Crannogs:
a study of people’s interaction with lakes, with particular reference
to Lough Gara in the north-west of Ireland by CHRISTINA FREDENGREN
Wordwell. 2002. 332 pages, 12 colour plates,
74 figures, 8 tables, CD-Rom. ISBN 1 869857 56 9 This
book is a significant addition to research on that diverse group of
sites popularly termed ‘crannogs’
- artificial islands built at various points throughout prehistory and
into the historic period. Fredengren presents the results of a substantial
programme of research undertaken at Lough Gara on the border of Counties
Sligo and Roscommon. She uses this material to challenge traditional
explanations of why people built crannogs in the past. In doing so,
she draws on contemporary theoretical developments in landscape archaeology
to develop a persuasive argument for the social and symbolic significance
of these places. Although it focuses exclusively on the Irish literature
on crannogs, this volume will be of interest to those working on similar
sites elsewhere, as well as to researchers in wetland archaeology generally.
In Part I, Fredengren reminds the reader that building
an artificial island is not the simplest way to defend property or to
provide a suitable location for fishing - two of the primary reasons
given in the archaeological literature for the construction of crannogs.
The people who built these structures, she argues, chose to do so not
only because they would prove useful for the exploitation or protection
of economic resources, but also because of what islands meant to them.
In our own society, islands provide a source of metaphor and imagery.
They conjure up visions of independence and social isolation; their
inaccessibility renders them objects of mystery - destinations to which
we long to travel; at the same time, their manageable dimensions makes
them potential utopias - places in which it might just be possible to
create an ideal world in miniature. The author suggests that we must
look to equivalent systems of meaning in the past to understand why
it was that ancient societies considered the construction of crannogs
to be the best solution to certain social, economic and religious requirements.
Part II outlines a history of crannog research and
sets out the author’s own theoretical perspective. The history
of crannog research is carefully contextualised in relation to contemporary
meta-narratives. For example, much of nineteenth and early twentieth
century work on these sites was concerned with the ethnicity and origins
of crannog builders and whether the occupants of these sites could be
considered crude savages or civilised and independent peoples. The answer,
of course, depended as much on the writer’s political stance as
on the nature of the archaeological record itself. More recent writings
on crannogs have tended to favour functional explanations for their
construction and use. In contrast, the Fredengren expands on recent
postprocessual discussions of landscape to suggest that watery places
and the islands within them have meanings that transcend the purely
economic. The symbolic significance attached to places such as islands
have a fundamental impact on how people perceive and use these parts
of the landscape. However, the author wisely steers away from approaches
which explain all human action in terms of ritual or symbolism. Instead,
she argues that both economic and social concerns would have played
a role in the building of crannogs. She draws on studies in anthropology,
sociology and economics to argue that economic activities are always
socially embedded. In other words, social structures, cultural aspirations
and value systems are the major factors which shape the economic choices
people make. As such, the construction of crannogs would not simply
have provided people with a place from which to access the resources
of lakes and wetlands; their use would also have helped to maintain
certain social relationships and to reproduce ways of viewing the world
that served particular political ends.
Here, Fredengren’s own stance as an ‘anti-capitalist’
archaeologist is made clear. She rightly points out that archaeologists
have all to often projected modern western economics onto the past.
The idea of the goal-oriented individual setting out to maximise economic
production with minimum risk and effort is one that pervades contemporary
thought; however, people in the past may have had quite different reasons
for choosing to build crannogs. Unfortunately, the theoretical discussion
in this section is rather dense and assumes considerable prior knowledge
on the part of the reader. This means that many of the arguments that
Fredengren puts forward do not come over as clearly or as strongly as
perhaps they could. At other times, she makes points that have been
already been the focus of considerable discussion within archaeology
(for example, the need to move beyond the Cartesian dualisms inherent
in much post-Enlightenment thinking), although she does not always give
due recognition to previous work. This means that certain ideas are
presented as if they were quite new; while this may be so in the context
of Irish archaeology, this is not necessarily so for the discipline
in general.
