Recent Operations at Dowth Hall
The Colonial Mindset
Three photos of the excavations and art at Dowth Hall. Images by Nicky Ryan. There is an interesting debate / thread going on elsewhere in this group about colonialism and the colonial mindset. To me Dowth Hall sums the situation up perfectly.
There were debates here last spring where the passage-grave people were referred to as the indigenous inhabitants of Ireland. Personally I think this term can only describe the ancientI Irish mesolithic people - the first ones to get here. It used to be said the mesolithic people came here at the end of the ice age; a worked bear bone from a cave in Clare seemed to push their arrival back, and now a piece of worked reindeer antler seems to be pushing it back further again.
The indigenous Irish mesolithic were displaced by neolithic farmers - a group of people we have learned a huge amount about in the last decade. We know they originated in Anatolia and migrated into Europe in two great waves - through the Mediterranean and along the Danube. We know they had domesticated cattle. We know they meet again and settle all along the shores of Western Europe, and that early megalithic culture as we know it appears to arise in the Brittany region, possibly a mixture of mesolithic and neolithic beliefs.
Ireland and England get colonised in and around 4,000 BC. The Continent is getting overcrowded, sea levels are rising in the Brittany region - the Flood - and new settlers begin landing all around the coasts. The earliest evidence we have for a domesticated cow in 4,350 BC at Ferriter's Cove in Kerry. No one knows exactly what happened, is it the shipwreck of an early attempt to land on these shores?
The oldest megalithic monument currently known on this island in Poulnabrone, the famous dolmen in County Clare. There were more than thirty neolithic burials in the chamber, which included evidence of violence and Downs Syndrome. The human remains were dated to 3,800 BC. A lot of people here like to suggest that megalithic monuments are not tombs, but almost every one that was ever opened had evidence of human remains.
There are lots of very early dates around Sligo in the northwest of Ireland. The late Professor Göran Burenhult found plenty of extremely early dates when he excavated the Carrowmore monuments. It became fashionable to dismiss Burenhult's dates - which only proved there were fires at Carrowmore as early as 5,400 BC - on places where monuments were later built.
The causewayed enclosure at Magheraboy, just outside Sligo Town, has been dated to as early as 4,200 BC, these dates coming from charcoal found in pits and ditches. Lots of early neolithic pottery shards were found in Mageraboy. There are contemporary dates, again from charcoal, found mixed with shards of carinated pottery, in early neolithic pits at Rathquarter and Ballydoogan, found during roadworks.
I have seen some comments here where people getting very upset and emotional about the Catholic church. As I see it, organised religion arrived on these shores with the neolithic farmers who imported their death and resurrection cult along with their domesticated animals. All megalithic monuments are religious buildings of some kind, designed for the reenactment of ritual journeys to the underworld, to contain the mortal remains of specific people - because only a fraction of the neolithic population were buried in megalithic monuments.
There are various different groupings arriving, as shown by the differing kinds and styles on monuments - portal dolmens, passage-graves, Linkardstown cists, boulder burials and court-cairns. There is huge variety in the shape, size and form of the megalithic monuments. You get smaller monuments like the open-air platform or tertre style passage-graves at Carrowmore at the beginning of the neolithic, and huge and complex monuments and henges like those in the Boyne Valley by the end of the neolithic.
The neolithic is the original colonisation of Ireland, and it eventually sees the end of the indigenous native hunter-gatherers, whose lands, lifestyle and beliefs were all surely replaced. For anyone who wants to study colonialism, begin here. This was the first of a number of waves of colonisation. The First and Second Battles of Moytura, two of the central stories of Irish mythology tell of invading colonists who first take over the land, then fight off more colonists over possession of the land. Both battles were originally set in Sligo - the first on the south shore of Ballisodare Bay overlooking Carrowmore and Knocknarea, the second on the east shore of Lough Arrow overlooking Carrowkeel. It is fascinating to reread those myths and stories in light of modern genetic research.
The neolithic people are replaced by bronze age descendants of the Yamnaya, who sweep across Europe, and begin arriving in Ireland around 2,500 BC. There is lots of great new research on genetics, diseases, violence and linguistics from this next wave of colonisation. As I understand it, modern Irish people are genetically related to the bronze age colonists, and we only have a tiny bit of neolithic and virtually no mesolithic genetic heritage left in our makeup.
The next colonisation is a mental and spiritual event - the arrival of Christianity, which takes off rapidly in Ireland. Our next colonisation is the Vikings, who return here again for another bout of colonisation after a few centuries as the Normans. Then we have the Tudor reconquests and the Nine Year War, the most recent major colonisation of Ireland with organised plantation of imported settlers.
This brings us back to Dowth Hall, built around 1760 on the site of a large neolithic passage-grave in the Boyne Valley. The monument seems to have been decommissioned or slighted in the neolithic. There are two smaller monuments close by and two more have been discovered. There is a huge neolithic henge close by. Dowth Hall had fallen into serious disrepair and the family had died out. The neolithic monument, built by the colonising descendants of Anatolian farmers was replaced by a manor house built by the descendants of soldiers who acquired lands here in the more recent colonial wars.
The earliest antiquarians in Ireland were generally descended from the colonial ruling classes - the gentry who were wealthy enough and had the leisure to study prehistory and what was to become archaeology. These were often the people who opened monuments, found museums, kept private collections of artefacts. Societies were founded and examples can still be seen of colonial institutions such the Royal Irish Academy, the Office of Public Works. It is fascinating to see people complain that Irish artefacts form parts of collections such as the National Museum in England. Dublin was the Second Capital of the British Empire for many years. I was taken on a tour of the vaults in the basement of the National Museum in Dublin in the 1990’s. The collection contained items from Egypt, from the Congo, and from the Pacific Northwest.
When the Ordnance Survey of Ireland took place in the 1830’s, a vast amounts of material was collected in a huge colonial project, and the entire country was mapped. The Ordnance Survey Letters as they were called, containing a fascinating collection of local place names, archaeology and other lore, were due to be published in a county by county series of volumes, but only one volume was published. The project was shelved by the government of the day. .
