The Prehistoric Archaeology of Ireland.
Darvill, Timothy
JOHN WADDELL. xii+433 pages, 184 illustrations, 5 tables. 1998.
Galway: Galway University Press; 1-901421-10-4 paperback [pounds]25.
Given that most archaeologists are specialists in a particular
period or region, writing a coherent and comprehensive overview of a
whole country's prehistory is a big undertaking. Waddell, who
mainly specializes in Bronze Age archaeology, has risen to the challenge
well and provides an extremely wide-ranging yet detailed account.
Ireland is a relatively small country to deal with, but size is not
important here because its modest land-area is jam-packed with
archaeology, especially prehistoric sites.
Waddell's book covers the period from first postglacial colonization around 7000 BC down to protohistoric times in the early
centuries of the 1st millennium AD. It is arranged in 10 main chapters
which, although given snappy titles, seem to map fairly neatly onto the
conventional expanded Three Age System sub-divisions of prehistory.
Waddell is careful to avoid cultural-historical labels for his periods
in the text, sticking instead to a calendrical chronology (western
Christian calendar) based on calibrated radiocarbon dates. An
introduction that prefaces the main text provides a short history of
prehistoric archaeology in Ireland as a way of setting the
archaeological context. This is strong on the development of the
discipline up until the 1960s. The more recent developments, especially
the application of post-processualist approaches, are not fully
explored, and the only reference here is to Irish prehistory: a social
perspective by Gabriel Cooney & Eoin Grogan, published in 1994.
Waddell does not say anything about the theoretical or philosophical
orientation of what he intends in his own book. This is a shame, because
one of the virtues of a synthetic volume written by a single author is
the opportunity to see how a particular perspective can be used across a
broad field. Instead, Waddell's text is essentially descriptive,
while also being eclectic in the perspectives adopted and explanations
offered.
The text is detailed. Most of the sites, features and objects cited
have abundant measurements and quantifications of various sorts. This is
useful in terms of providing a quick source of references and
comparisons, but rather irritating to read as numbers and lists never
seem to scan quite as easily as free text. In presenting the sites and
materials there is of course a lot to draw on, and much of it the result
of relatively recent research. Indeed, the cover blurb boldly proclaims
that 'it is a measure of the amount of recent work that almost half
the references cited in the bibliography have been published in the last
dozen years or so'. The bibliography in fact runs to 31 pages of
fairly close-spaced references, and is a major strength of the book.
Account has also been taken of the results (in some cases interim
results) for the main prehistoric projects with Ireland's Discovery
Programme, which is funded by the National Heritage Council, although
the origin and impact of this major initiative is not mentioned in the
introductory chapter dealing with the history of Irish archaeology.
Getting from the text to the bibliography is less easy. A system of
end-notes is used, the notes themselves being printed at the end of each
chapter. Good in principle but frustrating in practice. Moreover, the
notes themselves are fairly expansive and include lists of examples,
radiocarbon dates with calibrated age-spans, references, and comments.
Some of the comments could more usefully have been woven into the main
text, especially as some are rather important: note 4 in chapter 2, for
example, deals with the various ideas about the change from
hunter-gathering to farming.
The focus on detail is both a strength and a weakness of the book.
While information about individual sites is well-focused and concisely
presented, rather less space is given to some of the big issues in the
understanding of Irish archaeology. Starting right at the beginning, the
matter of colonization, by whom and from where, is glossed over in
favour of a descriptive account of finds at Mount Sandel. The same
treatment befalls the potentially important issue of the heavy
broad-blade flint industry and its place in relation to changes around
the turn of the 4th millennium BC which led to the development of
agricultural economies and the first major monuments. We could go on.
The emergence of developed passage-graves such as Newgrange or Knowth in
the 3rd millennium, the early exploitation of copper around the turn of
the 2nd millennium, and the appearance of 'royal centres' in
the later 1st millennium are all well described but inadequately
explained.
In terms of its presentation the book works fairly well, at least
at first glance. It is heavily illustrated with line drawings and
occasional photographs. Amongst the drawings there are many
reconstructions of sites or elements of sites. These are most welcome,
and do serve to give otherwise flat plans a more immediate appeal. The
plan of the Site A house at Lough Gur is far more impressive viewed next
to an artist's impression of the thing as it might have looked
[ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 15 OMITTED] and the same applies to the big
post-built structures inside Navan Fort [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 166
& 168 OMITTED]. Close inspection of the plans themselves, however,
reveals some real difficulties with a few of them, especially some of
the sets of comparative plans in which the examples depicted are drawn
at different scales: figure 178 which shows a set of hillforts is
especially annoying and misleading in this respect, so too the cemetery
mounds on figure 62.
Maps are another issue. A good number are included, but only those
in chapters 4 to 8, which cover the Bronze Age, show more than Ireland
itself. Clearly, the distribution of classes of site, artefacts, and
cultural traditions often extends outside Ireland into England, Wales,
Scotland, and sometimes northern France during other periods too. In
dealing with an island, albeit a fairly large one in this case, it is
important to set it within the context of relationships with communities
living on surrounding land-masses.
Overall, this book provides a sound, detailed and up-to-date
account of the prehistoric archaeology of Ireland. It is essentially a
textbook and sourcebook rolled into one, and will no doubt provide many
students with a quarry from which to extract the raw material to prepare
essays and assignments. Taken together with Cooney & Grogan's
Irish prehistory: a social perspective, Ireland is now well served by
up-to-date introductory texts on its prehistory.
TIMOTHY DARVILL School of Conservation Sciences Bournemouth
University tdarvill@bournemouth.ac.uk
Reference
COONEY, G. & E. GROGAN. 1994. Irish prehistory: a social
perspective. Dublin: Wordwell.
