Information about Irish Antiquities comes to us through:

• History books;
• Ancient documents;
• Physical remnants of the past: monuments, buildings, artefacts;
• Museums and Visitor Centres;
• Folklore: the stories passed down from generation to generation;
• Literature;
• Imagination.

History Books have often got the story wrong. The Folklore version I heard in Lusmagh contradicted the school book, and was proven subsequently to be more correct than my school book. Historians bring to bear the bias of their time.

The Ancient Documents are also suspect. The first written records of our ancient world were compiled by clerics. They imposed on the folk memory the “truths” of the bible: the ancient invaders were interpreted as to whether they came before the flood or after the flood, and how they related to the sons of Noah — Shem, Ham and Japheth.

When the Four Masters, fearing that the memory of the Irish Race would be wiped clean by the Elizabethan ethnic cleansing, set about presenting a written record of the history of ancient Ireland, they began their task by visiting Bishop James Ussher, the protestant bishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, who was the 16th century expert on Bible dates, and who postulated the age of the world, and the dates of the flood and other important events. The Annals of the Four Masters built this time-line into their story.

Given that Usher’s calendar has been replaced by Darwin and the scientific community, we must re-interpret all these old interpretations.

The English conquerors tried to wipe out the entire folk memory and impose their own world view on Irish history.

The academics of the English tradition disregarded the oral heritage and relied more on the half-baked accounts of the Romans.

Early archaeologists imposed their primitive theories that the Stone Age conquests were followed by Bronze Age and then Iron Age invasions.

The advances of science over the last 20 years have re-opened doors to the  past, uncovering more and more ancient remnants and tracking the DNA of the ancient populations.

There were no Bronze Age or Iron Age invasions. There were Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) settlors, followed by Neolithic (New Stone Age) settlors, and, in historic times, Viking, Norman and English invasions.

The ancient documents and the folklore can be re-interpreted in the light of the advances of science. The new versions of history are found in the Museums and Visitor Centres, as well as new versions of the history books. Museum data is coming on stream (gradually) on the Web.

Imagination is not the creation of figments. It is the process whereby the mind brings together oodles of data from disparate sources and welds it into coherence. You are walking down the street and you meet someone you have not met for years. You recognise him almost immediately, despite how he has changed. You promptly make judgments as to whether he is fatter or thinner, sadder or gladder, older or younger looking, healthier or sicker, than when you knew him before, judgments relying on multiple categories of knowledge stored in your brain. When you hear a new story, you embellish it with the riches of the data stored in your pictorial memory. When the author says, “The sun sank into the sea,” you immediately paint a picture in your mind, a picture of a million glorious pixels, which varies with each new word added by the author.

My random thoughts on the Antiquities are given in the Pages posted on this site: see side panel for titles.