A History of Ireland in 100 Objects Read online

  By studying the isotopes in his teeth, scientists have established that the ‘Amesbury Archer’ grew up in the Alpine region of southern Germany or Switzerland, where the mining and use of copper and gold had long been known. Andrew Fitzpatrick, Head of Communications at Wessex Archaeology in Salisbury, suggests, from the evidence of some of the grave goods, that the archer probably made his way to England via southern France, the Iberian peninsula and the Atlantic. Why does he matter for Ireland? The Amesbury Archer provides crucial evidence about the biggest development following the emergence of agriculture: the mining and shaping of metals.

  There is no dispute that the advent of metalworking in Ireland, around 2400 BC, is linked to new cultural practices characterised by the kind of objects found in the archer’s grave and by the practice of single rather than communal burial. What is not clear, though, is, as Mary Cahill of the National Museum puts it, ‘whether it was brought by people on the move looking for new sources of metals or whether it is a transmission of information as opposed to of people. But the fact that the Amesbury Archer turns out not to have been born in southern Britain and has travelled all the way from central Europe is indicative of some movement of people’. We know that by about 2400 BC Ross Island in the Killarney lakes was perhaps the most important copper mine in northwestern Europe. The first Irish evidence of metalworking is therefore already quite highly developed. It is unlikely that this expertise emerged spontaneously. As Fitzpatrick puts it, ‘Ross has to be developed by people who already have the knowledge. You cannot just make that up’. A large cultural shift is under way in Ireland, associated with the mining of copper and gold.

  This does not mean that Ireland was ‘invaded’ by new tribes of metalworkers; but migrants from central Europe and the Atlantic coasts of France and Spain almost certainly played a key part in the end of Stone Age Ireland.

  7. Pair of gold discs, 2200–2000 BC

  The working of metals may have come late to Ireland, but the island then became one of the most important metal-producing centres in Europe. Ireland had large resources of copper and gold: new sources of wealth and power.Early smiths made copper axes and traded them to Britain. That this trade worked both ways is evident from the development of bronze objects. The tin that was alloyed with copper to make the bronze probably came from Devon and Cornwall. The working of metal was a cultural as well as an economic activity. Even into the beginning of the modern era the idea of alchemy—the transformation of one substance into another—combined science with magic. In the Early Bronze Age the ability of metalworkers to turn crude rock into objects of dazzling brightness must have imbued them with some sense of the magical. This must have been especially true of gold, not least because it was extremely rare. The people who sifted gold in streams and rivers in the Mourne Mountains had searched hard for something they knew to be especially precious. It was gold, then as now, that had the brightest aura of ritual significance.

  There is a natural connection between the brightness of gold and the power of the sun. In Indo-European languages, including that spoken in Bronze Age Ireland, the word for ‘god’ is derived from a root meaning ‘shine’. We know from the older Irish megalithic tombs that rituals of the sun had deep meaning. That some of this was now focused on gold objects is suggested by the creation of decorated discs of sheet-gold. These were probably attached to a backing material and may have been worn to indicate high political status, high religious status or both.

  These discs from Tedavnet, in Co. Monaghan, are by far the biggest and most sophisticated yet found; their crosses are elaborated with rows of dots, lines and zig-zag patterns, created using a variety of techniques. The general belief is that they relate to a cult of the sun and that the cruciform shapes in the design are intended to represent its life-giving rays. There is little direct evidence of this cult in Ireland, but rock-art images from contemporary Denmark clearly show people worshipping the sun, which is represented in the same way as on the Irish discs. The sun, in this cult, may have been a goddess rather than a god. One interpretation of the gold discs is that they were placed as symbolic breasts on the chest of a king, creating an image that fused the leader with the life-giving deity. If this is so, the discs belong to an Irish tradition of associating kingship with the sun that continued long after the arrival of Christianity.

