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Ireland's ancient monuments are majestic...
..spiritual.
Sacred sites that connect us to our earliest ancestors.
Well, at least that's what I was always told.
RECORD SCRATCH
Our small island is full of mysterious sites like this one.
We think of them as the sacred places,
and I suppose they are.
But the story I'm about to discover is not exactly sacred.
No, it's sacrilegious, if anything.
In the 1930s, just a few generations ago,
the secrets found in places like this were at the centre
of an epic quest.
Not a quest for gold or treasure,
but to explain the very origins of the earliest people in Ireland.
A quest, no less,
to find out who we are and where we came from.
It was a time when intrepid explorers were digging for treasure
around the world.
For the next big find,
all eyes were on Ireland.
But partition was barely ten years old.
Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State were busy forging
new identities.
In both states, a feverish search began.
One place to look was the ancient past.
And it all kicked off here in the hallowed landscape
of County Sligo.
In 1931, an American professor from Harvard University,
he inspected these monuments,
wondering if Ireland would be the place
for his next big dig.
Needless to say, he was hooked.
And why wouldn't he be?
This moment triggered an archaeological frenzy.
Both north and south of the border,
excavation teams raced to unearth evidence of the
first Irish men and women.
Unearthing THIS story will take me to some unexpected places.
This is literally the end of the world.
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if we actually find some
ancient Celts up here.
I'll experience some strange science...
Oh, she's only reading the instructions now.
..uncover dark history...
..and get a flavour of the footloose world of early Irish archaeology.
I mean, nowadays, we'd be thinking serious health and safety headache!
My own quest is to uncover what they found
and what it says about us...
..and to figure out why this story has been forgotten
for so long.
The one thing I was always sure about growing up
was my Irish identity.
I was steeped in our myths and legends as a child, and enthralled
by our unique sports and music, our native tongue,
and not least my Celtic heritage.
So when I stumbled upon this story, I was fascinated, but also nervous.
I mean, I hope I haven't been deluding myself all these years
about who we actually are.
My own delusions aside,
there's one thing you need to understand
about this story.
In the 1930s, our mysterious megaliths
were even more mystical than today.
North and south,
many of these monuments were simply called Celtic -
because no-one really knew who built them.
But with the new border,
these ancient sites became, well, political.
In the south, the idea of a Celtic origin
was central to Irish identity.
But in Northern Ireland,
some were questioning these Celtic roots.
This is tricky history,
so I'm hoping Professor Diarmaid Ferriter
can explain how Northern Ireland was forging its own path.
This is an illustration of their own path.
A very iconic image.
Edward Carson outside the Stormont parliament.
They were an announcement that Northern Ireland had arrived.
The statue of Carson is actually unveiled in 1933,
when he's still alive,
and he is the godfather of modern Ulster Unionism.
And the unveiling of the statue, of course, was a reminder
that this is where it started.
FILM: ..through their ancestors' loyalty to William of Orange,
King of England.
And it is about loyalty to Empire, loyalty to Crown.
Now, as in olden days,
Orangemen turn out in full regalia...
South of the border, there was a very different message,
from a newly elected leader - Eamon de Valera.
The conquering hero arrives. Mr Eamon de Valera.
Full disclosure - Eamon de Valera was a revered figure in my house.
My father was a member of his party, Fianna Fail.
They even met, along with my mother, aunt and granny.
As you can see, it was a big deal.
So I need a more objective view.
The present government of the Irish Free State has been elected...
It really heralds the dawn of a new political age in Ireland.
De Valera, his new Fianna Fail party have taken power in 1932.
This programme aims at restoring
the unity of this island and creating
an independent Ireland living its own cultural,
economic and national life.
What we're seeing here is also about De Valera
setting out his stall.
"I am going to make Ireland self-sufficient."
It's about political self-sufficiency,
economic self-sufficiency, cultural self-sufficiency.
"We are embarking on a mission to make this a truly Irish Ireland."
And, in a sense, like, create an origin myth as well,
harking back to a glorious Celtic past.
There's a deep, deep reverence for the past, for Irish antiquity,
for stressing we are unique,
what we have brought to the world.
And there really are two state building projects going on
on the one small island,
and they're drawing on particular traditions to reinforce that state.
..trace their ancestry to this little island
with its long and tragic history.
So one of the interesting questions was whether
the newly created border, the physical border,
from 1920 and 1921 actually reflected
much deeper, more layered and deep-rooted differences.
And that was where the research of the 1930s was going
to throw very interesting findings and conclusions.
The archaeological world was fascinated by Ireland,
drawn to the promise of discovering the origins
of an ancient Celtic race.
In 1932, an American archaeologist - from Harvard, no less -
brought his team to the country, intent on digging up Celtic sites.
They called it the Harvard Mission to Ireland,
and their command HQ was here in Dublin.
Dr Mairead Carew is one of the few people who knows
this forgotten story inside out.
It seems to me that the whole archaeology field at that time
in Europe was a bit of a macho pursuit.
I mean, it reminds me of Raiders Of The Lost Ark or something. Yeah.
You know, these guys scrambling all over Europe, trying to find
something that would explain our origins.
At the time, Ireland was perceived as having that pure Celtic heritage.
There was loads of archaeological sites, so there was great potential.
Right.
VOICEOVER: Sounds like the perfect place to excavate.
