IT is Friday morning and the National Museum is crowded. A small group of visitors is gathered around the glass case holding the shrunken remains of an Iron Age man. He was discovered in Galway in 1821.
Patrick Wallace, the museum director, looks on thoughtfully, somewhat uneasily, and comments: "People are fascinated with things like that. I don't know, I think it's a bit ghoulish. This is a human being, a person who may have been sacrificed and certainly died a violent death. He was found by a turf cutter in the last century. I'd agree with Christian teaching; the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit: I don't think it is right to violate an individual's privacy, regardless of his age."
Far more enthusiastic about the magnificent 52 foot oak long boat discovered in Lurgan Bog outside Tuam in Galway and brought to the museum in 1902, he says: "Look at it, what a wonderful story it tells, Stone Age Ireland. The images of warriors paddling." Tree ring dating places the boat - which consists of a full, split, dug out tree - to about 2200 BC, making it more than 4,000 years old.
Wallace leads the way over to some of his other favourites, including two delicate - fragments of tasselled cloth discovered at Cromaghs, Co Antrim in 1904, each 3,000 years old and the earliest cloth found in Ireland. He points to late Bronze Age, gold neck collars dating from about 800 BC, and then stops at the case displaying the Tedavnet gold disc," a sun disc; pre Celtic, pre Christian." A beautiful object of beaten gold, it is subtly crafted and was discovered in Co Monaghan during the 19th century. The disc was given to the museum by the Royal Irish Academy. In 1988, when he was appointed director, Wallace adopted the Tedavnet disc as the museum's symbol.
Wallace's public image has tended towards one of extreme affability. A compact, quick talking, friendly character with a quizzical demeanour, Wallace is a deceptively serious man, outspoken and far more passionately opinionated than many suspect. "I think the museum director should be a scholar, not a theme park administrator. I should like to be remembered as a scholar."
Proud of the museum's annual attendance of 600,000, second only to the National Gallery, he is nonetheless aware of the potential threat of indifference facing institutions such as the one he represents: "We are living in a country and at a time of anti scientific, anti intellectual, anti academic emphasis, it is part of a worldwide shift to the anti reflective," he says, stressing that the scientific values and achievements of the museum archaeologists have not been recognised. "It is the same with the Natural History Museum," over which Wallace also presides. "The keeper, Dr Jim O'Connor, is working on a catalogue of Irish insects, it is a life work - but do the people interested in museum performance actually care?"
Having just recently returned to work following a stroke last November, Wallace is currently working on Weights and Balances of Viking Dublin, as part of the Royal Academy Series, a book about lead weights and balances, of which Ireland has 250, most of them recovered at Wood Quay. "Most of the Irish weights are from Dublin. But also in a wider European context, Dublin has produced more than any other town in the Viking world - underlining the importance of Dublin as a trade centre."
Ironically, the radical diet necessitated by his illness means he looks far better than he did. But the experience has given him a heightened sense of mortality and an urgency in terms of publication. "There is always the fear that it could happen again.
It all began simply enough. I couldn't lift my cup and saucer. Then the next day, in the office I was unable to write a man's name. My hand just wouldn't, obey. That brought me to the doctor to find out what was wrong and I was sent off to the Meath. He stayed there for 10 days. Recovery centred on working on his book: "The act of writing was part of the therapy to regain the use of my right hand."
Born in Askeaton Co Limerick in 1948, Wallace is the eldest of a family of five born to a blacksmith. "I grew up at the forge. My father cared for all the cart and wagon horses of the farmers as well as the hunting horses of the several big estates nearby.
The Wallace eldest males, all Patricks, had been blacksmiths for well over 200 years. His great grandfather, who was born in 1815, survived long enough to be included in the 1901 census - "I only recently saw that." The current Patrick Wallace's grandfather had a flair for decorative ironmongery such as gates and railings. "He died in 1948, the year I was born."
WHILE his father was interested in politics, Pat Wallace was soon drawn to social history and archaeology. "My father was a nationalist, my mother was a great republican."
He says he was close to his father, but his mother had "this great Irish mother's grip on me.
"The one person I'd most like to meet up with in Heaven is my grandmother, my mother's mother. She was an old woman when I knew her, I knew her for the first 12 years of my life. I spent a lot of time with her and her son, my Uncle Dick, a bachelor who was able to give me more time than my parents could. Granny put me right on everybody in the neighbourhood ... Women have this great knowledge of the locality - she certainly did, who was who who went to America, who died of TB." The small facts which make up the private history of any place.
Young Pat Wallace played a lot of football and hurling "not very well" and became academic without really noticing. As a pupil at St Mary's Secondary School in Limerick, "I was good at Irish, English, history and geography arts subjects. St Mary's was a great school: it was run by women.
On achieving the best Leaving Cert results in Limerick in 1966, Wallace won a scholarship to University College, Galway. No matter how impressive his academic results, Wallace's mother had an effective method of keeping him level headed. "She'd be quick to tell you your tie is all wrong or would you not think of having your hair, cut?"
For him, archaeology became the story of how people live. "I'm an urban archaeologist. Although I'm from the country, I've always concentrated on town archaeology, how towns evolve, their layout, defences, houses, streets as we'll as the artefacts of commerce and craft. I'm more interested in towns than the archaeological sites of the countryside."
Wallace, who married the printmaker Siobhan Cuffe in 1991, enjoys sitting in his study, reading and walking in nearby Herbert Park. "I suppose I spend a lot of my time on my own, I like thinking." He has just acquired his first dog, a brown collie which strayed into his wife's mother's house. "It was a mutual adoption."
