Archaeologists are a lively, humorous lot; sceptical. Digging out skulls and bones and piecing together items in order to reconstruct something of the life of our predecessors sharpens their sense of proportion. They shift some of our assumptions gained from sweeping statements by incautious historians or propagandists - or so interpreted by us, the public. The current issue, Winter 1998, of their quarterly Archaeology Ire- land (£3.50) has a striking cover you can hardly miss on the news-stands: a montage of Ross Castle, Co Kerry, illuminated and with a comet thrown in for good value. Inside, too, four pages of illuminated buildings, the slanted artificial light drawing attention to detail which otherwise you might not appreciate. Con Brogan of Duchas took the pictures.
A quotation to remind you of something else comes from Ms Tinna Damgard-Sorensen, director of the Ship Museum, Roskilde, Denmark, at the opening of the Viking ship exhibition at the National Museum: "They didn't pack up and go home, you know. They came and stayed here. The people of Dublin are as much descendants of the Vikings as I am." Well, the leading article, by Aidan O'Sullivan, treats of this mix that goes into the people of Ireland. "Firstly," he says, "archaeology challenges the idea that we and our ancestors are much alike, part of unbroken cultural traditions. The truth is that we would find the people of ancient Ireland very strange. To us, they would look odd, dark and shifty. They spoke in strange, incomprehensible languages, their religions were bizarre, and their societies were structured in ways that we would find unusual (to say the least). People in the past were as different to us as these dark strangers we now see on our streets."
He goes on to argue that we are not a particularly homogeneous people in origin, ethnically or otherwise. Ideas of large-scale immigration into Ireland in prehistory are looked at suspiciously. This, in contrast to the historic periods when "there were at least some incoming Romano-British, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, French, English and Scottish settlers." But, he points out, it does not take many people to bring in new ideas and to change cultures. We need to explore regional communities, the intimacy of the local place "where people's identity sprang from their shared landscape rather than from their genes." That should stir the pot.