What were they trying to prove about our origins?
They wanted to find out really who the Celts were,
where they had come from, and who their descendants were
in the modern population.
Ah, the Celts - my tribe, my ancient ancestors.
RECORD SCRATCH
They believed that a lot of the beautiful objects
that they had were made by the Celts.
That there was an ancient civilisation pre-Norman Invasion
that we were descended from,
and this suited the Irish Free State at the time,
to strike a distance between Ireland and Britain.
They were looking for connections almost anywhere except Britain.
They didn't want to be connected to Britain on any level.
Don't worry, this isn't another story about England and Ireland.
It's about Ireland and the world in the 1930s.
And in the south,
that story had a central character -
an Austrian archaeologist named Adolf Mahr,
who came to work here at the museum in 1927.
He was an expert in Celtic archaeology.
A few years later, then he was promoted to the position
of Director of the National Museum.
He also pretty much hand-picked the sites for the Harvard Mission.
Now, I've been looking into this Adolf Mahr.
As an archaeologist,
he'd worked on some of the most important Celtic digs in Europe.
In 1927 - the same year Bewley's opened here on Grafton Street -
the 40-year-old Mahr saw an advert in an Austrian newspaper
for the job here in Dublin.
Now, the awkward thing about Adolf Mahr
is that he'd become a Nazi - card carrying and bona fide.
In fact, he was the most prominent Nazi in all of Ireland.
But in 1927, he was just an archaeologist with a single passion,
an obsession, really, for all things Celtic.
Adolf Mahr's Celtic-facing history
suited the Irish Free State just fine.
But across the border in Northern Ireland, a different view
of history was emerging.
I grew up in County Monaghan, along the border,
so that makes me an Ulsterman.
Oh, yes.
And even though you mightn't recognise the border
as a geographical factor,
politically it definitely shapes you to some extent.
When people hear you're from Monaghan, from Ulster,
they assign you certain characteristics.
They think of you as maybe dour or deadpan or reserved.
Watchful is the word I prefer.
So it's fairly clear...
..where you grew up shapes your identity,
whether you like it or not.
So technically I'm an Ulsterman, and now I'm headed to Belfast.
In the wake of partition, Northern Ireland began
to bolster its cultural institutions.
In 1929, the Ulster Museum opened,
and the state also brought in some outside expertise.
While Adolf Mahr was quickly becoming the most important
archaeologist in the Irish Free State,
another blow-in was settling into a new life here in Belfast,
and he was to become the most important archaeologist
north of the border, and a rival to Herr Mahr.
So let's hear it for Welshman Emyr Estyn Evans,
a famous professor at Queen's University, Belfast.
All through Ireland,
you have the remains of circular enclosures
called raths or fairy forts.
And round the corner from the Ulster Museum is his home.
Alun. Ardal. Hello.
Luckily, his son Alun still lives here.
I've come to have a good nose through the old family archive.
And here...
For your interest. Thank you.
Photographs from digs in the 1930s.
Ah, lovely.
Fast forward holiday snaps.
Rather fetching old-fashioned swimming costumes.
According to my mother, he was very good looking,
and I'm sure she was right.
Digging at Lyles Hill,
which my father was excavating,
1937, '38.
And this is Derry. Mm-hm.
And here we're here at Ach na Skia,
so obviously they were camping.
My mother as a young woman,
my father as a young man.
A Geographical Association visit, 1933.
And here we have Goward.
This is in May 1932.
Was that the first time he'd dug - in 1930?
That's the first dig. Yes. Yeah.
That took them six days.
So it was a bit of a smash and grab, by the sound of it. Yeah, yeah.
But...
So, Alun, how did your father end up in Belfast?
He'd finished his basic degree in Aberystwyth,
which was in anthropology and geography,
and a job came up.
He was interviewed on his 23rd birthday
to set up a geography department at Queen's,
and was given the post.
He became interested in archaeology
and basically started archaeology
or revived archaeology in the north of Ireland.
It must have been quite an exciting time, I imagine,
in Belfast - a relatively new state.
I guess people like your father got a free run of things, really.
Yeah, I think that is true.
It started off very much on an amateur basis.
The first dig at Goward, his main helper was my mother,
they'd been married a year,
and some more dedicated amateurs.
That was the start of it.
Estyn Evans wanted to trace Ulster's early settlers by studying
the ancient megalithic court tombs dotted around the landscape.
And he had this particular interest in these court graves
or court tombs. Mm-hm.
What was his fascination there?
It was really an intellectual challenge to decide
what was their source.
Did they come across from the east, across Scotland,
from northern Europe?
They were seen to have a predominantly
northern distribution, and they were interested in studying and finding
out all they could about them.
And they... It probably took an outsider to do that.
Yeah, I think it did.
I believe it took an outsider to really be interested
in the megalithic structures.
He seemed to discover that the north-east of Ireland
had a special character that was there long, long before partition.
A character all of its own.
Yeah. I mean, he did like the north of this island.
But it must have been incredibly exciting, like, you know,
stumbling upon a ruin that was neglected.
Or wasn't even considered to be a ruin.
It was just a pile of stones in a field.
Probably nobody even knew it was there.
And he comes across these sites and he starts digging
with his friends and his wife,
and he finds evidence of prehistoric civilisation.