On leaving UCG in 1971, Wallace applied for the post of assistant keeper at the National Museum. He came to Dublin and had no difficulty adjusting to city life, "Dublin is the love of my life, every decade of its history, not just the Vikings." His entire career to date has been connected with the museum.
"All my 20s were spent digging," he says. Much of that digging was involved with what became a modern day Viking saga, Wood Quay. Prior to that, he had been in charge of the Oyster Lane excavations in Wexford.
"That Wexford dig, though covering a small area, had an extremely complex time span, dating from the Norman into the post medieval period, covering some 400 years." The Wexford, dig lasted a few months. On, its completion, the then director, Dr Anthony Lucas (1911-1986), who was approaching the end of his 22 year directorship (1954-76), appointed Wallace, then 25, director of the Wood Quay excavation, over a team of about 100, from 1974 until 1981.
Lucas was a great man, a mentor. Being appointed to Wood Quay was like winning a £2 million scholarship. It was also a sink or swim situation. I had a sense of how extensive the work would be, but was taken completely unaware by the intensity of the controversy which would surround it."
In "A Reappraisal Of The Archaeological Significance of Wood Quay", an essay underlining the importance of the townscape, which appeared in Viking, Dublin Exposed Wallace wrote. The major significance of the Wood Quay/Fishamble Street excavations must be their contribution to our understanding of the layout of 10th and 11th century Dublin. Because such a large area was available for excavation, an "open area" approach was decided on, whereby the emphasis was placed, on uncovering the maximum area of ancient landscape, keeping the intrusion of baulks and section controls to the essential minimum.
"This approach," he went on, "allows the ancient topography to dictate and control the area and size of the area of excavation and contrasts with other excavation "systems which sink in pre arranged spits or take place within a honeycomb of rectangular baulks which can obscure an overview of the original topography."
Wallace later wrote The Viking Age Buildings of Dublin in two volumes, part of an ongoing Royal Irish Academy series on Medieval Dublin Excavations. It is a scholarly yet accessible account, although Wallace's archaeological writings are often quite formal in style. Central to his thesis is the reiteration of a theory suggesting there were two Viking Age Dublins: the first, a protourban lasting from about 840 to 902; and a later, enduring Hiberno Norse settlement, the town of Dublin itself, dating from about 917. How important is Wood Quay to him now?
"If I live to be 1,000, I'll never achieve anything, of that importance again. In that excavation, I, came nearer to understanding Viking Dublin than any other archaeologist had in a 1,000 years. I look on it with pride." He has no regrets about the way Wood Quay unfolded, but fears for what has happened since 1981.
"Developers planners Dublin Corporation and the Office of Public Works hake between them come up with a compromise - and I believe, that something tragic has happened. The insertion of concrete piles or poles into unexcavated archaeological layers at close intervals has punctured the preservation of the layers, possibly causing them to decay. It has also destroyed some of the architectural and artefactual features, and of course, the poles themselves have destroyed any building or other remains that they are inserted into. Would the authorities have allowed this to happen in Newgrange or Clonmacnoise? In European archaeological terms, Viking Dublin is just as sacred as any of our ancient monuments."
Wallace has always believed that accessibility does not diminish scholarship and has always supported radio and television programmes on archaeology. He is currently scripting a six part, general series in Irish on Irish archaeology, presented by him, to be screened on Telifis Na Gaeilge in late autumn. "I think it is good to have practitioners rather, than personalities presenting programmes like this."
Irish archaeology is well served by Archaeology Ireland, a bi monthly magazine now entering its 10th year which was established by Nick Maxwell, who once worked at Wood Quay with Wallace. Written by archaeologists and specialist writers it is edited by Dr Gabriel Cooney of UCD, has a readership of about 15,000 and is geared towards the scholar and general reader. But there are gaps in the teaching and perception of archaeology in Ireland. Where do classical Greek and Egyptian archaeology fit in? The emphasis here tends to be solely on Irish archaeology.
"Up to now, this has been so at the museum at Kildare Street, but now with the availability of Collins Barracks we will be in a position to show the heritage of the wider world."
Again, in February, The Story or Archaeology was published in London by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. A lavish volume, it purports to tell the story of world archaeology over five centuries. Yet, considering the wealth of archaeological monuments and sites here - the Turoe Stone in Galway, for example, is widely regarded as the finest example of a decorated stone in the La Tene style, never mind the range of early Christian sites - there is only one Irish entry, Newgrange. Wallace agrees this is a sobering omission. "This is because despite the international work of George Eogan and Michael Herity and others, we still tend to present our archaeology almost apologetically abroad.
THE new museum headquarters at Collins Barracks is to open in the spring of 1997. Wallace describes the move as the most important development in the museum's history since it opened in Kildare Street in 1890.
"It is a 19 acre site, like a university campus. It's 10 times the size of our building here which will continue to house our archaeological collections.
"Our decorative art, folk life, and historical memorabilia are all going to Collins Barracks. Almost everything that is going up there has not been seen. We simply did not have the space to display it.
"All the foreign ethnographical, mainly South Seas and Maori and also the geological collection will also be displayed there. The conservation laboratory is to be relocated there."
What does he want for archaeology here? I want people to learn about our common past in a low brow, non condescending way. To enjoy it; to share it; to protect it. I am still hopeful for an academically informed, user friendly Viking Centre in Dublin, maybe as part of a city museum." There is far more to the Viking legacy of Dublin, he believes than a handful of pubs with vaguely Viking names.
