Kevin R Whooley

A lot of bias in what would have otherwise been an enjoyable read. For the most part, this book is easy to read and it gives a lot of insight into the largely forgotten archaeological activities of Post-Independence Ireland. But there are two main reasons why I cannot recommend this. The first is that it has 316 pages in total. Of these, 98 are dedicated to endnotes, index, and bibliography (the last of which is in a normal sized font instead of a smaller one) which means it comprises about 30% of the book. So I essentially payed full price for 2/3s of a book. And the other is that I noticed a good amount half-truths, exaggerations, contradictions from the author herself, and an overall Celtosceptic bias which I find detrimental to the work's status as a reliable non-fiction source. The 3 most egregious which come to mind is as follows- - At some point Maréad Carew claims that the expenditure from 1934-1939 of the Unemployment Plan Scheme was at £6,490. This is true, but the issue is that it is mentioned in a section titled 'Archaeology on a Shoestring'. Carew doesn't mention the fact that due to inflation, such an amount was worth much more back then with, inflation calculators such as from Bank of England.Co.UK, saying that this would have been the equivalent of £300,000-500,000 today. So it was hardly a shoestring budget, especially in a developing nascent nation experiencing the effects of the Depression. - In Chapter 5, Carew states unequivocally that the excavated Lagore Crannog was inhabited by people who identified as Romans, Vikings, Germanics, and Celts, and she bases this on the material culture found there. The problem with this assumption is that at several points in the book she seems to be against assuming ethnicity through material culture, such as by quoting Macalister who criticised correlating 'cultural products with the movement of people' and bringing up Gustaf Kossina and how he was famous for 'correlating material culture with assemblages of artefacts' and was 'inspired by fanatical patriotism' and had 'nonsensical and sometimes amateurish ideas' and that his ideas were 'misused by the Nazis'. Her reasoning is made more absurd by her seeming to outright dismiss any possibility that the Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse artefacts found there could have been gifts, souvenirs, etc. She claimed ‘Hencken found a way of explaining existence of awkward or non-homogenous cultural traits’ and implied that Hencken had ‘explained away, incorporated or airbrushed out’ such artefacts, with her only using a handful of examples for the first action (which I don't think she gave any 100% concrete evidence that this was the case, that it wasn't Hencken genuinely believing in his own theories), and as far as I can tell no other examples were used for the latter two, thus leaving it largely speculative to suggest such a conspiracy. Because of all these, I cannot recommend a book with such a large amount of speculation and selectivity in the research, and a subtle yet prolific Celtosceptic bias.