The thing that drove him was just an insatiable intellectual curiosity
to try and understand the past.
I think I need to see these piles of stone for myself.
So I'm headed to County Down,
to the little town land of Goward.
This was the location of Evans' very first dig.
It would put Northern Ireland firmly on the archaeological map.
But for me, the Goward court tomb,
well, it's proving a bit difficult to find.
So we take a left... Right here.
Where do we go? Left. Sorry.
Somewhere else?
Wrong way. Sorry. What?
This way.
Somewhere around here in 1932,
Estyn Evans broke ground on his first big dig,
here in the foothills of the Mourne Mountains.
I honestly don't think anyone has been here since.
This is literally the end of the world.
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if we actually find
some ancient Celts up here.
Now, Estyn Evans' digs may look small and amateurish.
Here at Goward, he had what he described as meagre funding
from the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society.
Big spenders.
But he made do, and did valuable work with what he had.
So Alun gave me this photograph -
it's his father and mother standing,
I think, exactly here.
These stones once formed what's now called a court tomb.
It's where Neolithic people interred their dead
around 5,000 years ago.
Like myself, Estyn Evans was fascinated by them.
This is a copy of the dig report.
It's just a few pages describing the excavation.
Evans, he called this tomb
a horned cairn because the rocks are laid out like devil's horns.
The report also lists what Evans found -
some pottery, several quartzite pebbles,
a good deal of charcoal, an unworked burnt flint.
Hmm.
Pebbles and burnt flint.
Not exactly Tutankhamun's tomb.
But interesting nonetheless.
It may sound underwhelming,
but Estyn's dig here at Goward
was the first scientific excavation on a court tomb ever.
It was important because it actually tried to map out the site
and compare it to others.
But for Estyn, it also marked the beginning of a grand theory -
that these Ulster megaliths were built by people
with roots in Britain.
Most likely Scotland.
A few weeks after Estyn Evans left Goward,
the Harvard Mission arrived in Ireland,
led by the esteemed Hugh O'Neill Hencken -
an American professor with both Irish and German roots.
His first dig was in Ballinderry Bog,
in County Westmeath.
The excavation was anything but meagre.
This is the dig report for Ballinderry.
It's long - 80 pages long.
Don't worry, I'm not going to read the whole thing.
But at the start, there's a special credit.
"The expedition excavates in Ireland in cooperation
"with and under the auspices of the National Museum of Ireland,
"which has very kindly granted every facility in assistance,
"both in excavation and museum study,
"through the kindness of the director, Dr Adolf Mahr.
"Dr Mahr is also called upon officially
"to inspect the excavations."
Sounds like Dr Mahr is a bit of a control freak.
The dig at Ballinderry was on what's called a crannog -
man-made islands thought at the time to be Celtic.
It was, for one thing, an ancient Irish custom
to live on lake islands
or crannogs or lake dwellings.
Crannogs were well known here,
but I wonder what the Harvard Mission made of them.
The Americans had never come across a crannog before, I presume.
Hugh O'Neill Hencken, what he actually said was,
"I learned how to dig a crannog by digging a crannog."
It was the first scientifically excavated crannog,
and it worked.
They found 650 artefacts -
from swords to pins to ornate hanging bowls.
But the star find was a strange one -
an ancient gaming board.
What Hencken said, and others said at the time,
was it was some sort of little war game.
A bit like checkers, or battleships. Something like that.
Because as far as Hencken was concerned,
the Celts were into their games.
This gaming board lit up the international press.
One Chicago newspaper reported it as, "A carved backgammon board,
"which was used 1,000 years before Saint Patrick came along."
Then, noted dryly,
"A couple of smashed skulls were unearthed alongside.
"This would seem to point at some ancient debate over rules."
This was just ten years after Tutankhamun's tomb
had been opened in Egypt, kicking off a global craze for archaeology.
Ballinderry put Ireland on that map.
RECORD SCRATCH
But it almost didn't happen
because the dig was actually rejected
by the Ancient Monuments Council of Ireland.
Adolf wrote to a friend about this dig.
I'm not going to do the accent.
"As I knew the Americans would not
"abuse my confidence and were very capable diggers,
"I got so annoyed about the stupidity of my council,
"that I simply broke the law
"of which I am supposed to be the main watchdog.
"I gave them the best crannog to excavate of which I knew."
Well, as they say, it's better to ask for forgiveness
than permission.
Like Estyn Evans, Adolf Mahr was working on a grand theory.
But instead of Scotland,
he was convinced Ireland's ancestors stemmed from the Celtic tribes
of Europe, and that crannogs represented Celtic architecture.
His contention was that there was some pan-European culture.
Exactly. Like he believed that, yeah,
that there was sort of a pan-Celtic culture across Europe.
And that Ireland was the last vestiges of this. Exactly.
And that you were more likely to get evidence for your pure Celtic
race here in Ireland.
Mahr loved the idea of a grand Celtic race,
and thought the world would love it too -
especially Irish Americans, who were gaining
more and more clout in the US.
In 1932, the Yanks were busy preparing
for the Chicago World's Fair -
an event not lost on Adolf Mahr.
Usually the headlines were "ancient Celtic glory",
which Adolf Mahr was behind, because he did the press release.
It came to the Chicago World Fair.
