Interpreting the Conservative Purity: Irish Prehistory and the Post-Processual Critique

Contribution to Session #521 - Shaping a Discipline: Knowledge Transmission and Exchange in the Historyof Archaeology.

This paper examines the limited impact of theoretical developments in the second half of the twentieth century on archaeological scholarship in Ireland. While the discipline embraced many of the scientific methods and techniques of the post-war era, engagement with theoretical advances was muted. This was not simply a matter of resources, as the extensive deployment of palaeo-environmental techniques and the long-term funding of the Discovery Programme research institute demonstrate. Rather, it will be argued, a consistently conservative disciplinary elite has been reluctant to challenge the interpretive paradigm established at the time of the founding of the modern institutional discipline.

The newly independent Ireland of the 1920s and 1930s naturally sought to differentiate itself from colonial Britain. As in many European countries during the interwar years, institutional archaeology was established as a means of providing scientific credence for a distinct and immemorial national identity. In Ireland, the national myth centred on the survival of ethnically-pure Gaelic farming communities in the west of Ireland, whose folk-wisdom and traditional way of life had endured through centuries of colonial rule.

Archaeologists traced the continuity of Irish rural traditions back through the mists of ‘Celtic’ prehistory to the settlement of Ireland by Neolithic farmers. An opaque system of excavation licencing established in the 1930s helped shelter the discipline from external criticism by allied disciplines and international archaeology. The attendant control over excavation data has enabled the results of scientific analyses to be published according to their agreement with what the leading Irish prehistorian Peter Woodman described as the ‘canon of Irish archaeology’. Post-processual interpretive approaches allowed for the possibly that the assumptions that underpinned the ‘canon’ might be wrong. My aim is to explain why such approaches were seen as heretical, and the pervasive insularity of archaeological thought that endured as a result.