Hunter-Gatherer Ireland: Making Connections in an Island World

By Graeme Warren

Explores the Irish Mesolithic - the period after the end of the last Ice Age when Ireland was home to hunter-gatherer communities, mostly from about 10,000-6,000 years ago. At this time, Ireland was an island world, with striking similarities and differences to its European neighbours - not least in terms of the terrestrial ecology created by its island status. To understand the communities of hunter-gatherers who lived there, it is essential that we consider the connections established between people and the other beings and materials with which they shared the world and through which they grew into it. Understanding the Mesolithic means paying attention to the animals, plants, spirits and things with which hunting and gathering groups formed kinship relationships and in collaboration with which they experienced life.

The book closes with a reflection on hunting and gathering in Ireland today. The overriding aim of the book is to provide a point of entry into the lives of the Irish Mesolithic, to show the different ways in which people have lived on this island, and to show how we might narrate those lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Feb 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789256826

Graeme Warren

Graeme Warren is Associate Professor in the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, where he is is a specialist in the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, focusing on the Mesolithic of northwest Europe.

Book preview

Introduction: Gathering on the cliffs

Closing my front door behind me I walk down the hill towards the harbour of Wicklow Town, a small town about 50 km south of Dublin on the east coast of Ireland. In 10 minutes, I am at the Black Castle, founded by Anglo-Norman colonisers in the late 1100s. At the coast, the narrow path runs south on low schist cliffs, following the margin of the golf course. Carefully manicured fairways push hard against the coastline, but in some places the landscape is wilder, especially on the cliffs, out of the reach of the lawnmower. The place I am looking for is about 500 m southwest of the castle. Here the 5 m high cliffs fringe a small, nameless, pebble beach.

About 40 years ago Professor Frank Mitchell (1912–1997) found a scatter of prehistoric stone tools somewhere above the beach here. Mitchell was Professor of Quaternary Studies at Trinity College Dublin and made substantial contributions to knowledge about prehistoric Irish communities and landscapes. Alongside excavating sites, Mitchell was a prodigious collector of stone tools. He lived north of Dublin and spent large amounts of time searching ploughed fields near his home for prehistoric artefacts. His collections of stone tools, which include material that other collectors gave to him, are now stored in the National Museum of Ireland. They include hundreds of thousands of artefacts and are not well understood.

In the early 1980s Mitchell was walking the coast south of Wicklow Town. His notes record that:

(o)ver an area about 50 m long and 6 m wide about 5 cm of topsoil (brown loam with slate fragments) had been removed to build up a tee on the neighbouring golf links. A number of struck flints were soon found and on repeated visits a total of 39 were collected.

Mitchell called the site Corporation Lands A, following a convention in Irish archaeology of naming sites after the Townland (the smallest unit of land division) that they were found in. Unfortunately, and despite Mitchell taking photographs of the location and marking it on a map, the extent of landscaping associated with the golf course construction means that the precise location cannot be identified today, but a sense of the landscape setting is possible (Fig. 1). Most of the artefacts from this collection are very hard to associate with a specific period of prehistoric activity and not of great interest. But there is one exception: a stone tool made of flint.

Flint is a good material to make stone tools from. Its fine-grained and relatively homogenous silica structure means that its fracture properties can be consistent. A knapper can control and predict their craft. Flint does occur in nodules within chalk deposits in the northeast of Ireland, but most flint in Ireland is found on beaches and till deposits. This flint was probably identified by someone as a pebble which had the potential to be transformed into something new.

Figure 1: Corporation Lands, Wicklow Town: view north from approximate location of Mitchell’s find spot to show general landscape setting today

Someone used a hammerstone to remove the outer skin of the flint, and to create a flat surface which was a target for the careful blows that would produce distinctively shaped removals. In this instance, a leaf shaped flake, about 5 cm long and 4 cm wide was detached (Fig. 2). The flake is thicker at the end where the blow was struck, and where the distinctive swelling of a conchoidal fracture is visible: the ‘butt’ of the flake. The edges of the flake are shallow and sharp. After the flake was removed from the core a small area of blunting was applied to one edge of the area nearest the butt: this possibly facilitated attaching a haft, or simply made the tool easier to hold in the hand. Although the shape of the tool suggests it would have been most suitable for cutting, perhaps operating as a knife, we do not know whether it was ever used, or, if it was used, what it was used for. We can, however, say something about when this happened.