There was an exhibition called
A Century of Progress in Irish Archaeology,
and these three objects, they were put in them...
As evidence of a great pre-Anglo Norman civilisation.
Well, what they called it was evidence of the genius
of the Celtic race.
This Chicago World Fair was
obviously a pretty important event,
and it kind of put Ireland
on the map a little bit.
The whole idea was to show Americans
who were related to the Celts by blood
what the genius of the Celtic race was. And it kind of worked.
It gave Irish-Americans particularly a lot of pride in their roots.
Absolutely. Yeah, it did.
Another depiction of ancient Ireland also landed
at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933.
Images taken by an Irish-American who'd come back to the old country.
Robert Flaherty's documentary, Man of Aran,
would kind of take the world by storm.
I remember seeing this first as a sneering student
in the 1980s, but even then, I found it quite stirring.
Robert Flaherty came from Michigan, but had an Irish father.
He was a very well established and successful film maker.
He had first visited the Aran Islands in 1931.
He spent nearly two years on Inishmore -
the largest of the Aran Islands.
He's drawn to this idea of an ancient civilisation
on the fringes of Europe.
You couldn't find a more isolated and remote community.
The timing of this was interesting.
It satisfied that need for recognition of the Irish struggle
of the Irish traditional way of life,
of the heroic self-reliance and self determination -
that we would triumph, that we would succeed against the odds.
But under the surface, not everything in Man Of Aran
was as it appeared.
What he is depicting is a way of life that has actually ceased.
For example, the most famous scene in Man Of Aran, the shark hunt,
the attempt to try and get the shark with the harpoon.
Keep your head up.
They had long stopped hunting in that way.
Too high. Take it out.
The actors who performed that role, they had to be trained
in how this used to be done.
They're hunting the shark for oil for lamps,
but electricity had already come to Inishmore.
So Flaherty is conveniently leaving out the modern world.
He's just idealising and romanticising this primitive way of life.
There is an idealisation of the primitive way of life.
The climax of Man Of Aran is a big storm through which the
Aran Islanders are rowing to get home.
As you do.
But amidst the tempest,
a prominent Austrian lay just off camera.
Adolf Mahr with Gustav, his son,
was watching it from a small steamship,
which must have been difficult,
when you realise the scale of the tempest.
Flaherty would have consulted with Adolf Mahr.
Flaherty had to get a very strong sense of the history that lay
behind what he was taking on.
Did Irish people flock to see it themselves?
When you look at the Irish premiere,
Eamon de Valera is there as head of government.
WB Yeats, Ireland's greatest living poet, Nobel laureate.
This is a big deal.
It's showcasing Irish self-sufficiency.
Adolf Mahr was also at the Dublin premiere.
What he saw was the perfect portrayal of his notion
of the ancient Irish Celt.
Estyn Evans, researching up in Belfast,
was always more precise and factual in his conclusions.
The purpose of this mound has never been explained,
and its excavation offers exciting possibilities.
I also learned the upstanding Queen's professor was not one
for romanticising the past.
In one of Estyn Evans' books, I came across a telling line.
"I am no supporter of those who, indulging in sentimental regrets
"for a Celtic twilight of doubtful authenticity,
"find in the past a golden age to which they would have us return."
Ooh!
I think it's fair to say that Evans would not have been impressed
by Mahr's fixed notion of the ancient Irish Celt.
Adolf Mahr was the undisputed champion of archaeology
in the Irish Free State.
Estyn Evans was the champion of archaeology in Northern Ireland.
But their views on Irish pre-history couldn't be more different.
So it may seem strange that in 1934,
Mahr asked Evans to excavate a court tomb for him in County Louth.
But Mahr knew Evans was the best man for the job,
and court tombs were his speciality.
The location at Aghnaskeagh, as described by Evans,
is classic rural Ireland.
Cairn A lies on the land of the late Owen Matthews,
now occupied by Mrs Gray.
But access to it was obtained through the property of Mrs Keenan.
Today, the two sites are tucked behind an old mushroom farm,
which is where American-born archaeologist Matthew Stout
is attempting to locate them for me.
One, two, three, and maybe a fourth one over there.
You had a cairn, and you had access into the cairn
through these galleries.
These galleries would have been covered and open,
so you could have accessed them generation after generation
for the burials. That's why the emphasis was on tomb -
court tomb, passage tomb.
For Evans, excavating another court tomb gave him more data as he worked
out his theories on where the megalith builders came from.
Well, the dig at Aghnaskeagh was different.
Here, he had resources -
men commandeered under a new unemployment scheme
created by Eamon de Valera.
One of the things that Estyn Evans liked about this site
was that it was circular,
and there are circular-type gallery graves in Scotland.
For Evans, this was evidence that the Neolithic people who built
this megalith were from Scotland.
Behind me, you can see the mountain, which marks the border
with Northern Ireland.
Over that mountain, in that direction,
you have Carlingford Lough.
He believed that this was the entry point for the Neolithic settlers
that came from Scotland up into the northeast of Ireland.
In contrast, he thought that Neolithic settlers in the south
came up the River Boyne.
His idea was that the boundary stretched back to prehistoric times.
That was mirrored in the fact
that you had one type of prehistoric culture in the north,
which was people who built court tombs,
and the other type of prehistoric culture in the south
were the people who built passage tombs.