  8. Coggalbeg gold hoard, 2300–2000 BC

  In April 2009 gardaí in Roscommon announced that they had recovered, from a rubbish skip in Dublin, some rather unusual objects: wrapped in a sheet of paper, and weighing just under 80g between them, they had been in a safe stolen from a pharmacy in Strokestown.

  Following the robbery, the owners told investigating gardaí that the safe had contained three pieces of gold jewellery. From the description provided, curators from the National Museum believed the jewellery to be gold ornaments of the Early Bronze Age period. Due to the thin and flat nature of the objects and their extremely light weight (78g in total, about 2½ ozs), it became apparent that the thieves might have entirely missed them. What the gardaí recovered from the smelly skip were an Early Bronze Age lunula—a crescent-shaped collar—and two gold discs of the kind found at Tedavnet. The lunula (the word was first applied in the eighteenth century and is Latin for ‘little moon’) was made by beating gold into a very thin sheet on which decorations were incised or impressed with considerable skill. Like other lunulae, the Coggalbeg example is a very clever object: producing a highly impressive and seemingly large token of high status from a relatively small amount of gold.

  The ornaments, which had been dug up from a bog at Coggalbeg, Co. Roscommon, in 1945, make up a unique assemblage of objects. They represent ‘the first time ever that we have an association between the discs and the lunula, because the discs would be considered amongst the earliest gold ornaments and the lunula as coming a little bit later’, says Mary Cahill of the National Museum. The appearance of discs and a lunula together opens up the possibility that they may have functioned as part of the same set of regalia, with the discs representing the sun and the lunula the moon. More than 80 of the 100-plus gold lunulae found in western Europe come from Ireland; thus offering the first strong evidence we have of a distinctively Irish cultural form in gold. Instead of Ireland adopting influences from abroad, the process in this case seems to work the other way: Irish gold lunulae spread to Britain, and their shape is copied in necklaces of other materials, such as jet and amber.

  9. Bronze Age funerary pots, 1900–1300 BC

  Sometime in the Early Bronze Age, Irish people began to bury their dead in single graves. This suggests something about their attitude to death and, perhaps more importantly, hints at their attitude to life. A notion is emerging that what is significant is not just the life of the community or of political or religious leaders. Individual lives matter. Not only are the dead given an individual burial, but the idea also takes hold that they will continue in some other form.

  ‘There seems to be a change’, says Éamonn Kelly of the National Museum, ‘from the more communal approach of the great megalithic tombs to a more individualistic approach. This suggests that there was some sort of a change in how society was organised’. These pots are among the many ‘food vessels’ that survive from this period, some of which are vase-shaped, some bowl-shaped. The abstract geometric decoration found on bowls of the era is very similar to that on Irish metalwork of the same period, especially on the gold lunulae. On the base of some pots is a starburst pattern that may relate to a sun cult.

  The vessels were made to be buried with the dead. The graves are generally just large enough to hold the body and the accompanying pots. Adding to this sense of a new awareness of the individual is an apparently wide choice of burial forms. Some members of the community do not seem to have been accorded a formal burial at all. Those who were, experienced an extraordinary and shifting diversity of funerary rituals: cremation, unburnt burial, disarticulated remains, multiple burials, pit graves, cist graves, flat graves and g
raves in or under mounds all occur over the five or six centuries before 1500 BC. Thereafter burials are rare in the Bronze Age.

  To our eyes, the most moving of these burials are those in which the dead person has been arranged in a foetal position. Why were the dead placed as if they were curled up in the womb? The obvious suggestion is of a simple and beautiful metaphor: the tomb is a womb. The dead are to be reborn into another life. The drink or food in the vessel is meant to sustain them on the journey from one state to the other. This tells us both that these Bronze Age people were looking carefully at the human body: they knew the shape of the child in the womb; and that this capacity to observe humanity went hand in hand with a desire to transcend it.

