Something I’ve noticed in my short academic career is the way that certain fields can become rather insular, and coming from a bit of an interdisciplinary background I’ve seen this as a bit of a problem: back when I was doing my undergrad, I majored in Medieval Studies -- a bit of a catch-all term that included literature, religion, history, and (to a much smaller extent at my university) archaeology. I see interdisciplinary approaches rather necessary to be able to understand the past.
Despite archaeology being the smallest part of Medieval Studies at my university, it is what really spoke to me, because it felt so much more concrete, and when I continued on into my Masters I jumped into the discipline. To quote the esteemed archaeologist Indiana Jones “archaeology is the search for facts”, and often those facts seemed more real: in a course with a more traditional Celtic Studies focus I might read the Táin Bó Cúailnge (or any other saga) and engage with the papers on papers about whether the story as it survives to us reflects the late medieval world the manuscript is from, the early medieval world the language might come from, or the time period the story is supposed to be set in? How much trust should we put on the details in the story? Layers and layers of uncertainty that (to an extent) aren’t present in archaeology. Are the Cork Horns real? Yes, I have personally held them in my hands. Was there a medieval church at Tibberaughny? I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Archaeology is concrete and tactile in a way that other ways of studying the past often aren’t.
While that is a rather simplistic way of understanding archaeology, I do maintain that the lack of an appreciation for the concrete ways the past survives to us is a major stumbling block to giving an accurate picture of the past. A while ago, I stumbled upon this blog post which discusses the writings of Saint Patrick from a literary/historical lens, and it questions how seriously we should take St. Patrick’s comments that the pagan Irish used idols; the conclusion the author comes to is that this is probably a Biblical reference and not necessarily reflective of the pre-Christian past in Ireland. And yes, if we treat the Confessio as an isolated literary text and understand the imagery and rhetorical techniques St. Patrick uses then that would be a solid conclusion. However, and I feel this is a very important point, it is also demonstrably wrong, and there is no amount of literary analysis that can convince me otherwise, because the idols that St. Patrick mentions do exist and you can go out and see them yourself: there’s the Boa Island Janus, the Tandragee Idol, the Corleck Head, the Ralaghan Idol, and others. While one could say that these aren’t 100% proof of idol worship -- they could have served non-religious functions (not every statue is an idol, after all) and maybe Patrick misunderstood how the Irish used and interpreted the figures -- but the fact that the idols being referenced are physically there, and I can personally go and see them, is more than a small hurdle to the conclusion that the idols aren’t real, and I think this case really goes to show why I think a historical approach to the past without archaeology can very easily become misguided.
And as much as I love archaeology, I don’t think archaeology devoid of history and literature is necessarily true. I remember when I first started grad school, the head of the department told a story (I can’t speak to how true it is) about the limits of archaeology going roughly like this: a prominent archaeologist was giving a lecture about Stonehenge, where he went on in great detail about every little minutiae of the monument, and at the end when he was accepting questions someone from the audience asked what the people who built Stonehenge believed and he responds with “I have no idea, they didn’t write anything down.” And I think there’s a lot of truth to that answer, no amount of archaeological data can really tell us this. There’s a popular theory that the early prehistoric peoples of Ireland engaged in sun worship because so many monuments that seem to be religious have solar alignments, such as the entrance to the Newgrange Passage Tomb facing the rising sun on the Winter Solstice.
I’m not sure if it's worth trusting in that line of thinking, and let me give a good case study around why. So a long time after the construction of Newgrange and similar monuments, about 1,500 years ago, a new style of religious buildings appeared in Ireland, all aligned with the rising sun, and a new style of burial appeared at the same time with the same alignment. Using the same logic as before, we might say that about 1,500 years ago, a new pagan revolution based around sun worship appeared in Ireland, but I imagine many of you are thinking “Hold on, 1,500 years ago is about when Christianity arrived in Ireland, was there also a pagan movement at the same time?”, and actually the new religion is Christianity -- ancient and medieval Christian churches would point towards Jerusalem awaiting the return of Christ, and the belief in the resurrection of the body (as stated in the Apostle’s Creed) meant that graves had the same alignment so the dead can also look towards Jerusalem during the Second Coming. So it’s actually a coincidence that in north-western Europe Jerusalem and the rising sun are in roughly the same direction (ancient churches built outside of north-western Europe still face Jerusalem and turn their backs on the sunrise), but if we didn’t have access to Christian writings it would be nearly impossible to accurately get an understanding of why churches were built the way they were, and it's just as possible that we’re missing a huge part of prehistoric Irish theology that could give a better religious justification for why ancient burial grounds and ceremonial sites happen to look like they’re based around the sun -- it doesn’t even have to be religious, if you’re building a large indoor space without any windows (like Newgrange) then putting the entrance facing the sun means you don’t need to buy as many lamps. Archaeology without history isn’t all that great at understanding the past either, it can’t tell us why people did what they did, or what they thought and felt.
With all that, I would say neither history, literature, or archaeology can give a particularly good picture of the past. But despite that, they can really compliment each other. The writings of St. Patrick might not give a great understanding of pre-Christian Ireland since it lacks concrete, unbiased facts, and the archaeology is full of facts that tell us nothing about the subjective experiences and beliefs of people, but by piecing them together it is possible to start to get an understanding of the past. I’m not actually going to be doing that here, but in theory it is possible.
And so to get to the point (if any of my long ramblings can be said to have a point), this is why I think that we can only really get an understanding of the past through an interdisciplinary approach, we need both the external, tangible proof revealed by archaeology and the internal, intangible personal experiences revealed by history and literature to be able to get a reliable picture of the past. So as students of the Celtic past, incorporating both of these fields gives us the best chance to be able to understand our subject, and it is important as academics we try our best to view our studies from both approaches rather than the often dangerous trap of becoming insular in our chosen specialty.
Colin McGarry
UCC (recent graduate)
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