Estyn Evans saw court tombs as distributed coast-to-coast
across the whole northern half of the island.
But in Matthew Stout's opinion,
how others used his theories
was beyond Evans' control.
Now, Evans was a man of fierce integrity, and there's no question
that he would have altered his opinions to suit the needs
of the six-county government.
But it just so happened that the theories that he genuinely held
suited the idea that the six counties of Ireland were always
separate from the rest of Ireland.
However, Evans was also concerned about the direction archaeology
was taking in the Irish Free State.
He was very conscious of the work that was being done
in the Free State to focus all the attention on the Celtic period.
He rejected the arguments of racial purity.
He wasn't going to get involved in the whole idea of the Celts
or the master races or anything like that.
But that meant he never got involved in the theories
that maybe Adolf Mahr might have been interested in pursuing
when he brought the Harvard team over.
Racial purity?
Hmm.
Just what was Adolf Mahr and the Harvard Mission
getting up to on this island?
It doesn't sound much like archaeology.
Here in Trinity College Dublin's old anatomy building,
I have a feeling I'm about to find out.
Hello. How are you, Ardal?
Nice to see you.
What is going on here?
Well, these are some instruments - craniometers, or callipers -
and we have a small collection from 1891 when the anthropometric
laboratory was set up.
The Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory
opened in the last decade of the 19th century
to scientifically study the Irish race,
whatever that means.
Like, what is anthropometry?
It is basically skull measuring and body measuring.
Colour of your eye, your hair colour,
cranial length, cranial breadth,
cranial height,
face length, face breadth,
height, standing weight.
But to what end?
To what end...
..is to find out the variations in people.
By the 1930s, when the Harvard mission arrived,
anthropometry was no longer an emerging theory.
It was seen as established science.
And so, fast forward a few decades, and then the Harvard Mission came
over and they were ostensibly archaeologists.
But what were they up to?
Did they kind of introduce a bit of this anthropometry as well?
Yeah. So there was three strands to the Harvard Mission,
and this was the physical anthropology strand.
And at the top of that strand is Earnest Hooton,
who's a Harvard anthropologist. He sets up a research team.
There's two people in it -
Helen Dawson and Clarence Wesley Dupertuis.
They come over in 1934 and 1936,
and what they arrive to do is sample,
as best they could, the entire population of Ireland.
The Harvard Mission's Anthropometric Survey took place in every county
in the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland.
It meant quite a lot of travelling.
Clarence Dupertuis covered 45,000 miles by car, and Helen Dawson,
she travels the countryside by bike and she surveys 1,800 females.
Altogether surveyed almost 12,000 people.
Not sure how I'd convince someone to take part
in a skull-measuring survey.
His method is to find what he calls his "rounders up and whippers in".
So he relies on a kind of informal network of Garda Siochana,
of parish priests.
They'll be expected to go round up local men.
I think they probably turn up because it sounds like it's a bit
of craic or it's a novelty. Weren't paid?
No, they're not paid. Not even a pint? No!
WHEELS CREAK
BELL RINGS
Helen Dawson realises that a rumour has gone around
that she's a Hollywood agent scouting for new talent,
and all of a sudden, loads of young Irish girls appear
and are quite happy to have their head measured.
OK, Siobhan, I can't put it off any longer.
I need to know who I am.
I know there's some instructions on the back of this sheet.
Oh, she's only reading the instructions now!
The Harvard Mission undertook their surveys in many
towns and villages.
They even took photographs of the local specimens,
which looked strangely criminal.
Not sure how I feel about all this.
We have to do a little calculation, 155,
multiply by 100 and then divided by 200.
We come up with a cephalic index of 77.5.
So you are a middle classification, which is probably great
just to think that you're normal. Yeah.
So I'm average, right in the middle.
Maybe because I grew up on the border.
But what about the conclusions of the Harvard Mission -
that all this data says something about us
as a so-called "Celtic race"?
And did they find anything? They recorded everybody's measurements.
So what we have is, you know, boxes and boxes of forms, just like this.
You know, 12,000 of them. What use are they to us?
If we want to know what the physical measurements of people
were in the 1930s, they're great.
If we want to know what makes them distinctively racially Irish,
they're not worth anything.
Like, were the intentions noble at the time?
I mean, it sounds suspiciously like what we now know as eugenics.
Eugenics is... Really the idea behind it is that there's a sort
of a hierarchy of races.
So at the top were Aryan populations, Nordic populations,
white populations... Tied up with notions of nationalism...
Absolutely, yeah. ..race.
So it justified a sort of racialist thinking that sort of advocated
that there were superior humans and inferior humans.
I mean, it's creepy stuff.
It's very dubious, isn't it? Sinister.
And ultimately, I suppose Nazi genocide is the ultimate outcome.
It's the end of the spectrum.
Let me just remind you -
the Harvard Mission's visit...
DRAMATIC MUSIC
..took place in the 1930s.
MUSSOLINI SPEAKS IN ITALIAN
PATRIOTIC MUSIC PLAYS
Benito Mussolini's brand of fascism had already been rooted in Italy
for over a decade.
And in 1934,
the often angry and alarmingly popular Adolf Hitler,
swept along by his now infamous rallies,
was named Fuhrer in Germany.
Extreme nationalist governments were on the rise.
So what was happening here?
