A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

by Fintan O'Toole

  For this very reason, historians would tend to be sceptical of the very idea of a history of Ireland in 100 objects. History is based above all on documents—the written word reveals not just actions but intentions. Texts open up contexts. Mere objects, on the other hand, are seldom eloquent in themselves. The fish trap with which we start our selection, for example, is an amazing thing—but only if someone tells you what it is and how extraordinary is its survival. On its own, it looks like a bunch of sticks stuck in a slab of turf.

  No one would dispute this. Even archaeologists will stress that the objects they uncover, however beautiful, are of little use without their wider context, a context that is usually provided by the scientist or the historian. Yet there are at least two good reasons for starting with objects and using them to sketch the development of human societies and cultures on this island.

  One is that very quality of immediacy that a significant object carries with it. The digital age we inhabit seems to make physical things less important, but it does the same for time and sequence. On the internet, everything seems to exist together simultaneously. The idea of chronology, of the way one thing follows another, is losing its grasp. Objects, so striking in themselves, can be arranged in such a way that the unfolding of change can be experienced tangibly, especially if, as we hope, readers take the opportunity to go and see them for themselves. (Apart from anything else, the National Museum and the other great repositories of striking objects are a great free resource in lean times.)

  The other good reason for doing this history of the island through objects has to do with history itself. Ireland, at least as much as any other place, has been awash with grand narratives and epic histories, which all come, of course, in competing versions. The thing about these big narratives, though, is that they tend to fall apart, or at least to get very complicated, when you scale down the field of study. Biography tends to reveal more ambiguities than local histories, and local histories tend to contain more contradictions than national narratives.

  For this reason, much of recent Irish history-writing has tended to concentrate on the small scale and the fine detail. This is an admirable reaction against the inadequacy of the grand narratives, but it does leave non-historians feeling somewhat excluded. By unfolding a rough history of Ireland through 100 objects, it is possible to combine the virtues of micro-history (what could be more micro than a single thing?) with a broad chronological narrative. It is possible to tell a ‘story of Ireland’ that is complex and ambiguous but at the same time broad and engaging.

  We have therefore chosen 100 remarkable objects, each of which opens a window onto an important moment in Irish history. Most come from the great trove that is the National Museum, a resource that is itself one of the wonders of Ireland. The rest are from a variety of other institutions. They are not intended to be the 100 most remarkable objects on the island, or even to be a representative sample of the great collections. They are chosen simply for their ability to illuminate moments of change, development or crisis.

  We have adopted three simple rules. An ‘object’ is defined as a single, man-made entity—a definition that does not include buildings; the objects are presented in broad chronological order; and, unless there is an overwhelming case to the contrary, the objects themselves are freely accessible to readers in public institutions or spaces. If nothing else, these fascinating things should act as a reminder that Irish people have been around for a while and have survived ordeals and challenges with creativity, resilience and a remarkable ability to invent new ways to say old things.

  1. Mesolithic fish trap, c.5000 BC

  It does not look like much: some small, smooth interwoven sticks embedded in the turf from a bog at Clowanstown, in Co. Meath. The bog, however, was once a lake, and the woven sticks are an astonishing survival: part of a conical trap used by early Irish people to scoop fish from the lake or catch them in a weir. Radiocarbon tests date it to between 5210 and 4970 BC. The delicacy of the work has survived the millennia. Nimble hands interlaced young twigs of alder and birch, gathered from the edge of dense woods that covered the land at the time. The warp-and-weft technique is similar to the way of weaving cloth that developed much later in human history. The Irish trap could be called a classic design: similar items continue to be used around the world.

  The people who made this trap were adept at using what was around them. They made circular, tent-like huts using saplings; they turned flint and chert stones into knives and other tools, but, as the trap suggests, this was as much an age of wood as of stone. They foraged, hunted and fished, gradually making a human mark on what had been an outpost of untouched nature. In human terms Ireland is a very new country. Recent finds suggest the movement of our species out of Africa may have begun more than 125,000 years ago. There is evidence of settlement in Britain by people like ourselves as far back as 40,000 years ago, but there is no evidence of human settlement in Ireland before 8000 BC.

  When hunter-gatherers did arrive from Britain, they found a densely forested landscape, a temperate climate and an abundance of animals, including wild pigs, wolves and bears (though not yet deer). Brown trout, salmon and eel were abundant in rivers and lakes. It is not accidental that the earliest settlements yet identified in Ireland, at Mount Sandel, in Co. Derry, and Lough Boora, in Co. Offaly, were close to water.

  The people who made the Clowanstown trap may have moved with the seasons, following their best sources of food. They would probably not have seen themselves as belonging to a single, large, overarching group. Yet the flint tools they made were gradually becoming distinctive and different from those in Britain. Slowly and unconsciously, Ireland was emerging as a particular human space.

