Christina Fredengren. Crannogs: a study of peoples interaction with lakes, with particular reference to Lough Gara in the north-west of Ireland.
Henderson, Jon C.
xi+332 pages, 74 b&w & colour figures, colour plates, 8
tables; CD-ROM. 2002. Bray: Wordwell; 1-869857-56-9 paperback 25 [euro].
Whereas most studies acknowledge the wide chronological range of
crannogs, due in the nature of archaeological research, they have tended
to concentrate on one particular period. This is one of the few studies
that acknowledges the multi-period nature of crannogs and considers the
changing role of them through their full chronological span. Using
evidence from field survey, excavation, literary study and interviews
with local people, Christina Fredengren presents a detailed study of
crannog building in the area around Lough Gara in the north-west of
Ireland from the Mesolithic to the present day.
Lough Gara has long been something of an enigma due to the sheer
number of crannogs it supposedly contains. The number depends upon how
one defines such a site. Fredengren uses the term 'crannog' to
simply denote a 'man-made island surrounded by water (p. 11). In
using this loose definition, Fredengren is taking a significant step
away from traditional usage of the term in Ireland to refer only to
early historic islets with defensive palisades. As a result, she
identifies 184 potential sites. Her fieldwork demonstrates that small
artificial stone islets were used as early as the Mesolithic, while
larger artificial islets (with and without palisades) were being built
in Ireland at least as early as the Late Bronze Age, through the Iron
Age and into the early medieval period. Her excavation of a crannog at
Sroove in Lough Gara, fully reported in an accompanying CD-ROM, further
challenges accepted wisdom. Here a low-cairn crannog was excavated,
revealing evidence from the early medieval period consisting of
utilitarian artefacts and evidence for textile and, later, iron
production. These results conclusively prove that the use of crannogs in
Ireland was not confined to people of higher status and that people of
lower standing were also constructing artificial islands.
Early on, Fredengren states that she is trying to make a modern
theoretical contribution to the study and interpretation of crannogs.
She argues that previous approaches have been too focused on economic
and technological factors, resulting in functionalist interpretations of
crannogs ranging from defensive enclaves, to high status residences, to
links with fishing and metalwork production. She defines her approach as
staunchly 'anti-capitalist' and sees one of the main aims of
the book as a challenge to 'economistic' interpretations of
crannogs and of archaeological material more generally. In reference to
Late Bronze Age crannogs, for example, she rejects the traditional
defended homestead interpretation as an oversimplification and argues
that they were 'built in order to provide a place from which
depositional rites could take place' (p. 296). She sees the
evidence for metalworking, or 'metal-handling' as she calls
it, within a ritual framework, while the presence of domestic items does
not imply simply domestic occupation but rather that someone who
'held the office of carrying out the deposition', presumably on behalf of a wider group, was living on the island.
By rejecting any economic interpretation and focusing instead on
ritual, Fredengren could be accused of simply replacing one dogma with
another. Recognising a ritual aspect to crannogs is a step forward in
their interpretation but it does not necessarily disprove the defended
habitation or workshop models. Most archaeologists would now accept that
what may appear as common, utilitarian activities in the modern world
could have been, and probably were, bound up in sophisticated spiritual
beliefs, in prehistory, with many important functional tasks
communicated through ritual.
Despite the book's clear post-processual aspirations, the
approach in her fieldwork and her initial interpretation of it is very
traditional. She presents a tight classification and dating scheme for
the potential crannogs she has identified. The sequence starts with
small platforms (124 examples) being used from the Mesolithic to
low-cairn crannogs (48) from the Late Bronze Age to the early medieval
period and, finally, high-cairn crannogs (12) dating from the
'later' early into the late medieval period. This rather
simplistic model of smallest to largest fails to convince as it is
mainly based upon the occurrence of morphological features with
unstratified artefacts and radiocarbon dates (neither of which, of
course, can be used to date the construction of sites with any certainty
and at best can only reflect periods of use). The radiocarbon sampling
strategy appears to have been random and rather unrepresentative with
only 14 sites sampled, of which 11 were of the low-cairn type, two were
of high-cairn type and just one was a platform crannog.
It is a failing throughout the book that there is little or no
reference to the extensive literature on Scottish crannogs, much of
which would have supported and enhanced her discussion. For example,
Fredengren has noticed "that the lakes chosen often have gently
sloping shorelines, while lakes with steep shorelines ... seem to have
been avoided (p. 6). This is almost word for word the locational
criterion identified by Ian Morrison in the 1980s for the siting of
crannogs in Highland lochs, which he related to geomorphology and the
availability of arable land.
The book is more successful when dealing with the potential wider
meaning of crannogs to communities over time. Fredengren is open to the
possibility that the building and use of crannogs not only reflected
people's actions but also to a degree determined and shaped them,
thereby directly affecting the way communities developed. In this sense
she quite rightly views the re-use of crannogs as a meaningful practice,
rather than simply as a labour saving choice, where communities may have
been drawing on earlier associations. Post-processual perspectives such
as how the building and use of sites can affect people's perception
of both themselves and their social reality have not been applied to
crannogs before. Of course one of the main reasons for this is that very
little modern research has been carried out on crannogs.
The concentration on one area in detail over a long chronological
span is one of the book's main strengths. Of course this is also a
weakness as interpretations based on such a restricted area are open to
question when applied more widely. The range of possible interpretations
of crannogs in Ireland is probably as various as the sites themselves.
Fredengren's anti-economic stance throws up some interesting issues
for the prehistoric period but her approach is less useful for the
medieval period where commerce and power strategies have a vital rote in
the location and rise of crannogs as high status sites. However, in
offering alternative explanations beyond the simple defended palisade
model and for providing the first post-processual treatment of crannogs,
this book should be welcomed and will quite rightly earn its place on
standard bibliographies of the subject.
JON C. HENDERSON
Dept. of Archaeology, University of
Nottingham, Nottingham, England.
(Email: jon.henderson@nottingham.ac.uk)