The creation of leaf-shaped flakes with hard-hammer knapping technologies, and the modification of the edges of these flakes near the butts is technologically characteristic of the Later Mesolithic period in Irish prehistory. During the Mesolithic Europe was settled by communities whose subsistence basis was fishing, foraging and hunting. It is usually defined as starting at the end of the last Ice Age (c. 11,700 years ago) and Mesolithic communities were the last hunter-gatherers in most of Europe, with the period ending with the first appearance of farming (with dates varying throughout Europe).

Figure 2: Butt-trimmed flake, Corporation Lands, Wicklow Town. Butt-trimmed area is at the bottom of the image (© johnsunderland.com)

Ireland has good evidence of settlement by hunter-gatherers from c. 10,000 years ago, with some poorly understood data from a few thousand years earlier (see Chapter 1). The Mesolithic ends c. 4000 BC,¹ when farming is introduced to the island. The Mesolithic in Ireland is conventionally divided into two based on changing stone tool technologies: the Earlier and Later Mesolithic, with the latter dating from c. 6700–4000 BC. The Corporation Lands find, technically known as a ‘butt-trimmed flake’, therefore provides us with typological evidence of hunter-gatherer activity on the cliffs south of Wicklow Town c. 6700–4000 BC.

This Mesolithic hunter-gatherer lived in a very different landscape than we experience today. Our poor chronology for the artefact and a lack of good data on the palaeoenvironment of Wicklow Town means that it is very hard to be precise about how different this landscape was. But significant climate change during and since the Mesolithic means that sea level and vegetation cover then were very different than now. Sea level change resulted from the interplay of the melting of the ice masses of the last Ice Age and the rebound of the landscape released from the weight of the ice. Wicklow Town is in an area of relative sea level rise: changes which took place during and after the Mesolithic. When the stone tool was made the sea level was probably a metre or two lower than today. The cliffs themselves have probably not changed their form dramatically but were perhaps fringed by a slightly more extensive coastal landscape of beaches and estuaries. On the cliffs, and running back inland, were forests. Ireland was mainly covered by woodlands – deciduous in the south and east, with pine in the uplands, parts of the north and the west. Understanding hunter-gatherer Ireland therefore requires consideration of the fundamental transformations climate change across deep time has caused to the Irish landscape.

Understanding how our artefact came into being also means considering other connections across deep time. Most flint in Ireland dates to the Late Cretaceous (100–66 million years ago – mya). The Cretaceous is famous for dinosaurs, but whilst tyrannosaurs, ankylosaurs and hadrosaurs flourished on dry land, the land mass that would later become Ireland was submerged beneath clear, warm seas. At the bottom of these seas, tiny shells rich in calcium carbonate accumulated over time, forming deep deposits. As the weight of these deposits compressed the accumulated debris, a distinctive white limestone, or chalk, was formed. Within these deposits, flows of water carried dissolved silicas, derived from biological sources such as diatoms, sponges or tiny protozoa known as radiolaria. In places, these silica-rich flows replaced the calcium carbonates: forming nodules or beds of silica-rich flint by a process called diagenesis. Some of these limestone deposits were eroded since the Cretaceous, as Ireland was variably areas of dry land, deserts or submerged by the sea, leaving pebbles of flint: sorted, tumbled, battered, rounded. The pebble flint used for our butt-trimmed flake only came into being through the combination of microscopic Late Cretaceous marine life and the specific geological history of Ireland that followed. Without this entanglement of deep-time processes and materials with the intentions of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer tool-maker the artefact could not have come into being.

This artefact tells a personal story of connections as well. Mitchell also collected artefacts from further south along the Wicklow coast, although none are Mesolithic. At some stage, whilst retaining much of his collection at Trinity, Mitchell gave this collection of Wicklow surface assemblages to Professor Peter Woodman of University College Cork. Woodman (1943–2017) was the leading researcher into the Irish Mesolithic for many decades and in large part defined the modern study of the Mesolithic in Ireland. From the 1970s to the early 2000s he was involved in almost all Mesolithic research in Ireland. Woodman was the external examiner of my PhD – which focused on the Mesolithic of Scotland – at Edinburgh in 2001. And, shortly following my appointment to UCD in 2002, Peter came on a visit to Dublin, bringing with him the boxes of Wicklow artefacts, which he thought I might be interested in. He left them with me.² Although at the time, I lived in Dublin, in 2006 our young family moved to Wicklow Town. I first visited the Corporations Land site shortly thereafter.

In many respects the Corporation Lands find is unspectacular. It is one find from a near 3,000-year long period. It offers evidence that hunter-gatherers once undertook activities on the cliffs south of Wicklow Town, even if those activities might have been little more than travelling through the area and dropping a stone tool. The information this artefact can provide about hunter-gatherer Ireland is of low resolution and limited detail. In this, the Corporation Lands find is typical of many Mesolithic sites in Ireland.