  2. Ceremonial axehead, 3600 BC

  Even now, its shine and colour are magnetically alluring, its green surface, mottled with darker veins and glimmers of light, polished to a glassy sheen. The shape is beautifully balanced between sharp edges and elegant curves. It was once thought that it must have come from China, and if it looks exotic and mysterious now, it would have seemed astonishing nearly 6,000 years ago in Ireland.

  The jadeitite axehead, from Kincraigy, Co. Donegal, was never used to cut anything. It was always a rare and precious object, made not only to enhance the prestige of its owner but as a sacred thing in its own right. We now know just how exotic it was: in 2008 analysis revealed that it came from Mont Beigua, high in the Italian Alps near Genoa, over 1,600 km from its final resting place. It required enormous skill to make it, and it was already up to 700 years old when it reached Ireland in 3600 BC.

  The axehead tells us two big things. One is that prehistoric objects can have long and complicated life histories, and could travel incredible distances. This object had not travelled directly to Kincraigy from the source, but had circulated around north-west Europe. Its shape was changed and it received its glassy polish at some distance from the Alps, probably in the Paris Basin, some time between 4500 BC and 4000 BC. The people who brought it to Ireland will not have known where the Alps were, but they would have known that the axehead had come from the ‘magic mountains’, close to the world of the gods, far away. It would have had its own legendary history, perhaps even a name.

  The second big thing this object tells us is about agriculture, and the revolutionary changes that brought. Why is this ultra-special object an axehead? Because it was axes that allowed the dense woodlands to be cleared. The axe was the symbol of human power over nature. This piece of Italian exotica points us towards the single biggest transformation in Irish history: the adoption of farming around 4000 BC. This axehead was probably brought to Ireland by immigrant farming groups from northern France—coming either directly, or through Britain, and establishing a tangibly Continental lifestyle on our shores (similar jadeitite axes from Mount Viso in the Italian Alps were being imported into Britain, France, Denmark and Germany). The immigrant farmers would have had to bring their domestic animals and cereals with them, since the wild ancestors of
wheat, barley, cattle and sheep did not exist on the island of Ireland. The axehead would have formed part of this package of novelties. It was probably a precious community heirloom, and its owners may have believed it could protect them during their long and dangerous journey. Once in Ireland, it would have been treasured before being deposited in a boggy spot. Mary Cahill of the National Museum believes that the axe may have passed from hand to hand as part of a ‘bride price’ or dowry. Farming created larger-scale settled communities with a strong sense of territory and ownership, and chieftains rich enough to own a fabulously exotic object.

  3. Neolithic bowl, c.3500 BC

  The bowl is simple enough, very dark with burnished surfaces and relatively crude lattice-pattern decorations. It may have been used for drinking, and similar vessels have been found elsewhere in Ireland.

  Yet, because of the context in which it was found, this everyday object is extraordinarily eloquent. It tells us a great deal about the lives of some of the earliest Irish farmers. It was discovered in 1992 along with remains of three other pots, in a small cave in Annagh, in the east of Co. Limerick, that contained three full human skeletons, two other sets of partial remains, various animal bones and a flint blade and arrowhead. The bowl and pots tell us that the people were farmers; the other objects tell us that they were also hunters and warriors. Thus, this ancient grave offers two major revelations. One is that the development of agriculture was accompanied by considerable violence. The men who were chosen for burial at Annagh seem to have been veteran local champions or heroes. Two of them were in their 50s when they died—perhaps 20 years older than the norm. All three had suffered violence: two had serious head injuries, one a broken nose, one a fractured rib. In one case, the blow to the skull was delivered with such force that it must have been inflicted by something like a slingshot. Beside the plain domesticity of the bowl, there are the vestiges of brutal struggles.

  The other thing we learn from Annagh is that the transition to agriculture did not happen all at once; socially and culturally people retained their links to an older, wilder way of life. Clearing land was hard work: the skeletons show the wear and tear of vigorous lives and the carrying of heavy weights. This hard-won territory had to be defended, and conversely offered an attractive prize for outsiders.

  The grave at Annagh dates from around 500 years earlier than the great Neolithic passage tombs such as Newgrange, but it may reflect the continuation of even older cultural practices. In this regard, the careful arrangement of hunter’s apparatus (blade and arrowhead) with a selection of animal bones is particularly resonant. The animal bones were brought specially to the cave, and they represent both the old, wild world and the new order of agriculture. There are bones from a bear, a wolf, a wild boar and a deer—creatures of the forest. There are also bones of sheep and cattle—the domestic beasts raised by farmers. Raghnall Ó Floinn of the National Museum, who led the excavation at Annagh, believes that this arrangement is deliberate and indicates a culture that is still in the midst of a long transition. Farming was the dominant way of life, but the call of the wild was still heard. Even as they cleared land and herded cattle, these local heroes may still have thought of themselves as proud hunters.