1934 was a good year for Ireland,
well, at least for Adolf Mahr.
The Harvard Mission was furiously digging up sites
right across the island.
Man of Aran won the Mussolini Cup for Best Foreign Film
at the Venice Film Festival.
And, oh, a Nazi Party was founded in Ireland
with Adolf Mahr as its first Ortsgruppenleiter,
or branch leader.
Ireland's Nazi Party, like others around the world,
was made up of Austrian and German expats,
many of whom held powerful positions like Adolf Mahr.
They'd meet together at the German Social Club or at a German-owned
hotel in County Wicklow.
Nothing to be alarmed about.
Here's how the Irish press covered an Irish Nazi youth camp.
"Hitler Youth. County Dublin holiday camp ends.
"A party of Hitler Youth who had been in camp for a fortnight
"at Hampton Hall between Skerries and Balbriggan, County Dublin,
"dispersed yesterday when the German legation officials
"paid them a farewell visit.
"The party numbered about 25 boys and girls, most of them children
"of Germans living in Dublin, some from England and a few from Germany.
"A portrait of Hitler hung inside the house,
"while over the porch, crossed flags of Germany and the Hitler Youth
"were entwined with palms."
"As part of the programme, Adolf Mahr himself, he had taken the youth
"on a cultural tour of Ireland visiting historic sites such as
"Newgrange, where they looked at the passage tomb."
Yeah. Sounds like your typical week at summer camp!
So, as far as the media was concerned,
the Hitler Youth was all a bit of fun.
While Mahr was busy building his Irish Nazi Party,
the Director of the Harvard mission, Hugh O'Neill Hencken,
and his Indiana Jones-styled assistant, Hallam Movius,
began a new search. An attempt to bring them face-to-face
with the earliest inhabitants on the island,
men and women who they believed lived around 10,000 years ago
in the Palaeolithic era.
Kilgreany Cave in County Waterford
had been excavated in 1928, making headlines across the country
because, well, they found Palaeolithic human bones.
Or at least they thought they did.
The Harvard Mission went back to make sure.
So Hallam L Movius, who is the Palaeolithic archaeologist,
went there in 1934 to see if he could recover more material.
The rugged Hallam Movius
and the Harvard Mission arrived with an army of excavators
from de Valera's unemployment scheme.
Very quickly, he started suspecting the 1928 archaeologists
weren't up to the task.
Now, he wasn't very happy with the previous excavator,
EK Tratman, because he was a dentist
and he was one of these, you know...
He was just looking for teeth!
He... No!
Like, he was with Bristol University,
but he wasn't a trained archaeologist. More of a dabbler.
Yeah. And you would have had a lot of people like that in the '20s
and '30s where they'd have an interest in archaeology,
but they wouldn't have the training to back it up.
Movius was very unhappy, so he did a much more scientific
excavation and found that the Palaeolithic man turned out
to be a Neolithic man.
That is, the bones were around 5,000 years younger than thought.
Once again, the results made headline news,
but not in a good way.
So they didn't find the earliest Irishman in the Kilgreany...
Damn it!
Hallam L Movius and the Harvard Mission
now had to reframe their search.
It meant that the oldest evidence for people on the island
was in Northern Ireland.
Objects formed by humans were found in their thousands.
Flints, tiny flints - just like the ones I passed in there
without giving them a second glance.
So the Harvard Mission headed north to Cushendun in County Antrim.
Because while flint sounds boring to me,
for those studying the Stone Age, they're pure gold.
Where you find flints, you find the people who used them as tools.
So the handsome Hallam Movius began a series of digs
where flints are practically lying around.
There were quite a lot of
middle-Stone Age flint tools found in this bay
and the surrounding area.
And, of course, all along the East Antrim coast.
There might be just a chance I might pick one up as we walk along here,
but so far I haven't seen anything.
Cormac McSparron is an archaeologist from Queen's University, Belfast.
He's excavated at Cushendun before, so he knows what to look for.
Upriver from the beach
is where Hallam Movius dug -
a long grown-over site Cormac is attempting to find
using the dig report.
It's reasonably clear.
We've got the Dun River on this side of us.
Movius's site is located at about 100 feet or 30 metres,
roughly, from the point down there.
What Movius had stumbled upon by accident, really,
was something which was really quite well stratified.
The uppermost strata is going to be the most recent, and the
lowermost one is going to be the most ancient.
And Movius was able to dig into this bank
and get the stratification going down.
Several thousand years, actually, of stratification.
Through silts and sands
and another layer of salt, and then finally
a layer of postglacial peat,
five or six metres of open excavation.
Huge amount of work done manually, of course, but nowadays
we'd be thinking serious health and safety headache!
Ah, health and safety gone mad!
Looks to me like a bit of craic!
But what Movius found in the strata at Cushendun
was like striking gold.
Most of what he found was flint tools -
large, broad-bladed, flint points.
You can sort of see they've been trimmed here to fit onto a shaft.
They're very sharp even after, you know, 6,000, 7,000 years spent
on the ground before it was found.
This is still really, really sharp, still a very effective tool
or weapon, or most likely, probably for hunting, to be honest with you.
And fishing - you could spear things of all sorts with this.
Having discovered his cache of flints, Movius began to work out
where the people that use them came from.
His money was on Scotland.
