Culture-historical ideas were embedded in the Lithberg Report and the National Monuments Act as the cultural value of artefacts and archaeological monuments were established within this framework. The parameters of the selection process of sites excavated by the Harvard Mission and under the Unemployment Schemes and the subsequent interpretative paradigm used was also defined by this. It enabled the state to control the creation of archaeological knowledge and to make political claims to disputed territory though the medium of archaeological discourse (see Chapter 6).
Archaeology and Folklife
The Harvard Mission archaeologists included reports on local folklore in their scientific papers.89 Archaeology in this period was directly linked with the life of ordinary people. This was part of a democratisation of culture, a European phenomenon, and an expression of anthropological modernism. In the Lithberg Report, for example, it was recommended that ‘on these two principles, that is, the knowledge of Ireland’s earlier culture and of the present day life of the people, should in my opinion, an Irish National Museum be based’.90 To this end it recommended the creation of a folklife section in the National Museum. The Folklore of Ireland Society was created in 1926. The Irish Folklore Institute was formed in 1930 and received finance by way of a Cumann na nGael government grant and a Rockefeller Foundation grant of £500. Within five years the institute had built up a collection of over 100 manuscript volumes. This important work was continued by the de Valera government with the establishment of the Irish Folklore Commission in 1935 and in 1937–8 the innovative Schools Collection was carried out. Séamus Ó Duillearga, who was involved in the setting up of the Irish Folklore Commission, travelled extensively in Scandinavia and established strong academic and cultural ties there.91 Micheál Briody notes that the Irish Folkore Commission was the first such organisation devoted solely to the collection of folklore in any country and succeeded in ‘assembling one of the finest and most extensive collections of folk tradition in the world’. 92 In 1936, at the inaugural meeting of the Historical Society of UCD, Ó Duillearga, then director of the Folklore Commission, pointed out that scholars on the continent and in America were taking particular interest in its work. In a letter dated 2 November 1938 from the Department of External Affairs to Maurice Moynihan, Secretary, Department of the Taoiseach, it was noted that ‘Ó Duillearga was going to deliver a series of lectures on folklore in the American Universities in the Spring and that Ó Duillearga desired ‘to extend the operations of the Folklore Commission to the Six county area.93 Ó Duillearga’s UCD address in 1936 on the oral tradition was entitled ‘An Untapped Source of Irish History’. He described the work of the Folklore Commission as embracing ‘everything of a traditional character which could throw light on the social and cultural life of the Irish people of past times’.94 In his book, Briody observed that ‘The Irish Folklore Commission achieved international status by bypassing England and going to, what it considered, the fountainhead of folklore scholarship,’95 the northern countries of Europe. The establishment of a folklife collection at the National Museum became more important after political independence. In 1935 the Folklore Commission invited Ake Campbell and Albert Nilsson, two Swedish ethnologists, to come to Ireland on a ‘Folk-Life Mission’ to make a survey of Irish rural farmhouses.96
Adolf Mahr, a friend of Ó Duillearga’s, and board member of the Irish Folklore Commission, was also involved in the Quaternary Research Committee, set up in 1934, which brought the Danish mission to Ireland; their work on the bogs had important scientific implications for Irish archaeology.97
Archaeology and the Democratic Ideal
It was explained in the Lithberg Report that the object of a Historical Museum was not to collect objects of artistic and monetary value as these objects have ‘an intrinsic capacity of preserving themselves’ but to collect ‘more simple objects which have a small market value and for this reason are threatened with destruction’.98 The ideal of a National Museum should be ‘to give a consecutive representation of the native civilisation of the country from the time when the human mind first showed its creative power until the present day, and it should embrace all classes which have been or still are components of its society’.99 This sentiment reflects the democratic ideal of the independent nation-state. It also reflects the fact that archaeology was no longer the preserve of the monied and leisured classes but was a state-sponsored activity.
Malcolm Chapman has noted that the ‘Celts’ and the ‘folk’ often seem ‘virtually conterminous categories’ because ‘folklore’ like the idea of the Celts had become romanticised.100 This idea of the idyllic life of the peasantry was a throwback to the nineteenth-century cultural-nationalist idea of the pure, native, Gaelic-speaking, rural-dwelling Irishman. According to Joep Leerssen, a sense of Irish cultural identity came to be located in antiquity and peasantry in the nineteenth century.101 This trend of glorifying ‘past and peasant’ continued into the twentieth century and was given material expression in the nationalist museums of Europe in their folk-life collections. The recommendations for the folklife section contained in the Lithberg Report were based on the open-air museum at Skansen in Stockholm.102
One of the Harvard Mission anthropologists, Conrad M. Arensberg, commented in his book The Irish Countryman that: ‘The folklorist has discovered Ireland, and today the Free State Government subsidises the preservation of folklore as a monument to national greatness’.103 Folklore and superstition were also important in the preservation of archaeological monuments. Macalister lamented the fact that superstitions were ‘once potent in preserving the ancient monuments’. He worried that ‘unless something intervenes to stay the damage, the world will lose many of the lessons that Ireland, and Ireland alone, can teach’.104 But these superstitions lingered and local people were sometimes suspicious of the scientific work of the Harvard archaeologists, with their emphasis on physical anthropology. For example, Rev. L.P. Murray, editor of the County Louth Archaeological Journal was worried that the respect shown for burial grounds by ordinary people would be diminished by the work of the Harvard Misssion and would lead inevitably to the destruction of more monuments in the future. He criticised the methods used in excavating the Bronze Age burial site at Knockast, Co. Westmeath. He did not agree with disturbing the remains of the dead and he questioned the use of bone measurements to acquire useful archaeological data.105 He described their work at burial-sites as ‘ghoulish performances’ and posed the question: ‘If it is permissible, today, to rifle a Bronze Age cemetery, will it not also be permissible, in the years to come, to excavate the consecrated burial grounds of today?’106
The Irish Free State in a Global Cultural Context
The Harvard Mission work took place during a time when, Terence Brown asserts, the Irish Free State, was ‘notable for a stultifying lack of social, cultural, and economic ambition’.107 This popular idea of cultural barrenness has persisted despite being challenged in a collection of essays edited by Joost Augusteijn entitled Ireland in the 1930s.108 Auguesteijn argues that, in this decade when Fianna Fáil came to power, attempts were made to develop the Free State into ‘an entity which was not only politically but also socially, culturally and economically independent and which dealt with its citizens in a purely Irish manner’.109 This theme is explored in a diverse range of papers whose topics include the Irish language revival, the cottage schemes for agricultural labourers and the centenary celebrations for Catholic Emancipation. While archaeological initiatives are not included in his book, they can also be considered as part of this wider cultural continuum.
Native cultural achievements in the early decades of independence, including the work of the Harvard Mission, are often not recognised by cultural historians as there has been a tendency to view cultural history through the lens of the censorship laws. In Brown’s opinion, the relationship between Irish-Ireland ideology and ‘exclusivist’ cultural and social pressures culminated in the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929.110 There was also the enactment of the Censorship of Films Act, 1923. In Brian Fallon’s opinion the importance of the censorship laws has been ‘much overplayed’.111 Indeed, the analysis of native cultural achievement celebrating archaeology, literature, ancient manuscripts written in the Irish language, oral traditions,