History of Ireland in 100 Objects

O'Toole Fintan

Description

This book takes 100 objects and explores their significance in shaping Ireland. Photographs are accompanied by a concise and insightful story that shows the social, political and artistic vitality of each object. Beginning with Mesolithic Ireland and ending in 2005, ornamental treasures such as the Book of Kells, the magnificent 8th century Ardagh Chalice and a chair by modernist furniture designer Eileen Gray are given equal importance as pieces such as the bloodstained shirt of Irish revolutionary James Connolly, a 1950s washing machine and the letters from the Anglo Irish Bank sign which were dismantled in 2011. The concept for this book came from a series in the Irish Times by columnist, writer and literary editor Fintan O'Toole, who also writes the robust introduction to the book.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Ireland
• Stephen Ireland
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Royal Irish Academy
• Date de parution: 04 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908996190
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Table of Contents
Cover
Contents
Prelims
Introduction
1. Mesolithic fish trap, c. 5000 B.C
2. Ceremonial axehead, 3600 B.C
3. Neolithic bowl, c. 3500 B.C
4. Flint macehead, 3300–2800 B.C
5. Neolithic bag, 3800–2500 B.C
6. Basket earrings, c.2300 B.C
7. Pair of gold discs, 2200–2000 B.C
8. Coggalbeg gold hoard, 2300–2000 B.C
9. Bronze Age funerary pots, 1900–1300 B.C
10. Tara torcs, c.1200 B.C
11. Mooghaun hoard, c.800 B.C
12. Gleninsheen gold gorget, c.800–700 B.C
13. Castlederg bronze cauldron, 700–600 B.C
14. Iron spearhead, 800–675 B.C
15. Broighter boat, c.100 B.C
16. Armlet, Old-croghan Man, 362–175 B.C
17. Loughnashade trumpet, c.100 B.C
18. Keshcarrigan bowl, early first century AD
19. Corleck head, first or second century AD
20. Petrie ‘Crown’, second century AD
21. Cunorix stone , AD 460–75
22. St. Patrick’s confessio, c. AD 460–90
23. Mullaghmast stone, AD 500–600
24. St Patrick’s bell, c. seventh century
25. Springmount wax tablets, late-sixteenth century
26. Ballinderry brooch, c. AD 600
27. Donore handle, 700–720
28. Book of Kells, c.800
29. ‘Tara’ brooch, eighth century
30. Ardagh Chalice, eighth century
31. Derrynaflan Paten, late-eighth/early-ninth century
32. Moylough belt shrine, eighth/ninth century
33. Rinnagan Crucifixion Plaque, eighth/ninth century
35. Oseberg Ship, c.815
36. Ballinderry Sword, mid-ninth century
37. Decorated lead weights, c.900
38. Roscrea Brooch, late-ninth century
39. Slave chain, late-ninth or early-tenth century
40. Silver cone, mid-tenth century
41. Carved crook, early-eleventh century
42. Breac maodhóg, late-eleventh century
43. Clonmacnoise crozier, eleventh century
44. Cross of Cong, early-twelfth century
45. ‘Strongbow’s tomb’, twelfth century
46. Laudabiliter papal bull, 1155
47. Figure of a horseman, thirteenth century
48. Domhnach Airgid, c.1350
49. Waterford charter roll, 1215–1373
50. Two coins, 1280s and 1460
51. Processional cross, 1479
52. Magi cope, c.1470
53. De Burgo–O’Malley chalice, 1494
54. Kavanagh charter horn, twelfth and fifteenth centuries
55. Gallowglass gravestone, fifteenth or sixteenth century
56. Book of Common Prayer, 1551
57. Salamander pendant, c.1588
58. Morion, late-sixteenth century
59. Leac na RÍogh, tenth–fifteenth century
60. Wassail bowl, late-sixteenth century
61. Deposition on atrocities, 1641
62. O’Queely chalice, 1640
63. Fleetwood cabinet, c.1652
64. Books of survey and distribution, mid-seventeenth century
65. King William’s gauntlets, c.1690
66. Crucifixion stone, 1740
67. Conestoga wagon, eighteenth century
68. Wood’s halfpence, 1722
69. Dillon regimental flag, 1745
70. Rococo silver candlestick, c.1745
71. Engraving of linen-makers, 1782
72. Cotton panel showing volunteer review, 1783
73. Pike, 1798
74. Act of Union Blacklist, early-nineteenth century
75. Penrose glass decanter, late-eighteenth century
76. Robert Emmet’s ring, 1790s
77. Wicker cradle,nineteenth-twentieth centuries
78. Daniel O’Connell’s ‘chariot’, 1844
79. Stokes ‘tapestry’, 1833–53
80. ‘Captain Rock’ threatening letter, 1842
81. Empty cooking pot, nineteenth century
82. Emigrant’s teapot, late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century
83. William Smith O’Brien gold cup, 1854
84. Parnell silver casket, 1884
85. Carlow Cathedral pulpit, 1899
86. Youghal Lace collar, 1906
87. GAA medal, 1887
88. Reclining Buddha, late-nineteenth century
89. Titanic launch ticket, 1911
90. Lamp from River Clyde, 1915
91. James Connolly’s shirt, 1916
92. Rejected coin design, 1927
93. Boyne corracle, 1928
94. Eileen Gray chair, 1926
95. Emigrant’s suitcase, 1950s
96. Washing machine, 1950s
97. Bloody Sunday handkerchief, 1972
98. Intel microprocessor, 1994
99. Anglo Irish Bank sign, 2000–2011
100. Decommissioned AK47, 2005
Acknowledgements
Picture Credits
Suggested Reading
Map
Where to find the Objects
Copyright
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Introduction
Fintan O’Toole

