Archaeology can tell us about the material culture of a people. It can tell us how they lived, how they died, and how they practiced their religion. It can tell us how they did things, what their sacred spaces looked like, what was important to them (in religious or other terms), and it can tell us how they saw the world around them.
Because archaeology relies on what people left behind – the remains of their homes, their sacred spaces, industrial works, political centres, their graves, and things like that – the information we get from archaeological excavations can be as limited or as wide-ranging as the evidence allows. Of course, the science and technology we have that can analyse those remains can add a lot to our understanding, too.
‘Celtic’ Ireland
We’ll mostly concentrate on Ireland for a minute here because that’s where Gaelic Polytheism ultimately goes back to. The main period of time we’re interested in here is the Iron Age (c. 700 BCE – 400 CE), and it was only towards the very tail end of the Iron Age that the Irish began to colonise other places. The exact dates we’re dealing with, in terms of this colonisation, aren’t exactly agreed upon (possibly as early as the second century CE, but maybe as late as the fourth), but either way it’s only a relatively small part of the Iron Age. On the whole, it’s better if we start with Ireland, then, and keep it simple.
The earliest evidence for human activity in Ireland suggests that people may have got there sometime in the Palaeolithic period (the ‘Old Stone Age’) – the first ‘age’ of human prehistory. Conclusive evidence of human occupation in Ireland only dates to the Mesolithic (the ‘Middle Stone Age,’ which came directly after the Palaeolithic), however, from around c. 8,000 BCE, and so Ireland was one of the last places in Eurasia to have been settled.1 These Mesolithic humans spent a good 4,000 years kicking around in Ireland, living a hunter-gatherer sort of lifestyle until technological advancements again brought a huge shift in the way people lived. These advances marked the transition to a new prehistoric age: the Neolithic (or ‘New Stone Age,’ c. 4,000 – 2,500 BCE).
This Neolithic period saw a completely different way of life being adopted by the people of Ireland. They began farming – growing crops in the fields, and keeping domesticated animals for meat, dairy, wool, and leather (amongst many other things) – which is thought to have resulted in a more sedentary existence than people had ever known before (which is not to say they were completely sedentary). They also began building impressive funerary monuments for their dead, and many of these huge earthworks and megalithic tombs are still visible in the landscape today, including Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth.
This Neolithic period lasted until around 2,500 BCE, when further technological advancements saw the dawn of yet another new age – the Bronze Age. As the name suggests the Bronze Age marks the period in which people began working with the first metals, and while the defining metal of this period is bronze, other metals were being worked as well. These include copper (the primary ingredient for bronze, which is an alloy – usually a mixture of copper and tin), as well as precious metals like gold and silver. Many of the finest and most impressive and shiniest artefacts that can be found in the National Museum in Dublin date from this period – beautifully decorated gold ‘collars’ and necklaces, especially, which could be interpreted as evidence for the emergence of a high-status elite.
Sometimes you might see references to the Neolithic period transitioning into the Copper Age before we get to the Bronze Age, because copper was the first metal to be worked with, before people found out that other metals could be alloyed with it. The Copper Age represents such a short space of time, however, that it’s often paired with the Bronze Age anyway, if it’s mentioned at all.
Where the Bronze Age is defined by the adoption of metalworking technology in general, with the production of bronze as the metal du jour, as it were, the Iron Age is (as you might expect) defined by the shift towards iron-working. This represents a huge technological advancement, comparatively speaking, because although the Bronze Age saw the mining of a number of different metals pretty much right off the bat, they’re all very soft. Iron is a much harder metal it, which means it also has a much higher melting point. In order to work iron effectively, an entirely new type of furnace was therefore needed – one that could reach far higher (but also more controlled) temperatures than the furnaces of the Bronze Age could offer.
Of course, this journey through the ages in Ireland is part of a broader prehistory of the world. The Irish weren’t making all of these technological discoveries by themselves – they didn’t exist in isolation, completely separate from the rest of the known world. Instead, the technological advances we see in Ireland, throughout the ages, were largely the result of outside influences that somehow managed to filter into the country, either from Britain or continental Europe (most likely).
A traditional, old school view assumes these changes were the result of mass migration or invasion – a whole bunch of people just turning up on Ireland’s doorstep one day, who then took over the place and established their own way of doing things while the locals just kind of let it all happen without much of a fuss (or they did make a fuss and they lost). An alternative, more up-to-date view suggests that invasion isn’t the only reason that radical changes in a society might occur. Instead, these kinds of changes are often more likely to happen through a process of ‘diffusion,’ which basically boils down to the argument that ideas can move much faster, and much farther, than a whole group of people can. This means it only takes a few people with the right sort of know-how to introduce a completely new technology, or to introduce a new belief system, society, or language to a people and place.
This is an important point to consider here, because the Iron Age in Ireland marks the transition to a recognisably ‘Celtic’ culture for the first time in Irish (pre)history. We not only see the introduction of iron and iron-working in Ireland in this period, we can see that the methods and the technology that were adopted by the Irish, in producing their own iron, were clearly Celtic in origin. They also embraced Celtic art styles and motifs, reflecting a ‘Celtic’ understanding of the world around them. With this adoption of a Celtic material culture, then, it’s generally assumed that the Iron Age is also the period in which the people of Ireland started to speak a Celtic language (although an argument could be made that it could have been introduced earlier than that, in the late Bronze Age, which provided the impetus for other changes; it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, really).