  4. Flint macehead c.3300-2800 BC

  This ceremonial macehead, found in the chamber of the eastern tomb beneath the great passage tomb at Knowth, Co. Meath in the Boyne Valley, is one of the finest works of art to have survived from Neolithic Europe. The unknown artist took a piece of very hard, pale-grey flint, flecked with patches of brown, and carved each of its six surfaces with diamond shapes and swirling spirals. At the front they seem to form a human face, with the shaft hole as a gaping mouth.

  The source of the stone is uncertain (perhaps the Orkney islands), but if the macehead were carved in Ireland, the object suggests that someone on the island had attained a very high degree of technical and artistic sophistication. Archaeologist Joseph Fenwick from NUI Galway has suggested that the precision of the carving could have been attained only with a rotary drill, a ‘machine very similar to that used to apply the surface decoration to latter-day prestige objects such as Waterford Crystal’. The association of this extraordinary work with one of the great passage tombs tells us something about the society that constructed those enduringly awe-inspiring monuments. It was rich enough to value highly specialised skills and artistic innovation, and it was becoming increasingly hierarchical with an elite capable of controlling large human and physical resources. Knowth and the other great tombs were statements. As archaeologist Alison Sheridan from National Museums Scotland puts it, ‘Quite simply, they were designed to be the largest, most elaborate and most “expensive” monuments ever built’. The deposition of a fabulous object like the macehead at Knowth added to the sense that the tombs were ‘a means for conspicuous consumption, designed to express and enhance the prestige of rival groups’.

  This prestige was asserted in the tombs in three ways: the possession of awe-inspiring objects like this one; the use of astrological knowledge to demonstrate a link with the celestial world; and the passage of the seasons, what Sheridan calls a hotline to the gods (a phallus-shaped stone, also found at Knowth, suggests that fertility rituals were part of this mystique); and the demonstration of international connections. While small tombs like that in Annagh honoured local heroes, the great tombs were self-consciously European. There are strong parallels between Ireland’s megalithic tombs and passage graves on the Iberian peninsula and in northwest France. The likelihood is not that the tomb-builders came from these places, but that they were part of a network of Atlantic connections. Already in Ireland a strong sense of the local coexisted with a desire to be seen as part of the wider world.

  5. Neolithic bag, 3800–2500 BC

  It looks at first like a piece of a rough, greenish mat from a 1970s student flat. In fact it is a 5,000-year-old bag, a very rare survival in Ireland’s Neolithic archaeological record of an object of organic material. It was found in a bog in Twyford, Co. Westmeath, and was made by coiling long slivers of wood into spirals that were then bound together with lighter grass-like material. Next, the two sides were woven together along a seam, and handles of plaited straw were added. This would have made for a circular, purse-like bag, about 40cm in diameter, with a narrow opening at the top. It was probably dyed to give it a splash of colour. It offers a glimpse into the everyday life of early Irish farmers. Though we cannot know for sure, there is every chance that it was made and used by a woman.

  Similar bags have been found around the world: the technique goes back to the Middle East around 4800 BC and is still used by indigenous cultures. In fact, the best way to get a sense of the Twyford bag is to look at a very similar but intact specimen from nineteenth-century Aboriginal Australia that is also in the National Museum of Ireland. The Twyford bag takes us back into the day-to-day world of Irish people in the fourth millennium BC. Most of what survives from this era is made of hard stone and tends to be associated with ritual, death and power; has the drama of violence and mystery; and is overwhelmingly male. To look at a simple bag that might have been purchased at an ethnic market in a modern city and imagine it in the hands of a Neolithic woman gathering plants or nuts is to be reminded that life, then as now, was dominated by ordinary things and tasks.

  What do we know of those ordinary lives? They were short by our standards: most people could not expect to live beyond their 30s. People were probably about the same height as Irish people were in the 1930s: the Neolithic male skeletons found at Annagh in Co. Limerick were about 170cm (5ft 7in) tall. Again from the Annagh skeletons we know they worked hard, but not quite as hard as their counterparts in mediaeval Ireland. They probably wore clothes of leather and woven textiles, such as flax. We know, too, that they increasingly lived together in relatively substantial settlements of wooden houses, lined with wattle and daub and with thatched roofs. Communities were settling down for the long haul. By the time this bag was made its owner probably lived
in a society that had a sense of itself as being old.

  6. Basket earrings, c.2300 BC

  A man in his late 30s or early 40s was buried alone at Amesbury, near the great English monument of Stonehenge, sometime around 2400–2200 BC. From the huge range of objects in his grave, he had considerable status. The objects were similar to finds from the same period in Ireland: barbed and tanged arrowheads, a stone wrist guard, beaker-shaped pots. He even wore gold, basket-shaped earrings or hair ornaments. A strikingly similar pair, pictured here, is held in the National Museum in Dublin. In Amesbury, owner and objects were found together, offering far more information than similar isolated artefacts found in Ireland; and, although we must be cautious in our interpretations, information we can glean from Amesbury is likely also true of Ireland. What makes the Amesbury man so significant for an understanding of Irish prehistory is where he came from and the fact that copper knives and other tools in the grave show that he was a metalworker.