But this artefact that I have next to my computer as I write this introduction is also an astonishing gathering of different lives, timescales and stories: connections between different worlds. These connections include the decisions of a prehistoric hunter-gatherer; the lives of marine animals in the Cretaceous period; decisions to expand and transform a golf course in the early 1980s; geological histories of erosion; and a series of movements of artefacts amongst researchers interested in the earliest settlement of Ireland. It is only through these connections that I can encounter the physical remains of the activities carried out by past hunter-gatherers in a landscape that is very familiar to me – albeit one that has been substantially transformed since Mesolithic communities lived there.

These remarkable connections of materials, lives and times enable an insistent question: how can we use this archaeological evidence to understand the life-stories of those who lived in Mesolithic Ireland? And, even more fundamentally the artefact challenges me to do justice to the remarkable opportunity and moral responsibility that it presents: to respectfully tell the story of other lives.

About this book

This is not a book about archaeological theory. But, like all archaeological practice, it is informed by decisions about what is meaningful, how to make sense of materials: about what matters. Or, in other words, by a body of theory. The development of the book is informed by three main areas of broader discussion:

•the relationship between the Mesolithic of Ireland and other areas;

•the relationships between humans and the other beings and things with which we share the world;

•the ways in which the term ‘hunter-gatherer’ shapes thought and practice.

In varied ways, these themes all relate to notions of ‘difference’ in contrast to the connections which I choose to emphasise here in this book. All three themes also highlight the legacies of colonialism in shaping archaeological thought, language, and practice – and the book will be explicit in considering this.

A different island

The first supposed difference that articulates this book is the dominant idea that the Mesolithic of Ireland is different than the Mesolithic of other parts of Europe, especially its immediate neighbour in Britain to the east. This long-standing emphasis has arisen partly because of genuine differences in the archaeological record of Ireland compared to its neighbours, including the development of a distinctive form of stone tool technology. These discussions are also linked to the status of Ireland as an island, and the distinctive ecology that developed here. This theme is reviewed extensively below, but it is captured well in the closing statements of Woodman’s major recent monograph on the Mesolithic of Ireland:

the most interesting aspect of the Irish Mesolithic, namely that it is different. It took half my career to realise that this difference was an essential attribute of the Irish Mesolithic. The difference is undoubtedly, in part, due to the fact that the island of Ireland has had a distinctively different ecological dynamic and this is what makes the Irish Mesolithic so interesting and important (Woodman 2015, 336).

It is unsurprising that, at times, these discussions of difference between the lives of long dead hunter-gatherers in two parts of the islands of Britain and Ireland have been influenced by the complexity of the modern relationship between the states of Britain and Ireland (see Chapter 3). Beyond the specifics of Britain and Ireland, attitudes to islands more generally have also been strongly shaped by colonialism.

Recently, this supposed difference between the Irish and European (but mainly British) Mesolithic has been cast more strongly in statements that technological changes within the Irish Mesolithic show a simplification of Mesolithic trends in other areas and that Ireland was isolated from contact with other areas (Riede 2009; Riede et al. 2009). These arguments have received further support from the interpretation of recent aDNA analysis of two Later Mesolithic individuals from Ireland which has also strongly emphasised a ‘prolonged period of island isolation’ (Cassidy 2020; Cassidy et al. 2020).

This book attempts to develop a more nuanced reading of these themes of difference, isolation and impoverishment. One aim of my emphasis on connections is therefore to highlight the points of contact and comparison between the Irish and European Mesolithic, whilst not losing sight of what is distinctive.

Avoiding human exceptionalism

The second difference that has dominated archaeological practice until recently, not least because it is a dominant societal understanding, is the sense that humans are somehow different than and distinctive from other forms of being. This human exceptionalism often carries an assumption that humans are superior in some way to other forms of beings and things. Work across a wide range of disciplines has sought to destabilise this assumption, and recognising how human lives are made possible by their relationships with the other-than-human with whom we share the world is a compelling social and political requirement.

In archaeology the resurgence of interest in the mutually constitutive relationships that bind people and ‘things’ can be traced through a variety of approaches, including varied archaeologies of materiality (Knappett 2012), symmetrical archaeology (Olsen 2010; 2012) and entanglement (Hodder 2012). As Cooney argues, although differentiated by name and subtleties of philosophical argument there is much these approaches share (Cooney 2016).