So how did all this Celticness get there? Was it the result of mass migrations or invasions? Or was it the result of this ‘diffusion’ we’ve just touched on – a technological, cultural ‘osmosis,’ in a way, where these new ideas and new ways of doing things were simply absorbed by the Irish through more peaceful forms of contact with other Celtic cultures than ‘invasion’ would suggest.2 There are many arguments that could be made both for and against either of these theories, but unfortunately the fact remains that when it all comes down to the brass tacks here, we just don’t know what happened, or how it all began, exactly.
What we can say, however, is that no matter its origins, the Iron Age in Ireland is effectively our starting point, as Gaelic Polytheists. This is the period in which the religion our own beliefs are based on was first practiced. It’s in this period (in the late Iron Age) that Irish colonies were also established in the Isle of Man and parts of Scotland, and those early colonists brought their language and their way of life with them. Although other colonies were established in parts of what are now known as Wales and England (in Devon and Cornwall, to the very south-west of the country) they weren’t as successful as the colonies in the Isle of Man and Scotland, where the effects of that late Iron Age colonisation can still be seen today. Regardless of our personal cultural focus in our own practices – whether we might choose to concentrate on an Irish, Scottish, or Manx expression of our Gaelic Polytheism – it’s the Irish Iron Age that effectively underpins everything we do. In theory, anyway.
On the one hand, this means the cultures of the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age don’t really have much to do with anything when it comes to Gaelic Polytheism, because they were all pre-Celtic peoples. The special alignments we find at the entrance of Neolithic Newgrange, for example – catching the sun on a winter solstice morning3 – has no real, direct bearing on our own practices, because this hint that the winter solstice was somehow significant to the Neolithic people of Ireland has no tangible connection to the pre-Christian beliefs that are rooted in Ireland’s Iron Age.
On the other hand, however, the people of the Irish Iron Age didn’t just magically pop up one day, replacing an entire population and having no memory and no connection at all to those earlier peoples. Change takes time, and the people of the Iron Age (and into the medieval period, up to the present day) clearly did have a link to this prehistoric past, and they obviously valued it (as many still do today). The archaeology tells us that the dead were still being interred at places like Neolithic Cnogba (Knowth) during the Iron Age, while visiting Romans left offerings at Newgrange at some point towards the close of the Iron Age.4 In particular, though, the people of the Irish Iron Age built their sacred sites or ritual centres at places where their ancestors had already made their mark, deliberately incorporating prehistoric burial mounds from the Neolithic or Bronze Age into their sacred enclosures (as we see at places like Tara, Emain Macha, and Cnoc Áine, for example) . Whether they still understood that many of these monuments were built with a special alignment in mind, marking a specific day, isn’t something that’s really clear to us, but that may be beside the point. The fact remains that the most important sacred sites of Iron Age Ireland were built at places that had already been recognised as sacred for thousands of years, and where there had already been a long history of activity.5 At the very least, then, we can see that some of the rituals and ceremonies of the Iron Age were deliberately performed in the shadow of their Bronze Age and Stone Age ancestors. This link with the past was clearly important, so it’s something we can’t ignore.
References
1 First off, a note on dating conventions here: BCE stands for ‘Before Common Era,’ while CE stands for ‘Common Era’ (as you might guess). These are a more neutral alternative to the Christian-derived BC (‘Before Christ’) and AD (Anno Domini, often given to mean ‘The Year of Our Lord’).
The Palaeolithic evidence mainly consists of flint flakes and possible tools, but the contexts in which these items have been discovered often presents a number of difficulties that means we can’t confidently, conclusively say that people were living in Ireland during the Palaeolithic period. For example, a flint ‘hand-axe’ was found in an Iron Age layer at Dún Aenghus (Aran Islands), but it clearly wasn’t found in situ – it hadn’t been put there by a Palaeolithic person, that is. Instead, the hand-axe was found in an Iron Age context, so we can only assume an Iron Age person had left it there, which means the axe could have come from anywhere. It’s possible an Iron Age Irish person found it somewhere locally, kept it, and then lost it or deposited it in the place it was later found by archaeologists, or else the hand-axe could have come to Ireland from Britain or the European continent.
Flint flakes found in a quarry near Drogheda (Co. Louth) are also Palaeolithic in date, as far back as 250,000 years ago. Given the nature of the environment at the time, it’s believed these flint flakes were originally deposited elsewhere, by a Palaeolithic hunter who was hunting in an area that’s now under water (in the Irish Sea). An ice-melt, which caused shifts in huge sheets of ice (taking rocks, mud and debris with it), is then thought to have moved the flint flakes (and pretty much everything else) until it settled in the place it was found. Again, then, we can’t really say for certain that people were living in Ireland at this time.
J. P. Mallory, The Origins of the Irish (2015), 39-40; 70; Peter Harbison, Pre-Christian Ireland: From the First Settlers to the Early Celts (1988), 17.
2 J. P. Mallory’s The Origins of the Irish (2015) really covers the basics of everything you need to know here and it should be widely available at a reasonable price.
3 Michael J. O’Kelly, Newgrange: Archaeology, Art and Legend (1982), 124-125.
4 Michael J. O’Kelly, Newgrange: Archaeology, Art and Legend (1982), 74.
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