Part III discusses the importance of the lake and
the monuments in and around it to the local communities living in the
Lough Gara area today. Some crannogs remain in use today, for example
as hides for duck shooting. This underlines the author’s contention
that crannogs are not static entities which can be ascribed to a particular
chronological period - in fact, they are still being ‘created’
today in the sense that people’s continuous re-use and ‘re-imaginings’
of these places turns them into something new. Fredengren goes on to
describe the study area, her own programme of survey, and previous surveys
of the lake and its environs. She presents a typology of Lough Gara
crannogs and maps the distribution of different types around the lake.
Three primary crannog forms are identified: platform crannogs, low-cairn
crannogs and high-cairn crannogs. The results of the project’s
programme of radiocarbon dating are presented here. These suggest that
the types of crannogs constructed may have changed over time from platform
crannogs (Mesolithic) to low-cairn crannogs (later prehistoric and early
Medieval) to high-cairn crannogs (late Medieval). In fact, the potential
Mesolithic dating of platform crannogs is based on two dates from a
single site, so the author’s model for change over time may perhaps
overstretch the evidence. The sequence of ten dates from the Late Bronze
Age, on the other hand, certainly challenges recent assumptions that
crannogs are primarily a feature of the early Middle Ages. Moreover,
dates from three of the sites indicate episodes of rebuilding and re-use
over considerable periods of time. This supports the author’s
argument that crannogs can often be seen as places with lengthy histories
- histories which might remain in people’s consciousness long
after their original construction, and which may be part of the reason
for their later re-use.
Part IV contextualises the survey data in relation
to other sites in and around Lough Gara from the Mesolithic through
to the Late Medieval period. It is perhaps surprising that this part
of the book is laid out in chronological order given the author’s
previous criticisms regarding the narratives of progress embedded in
traditional archaeological accounts; as she points out elsewhere, this
model of temporality rationalises modern western social and economic
forms by situating them at the apex of human development. This criticism
aside, it is refreshing to see a thorough consideration of the relationship
between crannogs and contemporary dryland sites. During the Mesolithic,
activities in the local area focused around the lake edges. Mesolithic
crannogs were low-profile features that would probably have been covered
by water during the winter months, and Fredengren suggests that there
would have been a distinct seasonal pattern to their use. More tenuous,
perhaps, is her suggestion regarding the link between the lake and the
dead. Human remains dating to the Mesolithic have been found in water
elsewhere in Ireland, and the author argues that this connection would
also have held true for Lough Gara. She argues that some of the lithic
material from the lake edges might once have formed part of votive deposits
placed in the water. Red ochre has been identified on lithic tools from
Mount Sandel and, as this substance is regularly associated with Mesolithic
burials in Scandinavia and elsewhere, Fredengren proposes that stone
tools could stand metaphorically for the ancestors. The lithic reduction
process, for example, might have been likened to human reproduction
and descent. Hence, the deposition of stone tools and waste in the waters
at Lough Gara created a conceptual link between the lake and the dead.
Certainly, it seems likely that the lake was a culturally significant
place during the Mesolithic, but the interpretative links that Fredengren
makes at this point seem to stretch the evidence a little too far.
During the Neolithic, the focus of activity moved
away from the lake towards other parts of the landscape, notably mountains.
However, the author makes the interesting suggestion that the Mesolithic
use of islands (bounded spaces) pre-adapted people to a Neolithic lifestyle
in which the process of enclosure (the delineation of houses, fields
and sacred places) was a significant element of the new cultural package.
With the building of tombs and other ritual monuments in the Neolithic,
alternative foci of activity were created away from Lough Gara. These
‘tribal nodes’, as Fredengren terms them, remained important
through the Bronze and Iron Age, creating a tension in the landscape
between the lake and the newer ceremonial centres. In the Late Bronze
Age and Early Iron Age, there was a new phase of crannog-building at
Lough Gara, associated with the deposition of metalwork and human remains
in the lake. The presence of particular concentrations of such ‘votive
deposits’ at the edges of crannog sites leads Fredengren to suggest
that during this period these structures were specifically built to
facilitate deposition in the lake. Evidence for metalworking from crannogs
of this period, she argues, need not run contrary to this suggestion.
The transformative processes involved in the production of metal from
ore or the recycling of broken objects to create new ones means that
in many societies this activity is seen as both magical and dangerous.