The most recent extension of these arguments comes with the archaeological engagement with posthumanism – a philosophical understanding of how action and change is possible because of the relationships that enmesh organisms and the words in which they live (Crellin 2020; Cipolla et al. 2021). Understanding others – be they human or not – therefore becomes an exercise in identifying and describing the connections they have established with the worlds in which they live – described as an ‘assemblage’. The rejection of the humanism (or human exceptionalism) characteristic of much Western thought means a commitment to an ‘ontological flatness’ which does not presuppose the importance of any individual aspect of these assemblages for understanding action and change. This ontological position means that posthumanism is well situated to contribute to debates about decolonising archaeological practice: the urgent task of understanding how archaeological practice has been shaped by the intellectual and material legacies of colonialism and developing new forms of praxis, especially with regard to the perspectives of Indigenous communities (Bruchac 2014). As Cipolla and colleagues argue ‘[p]osthumanism offers a critical alternative, one with potential to forge new connections with non-western perspectives’ (Cipolla et al. 2021, 5). This potential connectivity with Indigenous thought is of particular significance to the subject of this book – hunter-gatherer communities who are unlikely to have held humanist ontological positions (see below for discussion).

This commitment to treating humans as enmeshed with the world through connections with other-than-humans is broadly related to a wide variety of discussions across many disciplines. Lien and Palsson, for example, have recently emphasised the move towards a ‘more inclusive notion of the social’ in attempting to ‘amplify the signs of the other-than-human in ethnography’ in reaction to the ways in which ‘human exceptionalism has dominated anthropological scholarship for at least a century’ (Lien and Pálsson 2021, 16). Lowenthal-Tsing’s interdisciplinary anthropological development of an ‘emergent multispecies historical ecology’ (Tsing 2015, 143) has been particularly inspirational to me. As will be seen below, Tsing’s focus on ‘patchy Anthropocene landscapes’ and ‘multispecies histories’ (Tsing et al. 2019) and emphasis that ‘landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design, that is the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and non-human’ (Tsing 2015, 152) is especially suitable for engaging with the Irish Mesolithic (see especially Chapters 3 and 4). This ecological perspective, which is also seen in Haraway’s call for an ‘ecology of practices’ (Haraway 2016, 42), has perhaps been less developed in archaeology, which has remained a little more focused on materiality and things.

Tsing’s discussion of ‘patches’ also provides a useful link to the development of a ‘patchwork ethnography’ which foregrounds the changing positions of knowledge production in anthropology, and ‘reconceptualizes research as working with rather than against the gaps, constraints, partial knowledge, and diverse commitments that characterize all knowledge production’ (Günel et al. 2020). Whilst this emphasis on partiality feels very appropriate for a book which was written through long periods of pandemic lockdowns and at distance from archives, libraries, and museums, it is also applicable to the overall craft of archaeology. The archaeological record is highly fragmentary and very much a patchwork, even before we consider the context of knowledge production.

In this sense, then, the ‘connections’ of my subtitle are between humans and other-than-humans – plants, animals, spirits, places, things. Human lives are considered as patches, sites or locations where different materials, different forms of being and different timescales are entangled and connected. From these historically specific combinations the possibilities for growth, action, and experience are developed.

On hunter-gatherers

I have so far used the term ‘hunter-gatherer’ without caveat or question. It is important to problematise this. In brief, the idea that we can divide the world up into types of people based on their subsistence and economic strategies (‘hunter-gatherer’, ‘pastoralist’, ‘farmer’) is a deeply colonialist notion which took a distinctive form during the settler colonial expansion of European nations and was an idea which enabled colonial atrocities. As part of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries a body of social evolutionary speculation sought to make sense of the diversity of societies encountered during colonial expansion and to explain how European society had developed, especially in terms of justifying the development of exclusive property rights and ownership (Barnard 2004; Pluciennik 2004; McNiven and Russell 2005). The idea that there was a distinctive kind of society characteristic of hunter-gatherers was constructed as an ‘Other’ to the society assumed to characterise metropolitan Europeans: hunter-gatherers were what we used to be, and what we were now not. Through the process of European settler colonial expansion contemporary populations of hunting and gathering populations were mapped onto these schemes. Distance in space was conflated with distance in time, as for example, in this description of Tasmanians in Ancient Hunters:

We will therefore direct our attention to the habits and mode of life of this isolated people, the most unprogressive in the world, which in the middle of the nineteenth century was still living in the dawn of the Palaeolithic epoch (Sollas 1911, 87).