  10. Tara torcs, c.1200 BC

  In 1810, a boy digging close to the ringed fort known as the Rath of the Synods on the Hill of Tara in Co. Meath found two magnificent gold torcs. They had been made with considerable skill by hammering the edges of a gold bar into four thin flanges on an anvil and then twisting the whole lot into a circle. The amount of gold used to make them, the fact that torcs are a new kind of object, the technological sophistication they required and the emergence of Tara itself as an especially important ritual centre all point to a society that is becoming more complex.

  The largest of the torcs has a diameter of about 42cm and, if untwisted, would extend to about 167cm. The ability to make objects such as these comes in a period of development that may have been stimulated by the deterioration of the Irish climate from about 1200 BC. This may have led to conflict and insecurity (new types of weapons and enclosed settlements date from this period), with the emergence of more powerful kings. The assumption is that torcs were worn around the neck, but these from Tara are large enough to have to been worn around the waist; they could even have been placed on idols. The strong likelihood, however, is that they were, as Eamonn Kelly of the National Museum puts it, ‘regalia worn by the kings of Tara. How do we know? These are the finest objects of the period’.

  At the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, complex twisting techniques replaced sheet gold-work. Whereas the older lunulae were a very clever way of making the most of a small amount of precious gold, the torcs seem to be designed to show off the amount of gold used to create them. They are intended for ostentatious display. Tara had been an important centre for three millennia before the torcs were made, but their awesome quality suggests that it had become considerably more so. ‘You get the sense’, says Kelly, ‘that Tara was not just about political power or even religious power. It is a spiritual power. This is what gives the kings their authority. There is already a sense of that in these objects. They identify the one wearing them as the person who connects this world to the other world’.

  11. Mooghaun hoard, c.800BC

  A little under 3,000 years ago someone in Ireland was very, very rich. In March 1854 a ganger ordered some navvies working on the construction of the West Clare Railway near Newmarket-on-Fergus to straighten a dyke running close to the small lake of Mooghaun. They shifted a stone and found a small, rough chamber with a flagstone on top. When they opened it they uncovered one of the largest hoards of Bronze Age gold objects ever found in western or northern Europe. The navvies filled their pockets and ‘disposed each of his share to travelling dealers’. Many pieces were melted down, but the evidence suggests there were 138 bracelets, six collars, possibly two torcs and four other pieces: 150 objects, all of gold. The 29 objects that survive, split between the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin and the British Museum in London, are not especially remarkable in themselves. Most of the hoard consists of relatively simple bracelets, whose more or less uniform design has prompted suggestions that they may have been merely a way of storing the gold. What is extraordinary is the sheer scale of the wealth they represent.

  Mooghaun has a large and prominent hill-fort, with three huge, roughly concentric stone ramparts enclosing about 12 hectares and commanding wide views of the Shannon estuary. The fort may have been a ritual centre serving as the capital of the wider region. Pollen analysis from Mooghaun lake shows that the area was intensively farmed at the time. The wealth of the hoard suggests, however, that the Shannon estuary was also being used for fishing and trading. There must have been a long period of stability and prosperity in which such riches could be accumulated.

  There are other huge hoards from this period, notably one of 200 bronze objects from Dowris, near Birr, in Co. Offaly. That great find gave its name to the major phase of the Late Bronze Age in Ireland. The Dowris hoard was found in or near a body of water called Lough Coura. The lake no longer exists, but in the early-nineteenth century it formed an area of open water. In late prehistoric times it was probably much more extensive. The term hoard was applied to the Dowris find because it was assumed that it represented a collection of objects all deposited at the same time, but the range of material and its watery context suggest that it may have been a diverse set of objects (bronze swords, spears, cauldrons, horns) deposited perhaps over several centuries.