A conceptual association with death is not unusual, nor is the location
of workshops at ‘liminal’ locations; just as metalworking
involves the transformation of substances from one state to another,
places on the boundaries between land and water, or between this world
and the otherworld, provide suitable contexts for this activity. This
is a convincing argument, but it could have greatly benefited from comparison
with similar sites in other parts of north-west Europe, not least other
Late Bronze Age timber ‘platforms’ such as Flag Fen and
Shinewater in Britain.
The Early Middle Ages provide most evidence for the
construction and use of crannogs at Lough Gara. During this period,
the tribal nodes established during the Neolithic continued to be important
places in the local landscape. This section discusses the distribution
of sites such as ogham stones, early churches and ringforts, and suggests
that the location of crannogs is peripheral to most of these sites.
The author also presents the results of the excavation of a small Early
Medieval crannog carried out at part of this project (details of the
excavation are provided on the accompanying CD-Rom). This work demonstrates
how the meaning and use of such sites could change radically over even
a relatively short period of time. During the early phases of its use,
the crannog appears to have been a primarily domestic structure with
a house and areas for craftworking activities such as textile production.
Later, the house was abandoned, the crannog was covered with a layer
of shattered stone and it became an open-air platform for the forging
of iron. Interestingly, a Neolithic arrowhead and scraper appear to
have been incorporated into the occupation layers near the centre of
the house, and Fredengren argues that this was a way of deliberately
referencing the past.
Contrasts between the finds from this site and those
from contemporary ‘royal’ sites such as Lagore indicate
that crannogs were built and used by both high and low status families.
The author suggests that one of the reasons why crannogs were constructed
in such large numbers during this period was because of an increasing
desire for privacy. Changes in family structure and political organisation
in the Early Medieval period meant that an ability to distance and even
exclude other social groups through particular forms of architecture
became vital to the functioning of the social order. Crannogs and ringforts
provided two different ways of achieving this. However, Fredengren does
not fully explain why certain groups chose to build their settlements
on lakes which - on the basis of contemporary documentary sources -
appear to have been places associated with monsters and demons from
the otherworld.
The Late Middle Ages saw the construction of high-cairn
crannogs. In contrast to older sites, such crannogs could have been
a focus for year-round activity as they would not have been greatly
affected by seasonal changes in water level. The more regular use of
stone as the primary building material in crannogs of this period lends
them a monumental character that earlier sites would not have possessed.
There is some evidence for the pairing of crannogs with high status
dryland sites near the lakeshore (including moated sites and castles),
and Fredengren suggests that crannogs now acted as material symbols
for the status, independence and stability of local Gaelic lordships.
To sum up, this is a well-researched book which contains
a wealth of information on the Lough Gara crannogs as well as innovative
interpretations of the changing role and significance of these structures
over several millennia. Nonetheless, there are a number of minor problems
which could be raised. It would doubtless have been useful to compare
and contrast work on similar sites elsewhere in Europe, particularly
in Scotland. At times, the discussion in section IV is very generalised;
for example, Fredengren’s description of the Irish Mesolithic
is extremely broad, and her interpretation of the Lough Gara material
seems to depend as much on information from contemporary sites elsewhere
in Ireland as on her own data (she does explicitly acknowledge this
problem, however). Although the figures are in general very high quality,
there are problems with some of them. For example, figure 12 does not
match its in-text description on page 82, while figure 13 shows nine
high-cairn crannogs rather than the twelve claimed on page 83. A more
thorough integration of the theoretical content of Part II with the
data presented subsequently would have been particularly valuable; the
‘anti-Capitalist’ stance which Fredengren espouses in Part
II becomes a low-key subtext in later chapters of the book and the reader
is left to work out for herself the influence of different elements
of postprocessual thinking on the interpretations presented in Part
IV. It was only in the final paragraph in the book that this was brought
into focus again. Here, Fredengren argues that a primary role of archaeology
in the contemporary world should be to make places meaningful. Archaeological
knowledge of Lough Gara provides the local community with the resources
to resist the commodification of their landscape. This is one way of
giving archaeology a positive role in the present, and such an aim certainly
sits well with the ‘anti-Capitalist’ aspirations of the
author. Out of the entire volume, it was these few sentences that really
made this reader sit up and think - providing an excellent and thought-provoking
ending to what is overall a very interesting read.
Jo Brück
Review Submitted: September 2003
The views expressed
in this review are not necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews
Editor.
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