Celticism and the Volk: Tracing the Ideas and Networks that Shaped Irish Archaeology

The scholarly networks that shaped the discipline of archaeology were often highly politicized. Antiquarianism in Ireland was largely a colonial endeavor. The majority Gaelic-Catholic population were excluded from the social and professional circles from which antiquaries were drawn. By denigrating Ireland’s past, colonial antiquaries made the case for the imposition of Britain’s cultural values in Ireland. During the later-eighteenth century, romantic nationalism and the Ossian vogue generated international scholarly interest in Ireland’s ‘Celtic’ past. The Celtic Revival movement was initiated in the early nineteenth century by Anglo-Irish intellectuals. As the movement developed it took root among the expanding Gaelic Irish middle class. ‘Celtic’ antiquities, art, and literature became the iconography of a new ethnic nationalism. During the interwar years, Nazi Germany ‘weaponized’ ethnicity. The ‘Celtic’ regions of northern Europe were seen to preserve the lifeways, traditions, and values of the imagined golden age of Nordic Aryan supremacy in Europe. This was the past the Nazis wanted to recreate in the present. Archaeologists, folklorists, and linguists were deployed by the Nazis to infiltrate Celtic movements. Ireland’s leading archaeologist during the interwar years was an Austrian Nazi. The legacy of this period remains deeply embedded in archaeological practice in Ireland to this day.