  Were the Dowris, Mooghaun and other hoards buried as votive offerings to the gods, or merely for safe keeping? The Mooghaun hoard’s siting near a lake might point to the former, but the stone chamber in which it was buried suggests that the gold was meant to be accessible to its owners. Hoards such as these tell a story of human motives that were probably a blend of protection of material wealth, preservation of memory and propitiation of supernatural powers. Either way, the Mooghaun hoard tells us of an Ireland characterised, in the words of archaeologists Andrew Halpin and Conor Newman, as ‘one of old wealth, stability and cultural homogeneity’. In a literal sense, at least, this was a golden age. Like all such ages, it was not to last.

  12. Gleninsheen gold gorget, c.800–700 BC

  The marks that run through the ridges on the right-hand side of this dazzling gold collar show that it was roughly bent in two before being thrust into a rock fissure in the Burren, in Co. Clare, where it was found by a boy hunting rabbits in 1932. This folding is no accident: most of the other eight surviving examples of this uniquely Irish object were bent in the same way. They were, it seems, ‘decommissioned’ before being buried; such was their power that they had to be broken before being let out of the hands of their owners.

  The Gleninsheen gorget is a technical and artistic achievement at the apex of goldworking in the Europe of its time. It was made by applying a range of techniques: repoussé, chasing, raising, stamping, twisting and stitching. The discs at the terminals of the collar are decorated with spiral patterns of extraordinary finesse. This kind of work, examples of which are heavily concentrated in Munster, can only have come from a highly evolved society with a population dense enough to support specialist artists, and sufficiently settled to develop its own sophisticated traditions.

  There is evidence that gorgets like this one may be an ultra-luxurious and superfine expression of a contemporary European fashion. On mainland Europe c. 1200 BC one of the most important high-status objects is the bronze cuirass, a piece of armour that fits the whole torso. This highly decorated armour is evidence of the emergence of a prestigious warrior caste. Bronze cuirasses are not found in Ireland (Irish warriors probably favoured leather body armour and leather helmets), but Mary Cahill of the National Museum has pointed out detailed similarities in structure and decoration between Irish gorgets and European cuirasses: the raised lines on the Gleninsheen collar match the lines on the armour that indicate the warrior’s ribs; the circular discs mimic the breast and nipples. What we have, then, is a very specific Irish version of the symbols of a European warrior cult. In Europe the object is bronze and takes the literal shape of the warrior’s body; in Ireland it is gold and abstract. Who needs ordinary bronze when the overwhelming symbolic power of gold can be harnessed?

  The gorget may be a more self-consciously artistic representation of a European style, but it nonetheless belongs to the common ideal of a warrior elite. A rare rock carving from southwestern Spain in this period sho
ws a warrior with sword, shield, spear and chariot. The shield has a highly distinctive V-shaped notch. Distinctive, that is, except for the fact that the only extant shield of this kind was found at Cloonbrin, near Abbeyshrule, in Co. Longford. The gorget, therefore, is a peculiarly Irish and especially refined expression of a warrior cult that extended far beyond Ireland.

  13. Castlederg bronze cauldron, 700–600 BC

  Christianity may not have been the first Mediter­ranean religion to find its way to Ireland.The most famous Irish legend, the Táin Bó Cualinge, centres on the struggle for control of a magical bull. It thus suggests distant echoes of the presence in Bronze Age Ireland of a bull cult that itself originated millennia before in the eastern Aegean Sea. Versions of this cult spread into the Iberian peninsula, and it would not be surprising if it resonated with Ireland’s cattle-rearing society.

  This magnificent bronze cauldron, found in a bog in Castlederg, Co. Tyrone, is crafted from offset bands of sheet bronze held in place by rows of conical rivets. It could be seen simply as an expression of a chieftain’s bounty in feasting his followers, but it almost certainly had a ritual as well as a social significance. The skills of casting, beating and riveting required to make it, and the care with which similar cauldrons were repaired from time to time, suggest it was a valuable object and one of very special status. It was probably used as a central part of elite ceremonies in which the local king’s ability to share food and drink was an enactment of his power. Cauldrons like this one are at the root of the folk tales of ‘cauldrons of plenty’ that survived for millennia in Europe.