Comparisons between Ireland and Tasmania have been significant in shaping knowledge of hunter-gatherer Ireland and will be returned to below.

Hunter-gatherers were constructed as lacking basic human social capacities, indeed, as not really living in societies but in a state of nature. Because of their imagined use of unmodified ‘wild’ resources they were considered as incapable of creating change, with change being understood as demonstrated by the human capacity to shape the world to its ends, and by so doing, create history. Part of the natural world and without the capacity for change and history, hunter-gatherers were not human in the ways that Europeans were. Presenting hunter-gatherers as being incapable of change ran in parallel with assigning them to prehistory: whilst at one level this referred to a period without written historical records, it also carried meanings of a time before history was possible, a time before humans could create change.

It is important to emphasise that colonial rendering of contemporary hunter-gatherer populations as somehow not-of-contemporary-time, but as frozen changeless relics of the prehistoric past was not a neutral scientific observation. It played a significant role in justifying the colonial genocides and dispossession of hunter-gatherer territories, not least through its assertion of the supremacy of settler colonial societies. Indigenous peoples were either considered as doomed to give way to their supposed superiors or as people whose development could be aided by supposedly benevolent colonial interventions. The presentation of hunter-gatherers as passively living off what nature provided, failing to improve the land – as failing to cultivate the land, for example, was used as legal justification for land grabs. These assumptions were, of course, wholly false: the failure of Europeans to recognise abundant Indigenous forms of landscape management was largely because they were looking for western style farmed landscapes. For these reasons McNiven and Russell ask why archaeologists continue to use terms such as hunter-gatherer and prehistoric (McNiven and Russell 2005).

These colonialist, social evolutionary views of hunter-gatherers continue today, especially in popular discourse in Britain and Ireland where varied stereotypical hunter-gatherers are recruited to represent both the antithesis and the antidote to the problems of modernity (Lavi et al. forthcoming). This history means we must take great care in how we use the idea of hunter-gatherers. But the significant social recognition and influence of the term hunter-gatherer also means that, although problematic, it can serve as an entry point into more reflective understanding (Warren 2021b), and for this reason is it maintained in this book and used in its title.

Definitions of hunter-gatherers have changed over time, from a focus on group composition, through subsistence strategy, social organisation, epistemology and ontology. Even the idea that there is a distinctive form of behaviour associated with hunter-gatherers is highly problematic. Most anthropological overviews highlight the very significant diversity present amongst ethnographically observed hunter-gatherers (Bird-David 2015; Widlok 2020), with further diversity expected amongst hunter-gatherers in the archaeological record (Lemke 2018). Yet in archaeological interpretations once the dominance of hunting and gathering as a form of economic practice is identified, a series of assumptions about other aspects of social organisation often emerge. This is potentially misleading, because the idea that one can predict aspects of hunter-gatherer organisation because they practice a hunting and gathering mode of subsistence is far too simplistic:

whatever is commonly associated with ethnographically known hunter-gatherers cannot be causally linked with hunting and gathering because ‘hunter-gatherer’ is a category we impose on human diversity - it is not itself a causal variable (Kelly 2013, 2).

Put simply, what is interesting about hunter-gatherers is not just their subsistence emphasis on wild food – but the types of societies in which they live.

To move from artefacts or other forms of material evidence to making statements about the nature of human lives in the past requires comparative analysis. This has usually taken two forms: firstly, the use of analogies to ‘fill the gaps’ in the archaeological record is common, and often justified by the neo-evolutionary assumption that all hunter-gatherers are in some sense the same (Warren 2017b). The continued use of these analogies perpetuates the sense that there is such a thing a distinctive hunter-gatherer way of life (Porr and Bell 2012) and we must be careful not to reiterate these problems. The influence of colonialism on these analogies will be considered below. Secondly, general theories about how hunter-gatherer individuals and groups might behave in different contexts have been influential and provide generalised frameworks against which we can consider our data (Kelly 2013; see Chapter 2).

Finally, and as will be outlined below, it is important to emphasise that the subsistence strategies used in Mesolithic Ireland involved fishing, hunting and gathering. Lifestyles were varied, but for some communities at least, their way of life involved a strong reliance on marine foods: if we wanted the overall term to directly reflect subsistence we could call these groups hunter-gatherer-fishers, or even fisher-hunter-gatherers. My use of the term hunter-gatherer is a shorthand.

The hunter-gatherer is a powerful western stereotype derived from a specific and problematic colonial history. These attitudes continue to impact on the lives of hunter-gatherers and Indigenous people across the world today, people who are indeed under considerable threat. These ideas that hunter-gatherers are