He called it the "Larnian Culture".
And this Larnian Culture had similarities, he thought,
to some Mesolithic material in the west of Scotland.
And he thought that it was likely that they were related in some way.
So the Larnian Culture, named after the good town of Larne,
were the first settlers in Ireland, and they came from Scotland,
according to Harvard's Hallam Movius.
Down in Dublin, Adolf Mahr didn't agree.
Adolf Mahr had a sort of competing theory.
He believed that it was possible to link early Irish pre-history
with wider European archaeology.
His model stood in stark contrast to the model of Hallam Movius.
Estyn Evans' theories, though working in a different era,
supported Hallam Movius.
He very much also tended to tie Ireland, generally, into a sort of
a more Irish and British milieu,
rather than a continental milieu.
Hmm... Britain or Europe. Who to believe?
Who to trust?
What do you think, Cormac?
The nation, the origin is a tenuous concept, at best.
It's extremely difficult to tie down, but it doesn't mean
that sometimes archaeologists have not got drawn into that.
By 1935,
time was running out for the Harvard Mission.
Their five-year plan was nearly over, but not before they'd
excavated nearly 20 sites
from County Cork to County Antrim
and everywhere in between.
So the Harvard Mission had done its job,
filling the museum in Dublin full of artefacts
and impressing the archaeological world
with new theories and incredible discoveries.
But they'd never carried out a dig here in County Sligo,
where Hugh O'Neill Hencken first fallen for the mysteries
of Irish archaeology.
Now was his chance.
Hencken chose a court tomb
located on Sligo's western shore,
a site named Creevykeel.
The tomb was similar to the one Estyn Evans had dug in County Down.
But while Goward looked like a set of 1930s teeth with a few missing,
Creevykeel was an American-style set of dentures -
intact, perfectly preserved, gleaming.
Local expert Martin Byrne has come to give me the grand tour.
It really survived unmolested and un-dug, suppose,
until the Harvard Mission arrived in 1935.
So that may be one of the reasons why they picked it,
was because it was in such good condition and it hadn't been
dug by treasure hunters.
In July 1935, Hencken and his men began digging at Creevykeel.
When they started, the tallest stone stood barely a metre above ground.
Within days, gigantic boulders rose from the earth.
As it emerged, Hugh O'Neill Hencken
tried to make sense of the court tomb as best he could.
There's an interesting story
about the capstone leading into the chamber. Three local brothers
were bored one day, and they came and they pushed it over.
And the locals all told Hencken that it used to stand upright,
but he didn't believe it ever stood upright
so he put it back lying flat.
And it's actually the most dangerous thing on the site here,
because everybody who goes into that chamber cracks their head off it.
Will we put it back the way it was?
No. I don't think so, not today.
I'm still unclear about who actually built these megaliths.
Are we talking about the Celts? I mean, are these people Celts?
RECORD SCRATCH
When I studied archaeology, we were told, "There's no such thing as the Celts."
And when you're a tour guide, you have to be very careful talking to
people, particularly from America. Some people get very upset.
No, these people were way, way before what we would have considered
to be the Celts even.
The Corcoran people are thought to have migrated through the Balkans
and followed the line of the Danube, and ended up in France.
Then you have lots of people going up the east coast of England,
and you have people coming up the Irish Sea and you have people
coming up around the west coast of Ireland as well.
So these are German-French court tombs. But what about Scotland?
Evans was right. There were people who came over from Scotland
and build those kind of monuments,
and people who came from France as well.
The people who came from Scotland originally came from France anyway.
So...everyone's right.
Estyn Evans in Northern Ireland,
Adolf Mahr in Dublin,
the Americans with the Harvard Mission.
I visited these sites.
I've read the reports.
I've tried to get my head around exactly what these places are
and how they relate to my identity as an Irishman and an Ulsterman.
But I need more to go on. I need a geneticist.
So, essentially, you study old bones.
Yes. To summarise, yes. Sorry!
Dr Lara Cassidy is an expert in ancient DNA.
If anyone can help me, she can.
Would you like some gloves? If you want to hold a sample.
I suppose I should, really, shouldn't I? OK.
So this is a petrous bone.
So can you see how this might fit on your skull?
I'm hoping Lara can tell me who I am
and how I relate to my ancient ancestors.
We've been studying at the Harvard Mission to Ireland in the 1930s,
and then there was a guy up in Northern Ireland called Estyn Evans
who was racing around different historic monuments
to try and find out, you know, who our ancestors were. Mm.
So who do you think built them?
Like, who built Creevykeel, for example?
Some very talented, uh... Stonemasons.
Well, and a community, I think.
How did they relate to us living on the island today?
SHE CHUCKLES
Distantly. The idea that the Irish population has existed in some type
of crystalline state going back into the deep and distant past is...
Really? Yeah. Very disappointing, Lara.
So our sacred sites weren't built by the Irish at all,
at least genetically speaking.
So what about me? Am I Irish?
The modern-day Irish population can trace its origins probably back
to a foundational event that happened in the early Bronze Age.
Give me a date. 4,000 to 4,500 years ago.
And it's a movement of populations
from the Steppe region of modern-day Russia.
If you're looking for an "origin" for the modern Irish gene pool,
that's your foundation point. Really?
VOICEOVER: So I'm Russian?
