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Crannogs — These Small Man-Made Islands

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Crannogs — These Small Man-Made Islands PART I — INTRODUCTION 1. INTRODUCTION Islands attract attention.They sharpen people’s perceptions and create a tension in the landscape. Islands as symbols often create wish-images in the mind, sometimes drawing on the regenerative symbolism of water. This book is not about natural islands, nor is it really about crannogs — these small man-made islands. It is about the people who have used and lived on these crannogs over time.The tradition of island-building seems to have fairly deep roots, perhaps even going back to the Mesolithic, but the traces are not unambiguous.While crannogs in most cases have been understood in utilitarian terms as defended settlements and workshops for the wealthier parts of society, or as fishing platforms, this is not the whole story.I am interested in learning more about them than this.There are many other ways to defend property than to build islands, and there are many easier ways to fish. In this book I would like to explore why island-building made sense to people at different times. I also want to consider how the use of islands affects the way people perceive themselves and their landscape, in line with much contemporary interpretative archaeology,and how people have drawn on the landscape to create and maintain long-term social institutions as well as to bring about change. The book covers a long time-period, from the Mesolithic to the present. However, the geographical scope is narrow. It focuses on the region around Lough Gara in the north-west of Ireland and is built on substantial fieldwork in this area. It presents fresh information on both the dating and the classification of crannogs, together with new theoretical perspectives and questions. John Donne’s classic line,‘No man is an island’, conveys the idea that all people are in some way connected to each other.The island as a symbol often stands for anti-social behaviour and isolation. But, as I hope to demonstrate, people have drawn upon the island symbol in all its variations and forms throughout time, often in ways that articulate social norms and preconceptions. What I am particularly interested in is how the activities by the lake, and the building and use of crannogs, affected people’s perception of social reality, and their sense of community and solidarity over time. One of the assumptions in the thesis is that both past and present realities are mainly socially constructed (see Berger and Luckmann 1967). Secondly, I believe that people actively and passively use material culture in a way that contributes to the forming of these realities, partly by shaping people’s experience of space, and partly by creating and joining together items and room and context, creating categories of thought as well as frameworks of understanding from which actions can arise. Many archaeological and social studies are about change, but this book will also discuss the phenomena of stability and long-term traditions. I will suggest that the repeated use of the crannogs can be read as materialised institutional practices, whereby major changes are made acceptable by referring back to earlier material culture. In this book we will try to get a better understanding of how the use of these built islands may have been connected with people’s ways of experiencing communality and solidarity, how people’s involvement with these sites and the waters surrounding them may have affected what was seen as good at any point in time. The building and use of the crannogs may be seen as reiterative practices, where slow changes are happening against the background of an earlier set of beliefs. Change is mediated through a INTRODUCTION 3 constant reworking of earlier ‘social realities’ and can be seen in parts of the archaeological record other than crannogs — for example, reburials in earlier monuments during the Iron Age and long-lived practices such as the deposition of items in watery places. I shall investigate the role of man-made islands in this respect. Much archaeological terminology is economistic, and crannogs have often been explained in an economically sensible way — that they were built for protection of wealth or for resource exploitation.This terminology needs to be revised, as it hinders us from appreciating the variation in the archaeological material. Economistic interpretations are often standardised phrases that bring no additional understanding to the material. My anti-capitalist affiliations form an undercurrent in this book (see Shanks and Tilley 1987a for the role of archaeology as a social critique).What this means in practice is that I try to make explicit the often implicit applications of modernistic/economistic reasoning that have been used to interpret archaeological material, thereby normalising economics as the way to understand past realities. In this way the book is also intended as an anti-capitalist critique of earlier archaeological work. I wish to address the over- articulation of the so-called ‘economic field’ in processual/Marxist/systemic archaeologies and the under-articulation of everyday life in many of the post-processual approaches by contextualising production practices. I think that the terminology used in much archaeological work (not only in crannog studies) needs to be critically assessed. On many occasions a static use of modern economistic methods of thought and concepts hinders us from seeing and communicating much more interesting patterns in the archaeological material. 2. CRANNOGS There has been quite some debate over just what a crannog is, and many readers may not be familiar with the word. Before moving on to theoretical issues, the history of crannog research and the main study,we need to look at what has been meant by the term ‘crannog’ and to discuss its use. The word ‘crannog’ is Irish and consists of two parts — crann, meaning ‘tree’, and og, meaning ‘miniature’ or ‘young’.The term is often used to describe the small, wooded, man-made islands that can be found in many Irish lakes today.‘Crannog’ (‘young tree’) would of course be an apt description of their present appearance, covered with small trees and bushes.The average crannog measures about 25m in diameter and reaches a height of 1.5m above the lakebed (based on survey information from County Sligo and parts of County Roscommon). Many crannogs in these areas are built of stone. It has been suggested that they look like Bronze Age cairns in the water. Many people would have a picture rather like Fig.1 in mind when the word ‘crannog’ is mentioned. In the popular view they are seen as Celtic habitations, although the archaeological material does not fully support such an interpretation. Like Bulgarian tells, some crannogs have layers from many different periods. A single site could contain layers from the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and even more modern periods, although early medieval layers are the most common. There has been considerable debate as to whether all building phases on these multiperiod sites can be described as crannogs.This will be discussed in detail below. The distribution of crannogs Wetland settlements can be found in all parts of the world. Some of the most famous are sites like La Tène in Switzerland (Vouga 1925; Schwab 1972), Alvastra in Sweden (Malmer 1991) or Star Carr in Yorkshire (Clark 1954; 1972; see also Mellars and Dark 1998). However, crannogs have a specific location; besides Ireland, they can also be found in Scotland (see Morrison 1985), and there is at least one in Wales (Campbell and Lane 1989). Plate 1 shows the location of all crannogs and possible crannog sites recorded by the DoE and Dúchas for the island of Ireland. Their objective has been to establish that all the sites included are man-made islands. It has Fig. 1—A crannog (after Morrison 1985). CRANNOGS 5 Study area Pl. 1—Distribution map of crannogs, showing key sites that have been fully excavated and published (the first crannog map was published in Stout and Stout 1997, 49). 6 CRANNOGS been estimated that there were once 2000 crannogs on the island of Ireland (Mitchell and Ryan 1997, 262; Clinton 2000, 286).The map shows crannogs in all parts of the country, but most of them are located in a band stretching from the west coast to the east coast in the northern half of Ireland, corresponding quite well to the drumlin zone. Drumlins are the small, rounded, oval hills that divide the landscape into smaller compartments, and some have small lakes in between them.There are fewer crannogs in the south of Ireland, although some sites have been recorded there (e.g. Ussher and Kinahan 1879; Ussher 1903; Power 1920; Poole 1930).There are also fewer lakes in the south, which could explain this pattern.What is interesting is that there are areas — for example Donegal and Clare — that have lakes but where artificial islands are not so common. That Donegal lacked the same density of crannogs as, for example, Fermanagh and Monaghan has already been pointed out by Davies — ‘their distribution does not closely correspond to that of lakes’ (1942, 14) — but that Clare was so empty has only recently been noted, unless the archaeological survey turns up more. The number of crannogs in a lake can vary. Some smaller lakes in the crannog belt may have one or two sites. Others could have anything from 20 to hundreds of sites, depending on how the term ‘crannog’ is defined. It has been argued that crannogs tend not to be found in larger lakes.Very few crannogs have been recorded in lakes like Lough Allen, Co. Leitrim, for example. However, some larger lakes, like Lough Arrow and Lough Gara, Co.
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