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work…is lacking in one element: its presencem in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

I
T he story of human beings on the island of Ireland is very short. The earliest evidence of people living here goes back only to c . 8000 BC, to the era known as the Mesolithic or middle stone age. This may seem like a long time, but not when we remember that there may have been people living in southern Britain over a quarter of a million years ago. Early humans, in their gradual expansion out of Africa, moved vast distances across Asia and through the full length of America, but there are no traces of them having made it to Ireland. If any of them did come here as hunters, they would certainly have retreated by around 23,000 years ago, when expanding glaciers and intense cold made north-western Europe inhospitable. When people began to push northwards again around 15,000 years ago, no one seems to have settled in Ireland. Again, even if they did, they would almost certainly have been pushed out by another long period of severe cold around 11000 BC, which killed off many of the animals on which they might have lived, such as the giant Irish elk. This left Ireland with a relatively poor range of large mammals. The earliest Irish settlers, at sites such as Mount Sandel in Co. Derry and Lough Boora in Co. Offaly, seem to have depended heavily on wild boar and fish for their non-plant foods. Ireland was not an easy place in which to survive.
These conditions had two effects. One is that Irish culture is quite a recent and concentrated phenomenon. Most of it still exists, of course, in the long obscurity of pre history. It is not, however, a vast, panoramic epic— it can be imagined as a single story. The other effect is that, from the beginning, those who settled in Ireland had to adapt to conditions that were not typical of southern or western Europe. The food and the environment were, by the European standards of the time, unusual. As archaeologist J.P. Mallory puts it ‘the earliest occupants of Ireland were not merely an extension of their ancestral population, but one that was required to adapt to a very different environment and develop uniquely Irish strategies to survive’.
We do not really know where the first people to settle in Ireland came from. One possibility is an area between north Wales and the Solway Firth on the west coast of Britain that was being gradually inundated by rising sea levels and that is now, indeed, under the Irish Sea. What does seem clear is that, for a very long time, the number of people on the island was very small. For the first 40 per cent of the whole period in which Ireland has been occupied, the total population was probably of the order of 3,000 people. This gives us a third significant aspect of the emerging story of Ireland: it was small. We have, then, three characteristics present from the beginning of Irish culture: concentrated in time, shaped by distinctive conditions and small in scale.
This is not to suggest that Ireland was a place apart, or that its culture was not transformed from time to time by incoming people and new developments. Easily the biggest of such developments was the arrival of farming around 4000 BC. We know that this cannot have been simply a spontaneous discovery by the people who already inhabited the island. Ireland did not have wild cereals or wild cattle, sheep or goats that could be domesticated—they had to come from somewhere else. New kinds of houses and pottery and the emergence of great passage tombs came with the development of farming, making it likely that the first farmers arrived from elsewhere—most probably Britain or (less likely) north-western France.
Other big changes tended to happen in the same way. The emergence of metal-working (around 2500 BC) was probably the result of some inward migration of so-called Beaker people from Britain and continental Europe. The development of an elite warrior culture about a thousand years later seems to be associated with the presence of at least some foreigners from as far away as central Europe, and is certainly linked to intense contacts with Britain and the continent. (Ironically, one of the ‘invasions’ for which there is no evidence at all is that most famously associated with Ireland —the supposed arrival of the Celts.) Contacts such as these are probably also at the root of the development of the early forms of language that emerged in Ireland, which may have evolved as a lingua franca for Atlantic Europe.
Other huge changes also came from outside. Christianity brought a new belief system, literacy, the learning of the Graeco-Roman and Jewish worlds and entry into a ‘universal’ culture. The Vikings brought urban settlements and money. The Anglo-Normans brought feudalism. The English brought cities, a new language, printing, new systems of administration and land management and the end of clan power. The European Union enabled rapid urbanisation and ‘modernity’. Corporations based in the United States brought economic globalisation and technological transformation.
Yet, these waves of change always washed up on the same shores. Even the most profound influences are continually adapted to what is there already. There is a continuity of population—surveys of Ireland’s genetic profile fail to find any significant evidence of large-scale inward migrations after those of the early farmers. Moreover, there is also a cultural continuity. It is not static, not a fixed inheritance of images and ideas that is passed on from time immemorial. It is, rather, a way of using the old to make sense of the new. From very early on, the people living in Ireland make objects that suit themselves and their own conditions: even the very early stone tools found in Ireland are distinctive. Throughout Irish history, this