why the Harvard Mission came to Ireland and the political ideology underpinning its archaeological work was dominated by eugenic and racialist concerns.3 This work fitted easily with Irish nationalist aspirations for a proven scientific Celtic identity. The academic framework which was used for interpretative purposes and the academic backgrounds of the protagonists helps to explain how and why particular results were obtained about the Celtic race. Macalister believed that the answer to his question on the reasons for Harvard concerning itself with a study of the Irish was ‘the fact that Ireland belongs to the world’. He wrote that:
Here, at the remote end of Europe, but little disturbed by the stream of Time which tore the rest of the Continent to pieces over and over again, Ireland went on in her own old way, and kept alive primeval cultures, arts, beliefs, which were elsewhere submerged. Only in Ireland can we get down to the foundations upon which European civilisation is based; and as the whole world is interested in European civilisation, the whole world calls upon Ireland to solve problems that can be solved nowhere else.4
Macalister was probably referring in an oblique way to the problematic issues associated with the mixing of races, which were being debated around the world in the 1920s and 1930s. Themes of cultural and racial purity were expressed through the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology and were an essential part of a cultural vision reflecting the ‘underlying affinity between anthropology and modernism’.5
The Harvard Archaeological Mission was organised and managed by Earnest A. Hooton and was under the direction of an executive committee of the Division of Anthropology of Harvard University. The members of this committee included Hooton, Alfred Marston Tozzer and Roland Burrage Dixon. Tozzer served as Director of the International School of American Archaeology in Mexico from 1914 and was appointed chair of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard in 1921. He also became a faculty member of the Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930. In 1946, he was appointed John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology at Harvard.6 Roland Burrage Dixon formed ‘an integral part of the archaeological heritage of the Peabody Museum’ at Harvard.7 He made significant contributions and publications in the fields of archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology and sociocultural anthropology, eventually becoming a professor of anthropology at Harvard in 1916.8 He also had an interest in folklore and served as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Harvard Folk-Lore Club (founded 1894).9 Among Dixon’s important books was The Racial History of Man, published in New York in 1923.
One of the reasons that Ireland was selected for a co-operative study by social and biological scientists from the Division of Anthropology of Harvard University was that it was ‘politically new but culturally old’ and that it was ‘the country of origin of more than one-fifth of the population of the United States’. The Harvard team proposed to investigate the social, political, economic and industrial institutions in Ireland and to examine the Irish people. Their physical characteristics would be measured to determine their ‘racial affinities’.10 Excavations would be carried out in an effort to connect prehistoric cultures with early historic and modern Irish civilisation. The relationship of social and material culture to race and environment would be analysed.
The Harvard Mission and Eugenics
Another reason, cited by Hooton, for choosing Ireland for the Harvard survey was because the Celtic language was ‘an archaic Aryan language’.11 For an emerging European, independent nation-state prior to the Second World War, being identified as a white European Celt (possibly an offshoot of the Aryan race) was economically and culturally advantageous. Cultural imperialism was also associated with biological determinism during this period.
Hooton was a member of the American Eugenics Society (AES) and served as Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Anthropometry. The AES was founded a year after the Second International Conference on Eugenics which was held in New York in 1921. Among the founders were the ‘premier racial theorist’ Madison Grant, Vice-President of the Immigration Restriction League and author of The Passing of the Great Race: Or the Racial Basis of European History published in New York in 1918; and the ‘doyen of American archaeology’, Henry Fairfield Osborn, who penned the preface to Grant’s book. The AES became the ‘key advocacy and propaganda wing of the Eugenics movement’.12 The advisory council of this society included William Welch, the Rockefeller Foundation’s medical director.13 The Rockefeller Foundation funded medical research in Ireland and in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. It also funded various anthropological surveys, including the work of the Harvard Mission to Ireland. Practical social problems relating to race and immigration influenced the focus of American anthropology in the 1920s and this was reflected in the interest of the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council in such projects.14 In the 1930s biological determinism in anthropology was hotly debated in academic circles. This followed the Social Darwinian ideas and eugenic discourse on race prevalent at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century in America and Europe. In the nineteenth century, inferiority based on racial classification was used to justify colonialism, slavery and dispossession. A similar classification through the medium of physical anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s could be used to justify harsh immigration laws in the United States, discrimination and segregation laws.
One of the aims of the American eugenics movement was to ‘create an American eugenic presence throughout the world’. To this end a ‘network of eugenic investigators’ was installed in Belgium, Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Holland, Poland, Germany and the Irish Free State. Potential immigrants to the United States were ‘eugenically inspected’.15 This ideology drove the Harvard Mission to Ireland. Hooton stated that the purpose of the physical anthropological work conducted in Ireland, which involved measuring and observing the bodily features of thousands of Irish men and women, was ‘to determine their racial affinities and their constitutional proclivities’.16 At that time it was believed that proclivities for drunkenness, criminality, laziness or other socially deviant behaviour could be ascertained through the examination of physical attributes. Equally, more positive attributes of those deemed to be superior races could be ascertained.
Edwin Black claims in his book War Against the Weak Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, that the AES supported Germany’s eugenic programme.17 However, Hooton was staunchly anti-Nazi in his writings in the late 1930s.18 Hooton, it seems, could not see the inherent paradoxes in his own beliefs and wrote of his disapproval of Nazi distortion of anthropological ideas:
There is a rapidly growing aspect of Physical Anthropology which is nothing less than a malignancy. Unless it is excised, it will destroy the science. I refer to the perversion of racial studies, and of the investigation of human heredity to political uses and to class advantage. Man has long sought to excuse his disregard of others’ rights by alleging certain biological differences which determine the superiority of his own race or nationality and the inferiority of others. The allegation of racial superiority or inferiority previously dismissed as a mere sophistry now assumes the nature of a valid reason for wholesale acts of injustice.19
Hooton’s apparently contradictory views on race and eugenics were commonplace at that time. He was appalled at the ‘national sadism and sheer suicidal lunacy as impels the present German government to destroy that minority element which has been responsible for some of its most brilliant cultural achievements’.20 Christopher Hale described Hooton as ‘a fervent eugenicist’ and a ‘disciple of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’ who had ‘disliked blacks and Jews’.21 Hooton was disciplined by the President of Harvard for his ‘inhuman’ teachings.22 However, despite being a eugenicist who advocated better breeding for the human race and the removal of those deemed unfit for human society such as the disabled, the insane, the criminal and the economically unviable, Hooton was not overtly racist in the sense that he believed that the unfit from all races, including the white race, should be removed from society. He proposed the establishing of ‘an America national breeding bureau that would determine who could reproduce with whom’.23 It was no coincidence, however, that in America, those who fitted many eugenic categories also fitted the category of poor immigrants including ‘Negroid’, Italian, Mexican and poor rural Americans. Indeed Black’s definition of the eugenic movement was ‘It was a movement against non-Nordics regardless of their skin color, language or national origin’.24 Germany’s eugenic programme was getting a