Irish Iron Age’.127 He ascertained that the skeletons represented an ‘homogeneous blend’ of dolicocephalic Neolithic and brachycephalic Bronze Age stock.128 This anthropological blending allowed for a solid continuity without compromising the purity of the stock.

      In 1935, C.P. Martin, Chief Demonstrator of Anatomy at Trinity College Dublin, wrote that ‘The Iron age passes almost imperceptibly into the early Christian era so far as archaeology is concerned’.129 C.P. Martin’s work was dismissed by Howells because Martin had ‘published measurements on all of the known Irish crania of early and recent times, but without reaching any significant conclusions’.130 Martin himself conceded in his book Prehistoric Man in Ireland that his series of skulls was ‘small as a basis for compiling reliable statistics’.131 Howells saw similarities between the Iron Age, Crannóg and Early Christian skulls, arguing that ‘the Iron Age and crannóg skulls approach the Gallen type; the Iron Age skulls are very much like the British Iron Age series, or between this and the Gallen type; while the Crannóg skulls are near to the Gallen series, and the Early Christians [ …] are practically identical with it’.132 While Howells acknowledged that ‘archaeology makes it clear that in England the advent of iron was accompanied by invaders’ he also accepts Adolf Mahr’s theory that ‘in point of numbers the Iron Age immigration to Ireland was small and unimportant’.133 Howells corroborated Mahr’s stance, stating that the Gallen skeletons ‘gives a cranial type which calls for no Iron Age invasion’.134 Hooton published a paper entitled ‘Stature, head form and pigmentation of adult male Irish’ in 1940.135 In MacNeill’s view ‘the anthropometric statistics in this paper are deeply interesting and must have great significance. They should form a basis and give a stimulus for a more complete study’. However, MacNeill dismissed remarks