The Quest for the Irish Celt. Mairéad Carew

as ‘the most eminent and influential scholar of European prehistory in the twentieth century’,137 influenced a generation of British and Irish archaeologists, including Macalister.

      Childe was influenced by the racial ideology of the times, reflecting the pervasiveness of eugenic ideas and the nineteenth-century ranking of races which was still in vogue in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1926, he published a book The Aryans, expressing the view that the Aryans were ‘the linguistic ancestors’ of the Celts.138 He commented that the Aryans bequeathed to their linguistic heirs ‘if not skull-types and bodily characteristics, at least something of this more subtle and more precious spiritual identity’.139 This reference to the Celtic language reflected Childe’s interest in philology and Indo-European origins.140 He asserted that ‘it was the linguistic heirs of this people who played the leading part in Europe from the dawn of history and in Western Asia during the last millennium before our era’.141 While he was later to dismiss this tome and exclude it from his ‘Retrospect’,142 published towards the end of his life, it is worth noting that he too, came under the influence of prevailing political ideologies. Childe described the physical attributes of the Aryans as follows:

      The physical qualities of that stock did enable them by the bare fact of superior strength to conquer even more advanced peoples and so to impose their language on areas from which their bodily type has almost completely vanished. This is the truth underlying the panegyrics of the Germanists: the Nordics’ superiority in physique fitted them to be the vehicles of a superior language.143

      This physical description could equally be applied to the story of the Celtic invasion of Ireland. In 1935, Macalister described the Iron Age ‘invasion’ in terms of ‘the flashing iron blades of the tall, fair-haired newcomers, who landed one fateful day in or about the fourth century BC’.144 This white supremacist, Eurocentric worldview allowed for the Irish to be classified as European stock, with the implication of a Nordic dolichocephalic heritage. Andrew P. Fitzpatrick made the point that studies of the Celts creates ‘an essentially modernist fantasy.’145