Like, if you were to compare our DNA with the DNA of someone
from the Steppes now... Yeah. ..would there be similarities?
No. Because you can't think that the Steppe region of Russia
has stayed the same either. Because many of us were brought up
with this, like, very strong idea
that we were descended from the Celts.
But you have to be so careful in studies of archaeology,
anything about the human past and genetics,
and researchers definitely have the tendency
to bring their own subjectivities into it.
Well, they did in the 1930s.
And it's a dangerous game, this whole, like, you know,
where nationalism played a huge part.
What are your findings about race, generally?
Race is not a genetic concept. It's not a biological concept.
It is a social construct.
People sometimes think that genes or genetics are a more fixed anchor
of identity than, say, a culture or a language.
We know culture and language changes all the time,
but so do genetic populations.
They're ephemeral, they're fluid, they're changing,
their boundaries are fuzzy. And people are always moving,
they're migrating, meeting and mixing.
As a species, we have an incredibly recent shared evolutionary history.
We all trace our homeland back to Africa.
VOICEOVER: Hmm. Russian, French, Scottish, Irish and African.
And where do you think we come from? It's a different answer
whatever sort of lens you put on it. Like, where do I come from?
Where did my parents come from? Yeah. My great-grandparents?
500 years ago?
5 million years ago?
I suppose you can think whatever you want to think.
That's the wonderful thing about human identity, isn't it?
We can we can make our own
and we can make our own as a society as well.
But the thing that unites them isn't their genes,
isn't their culture, isn't even their language.
It's calling this island home.
If you're talking about looking for anchors of identity,
that's a really nice one.
The 1930s, however, didn't have the data from Lara's work
on ancient DNA, nor did it have her open-mindedness.
In September 1939, war was declared on Nazi Germany,
starting a conflict that would shake most people's faith in humanity.
Adolf Hitler's actions, particularly the Holocaust,
shattered any notions of a scientifically studied pure race.
In Ireland, the idea of a pure Celtic race sort of slipped away.
As did Adolf Mahr.
In July 1939, Mahr travelled to Germany for an academic conference
and to attend a Nazi rally in Nuremberg.
He stayed in Germany.
At one point, he made Nazi propaganda radio programmes
targeting British and Irish audiences.
A job that didn't exactly bolster his reputation.
After the war, Adolf Mahr tried to get back into Ireland,
to take up his old job.
He wrote begging letters to everybody he knew,
including this one to Eamon de Valera in 1947.
"It is now well over two years since the cessation of hostilities,
"half the duration of the shooting war, and I am still here.
"I have ever since frantically tried to enlist the support of the Dublin
"authorities in my endeavours to get back to my unfinished work,
"which I consider to be the vocation of my life.
"So far, I have met with no success.
"I can naturally understand that my past political sympathies
"and the general situation render my case somewhat delicate.
"But I beg Your Excellency to consider also
"the extenuating factors.
"I do not and I cannot deny that I thought it my patriotic duty
"to join the Party, and that I honestly believe that it stood
"for the common good of all Europe.
"This was an error of judgment, but it was not in contradiction
"to the loyalty and love which I felt equally for your country,
"which had given me hospitality and an honoured scientific position."
But by this time, Adolf Mahr had become a figure to forget.
No-one would touch him, not least Eamon de Valera.
Mahr died in Germany in 1951. He was still hoping to get back to Ireland.
Estyn Evans spent the war in Northern Ireland
teaching at Queen's.
He also wrote popular books about Ireland's heritage
and eventually helped found the Ulster Folk Park.
He even did the odd spot of presenting for the BBC.
This structure is what archaeologists call a souterrain.
One thing I wondered, though -
did Estyn Evans ever mention Adolf Mahr?
So I asked his son, Alun.
It's well known that Mahr was a Nazi.
My father noticed Mahr's interest in airfields and coastal regions...
HE LAUGHS
So they had a relationship, of sorts. Yes.
And they respected each other
because Mahr was a trained archaeologist. Mm-hm.
He was about 20 years old, my father.
But they were both very interested in developing the techniques.
But Alun also told me a story that suggests
things could have been very different had Adolf Mahr
and Adolf Hitler gotten their way.
My father was very surprised when a senior archaeologist in Dublin
told him that Mahr had commented
that Estyn would make an excellent Gauleiter,
for a mayor for the north of Ireland when the great day came.
But the great day didn't come. Thankfully.
Instead, Estyn Evans had a long and illustrious career,
becoming a household name in Northern Ireland.
And he never went back to Wales.
It makes for a strange sort of Irish story without any Irish characters.
Adolf Mahr, Estyn Evans,
Hugh O'Neill Hencken, Hallam Movius.
They dug up this island, excavated a warehouse of treasures,
and went some way to decoding our mysterious megaliths.
Yet, it's a forgotten tale
because it happened in the 1930s. A dark chapter of history.
But we should remember
they pioneered archaeology on this island as we know it today.
But I have to admit, I'm slightly disappointed
that there's no definitive evidence of an ancient and pure
Celtic culture from which I might be descended.
Of course, I'm not going to be swayed by mere science.
No. Like most people north and south, I prefer stories.
Stories rooted in the landscape of the mind.
Because that's where these comforting origin myths arise,
in the sometimes absurd and often baffling tales
that we tell ourselves about who we are and where we came from.