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| Yes, the Romans did invade Ireland. ~~~ And we don't need Roman forts as evidence, says Richard Warner, Keeper of Archaeology and Ethnography at the Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland This article was published in the English magazine 'British Archaeology' in May 1996. ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ |
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| So did the Romans invade Ireland after all, or not? This question, which has snoozed quietly in the background of Irish studies for decades, has recently leaped forcefully again out into the open. There are two reasons for this: first, this year's announcement of the discovery of a 'Roman fort' at Drumanagh near Dublin; and second, the almost hysterical attempt by some leading Irish archaeologists to rubbish the claim, in support of the non-invasion orthodoxy. In my view, the answer is overwhelmingly 'yes' - the Romans did invade Ireland. But this has very little to do with the discovery of Drumanagh, where a large amount of Roman material has been found, but about which we do not yet have any satisfactory information. There are plenty of other reasons for believing the Romans invaded Ireland. But first, we need to define what we mean by 'Romans' and 'invasion'. No one doubts that Caesar 'invaded' Britain, yet his largely non-Italian army left few discoverable traces, remained only for a short time, and failed to incorporate Britain into the official Roman domain. If it wasn't for the fortunate survival of his Gallic War, no archaeologist would be so bold as to postulate a Roman invasion of Britain in the 1st century BC. So let us define 'Roman' as implying an origin in the Roman empire, and 'invasion' as intrusion by force of arms in fairly substantial numbers. Let us not fall into the error of understanding invasion to be synonymous with national conquest or incorporation into Empire, or that all the persons involved were Italians. There is surprisingly little Roman material in Ireland, but what there is has a strange distribution. None has been found in association with native material. Indeed, to a great extent the distributions of stray Roman and native objects are mutually exclusive. In other words, those native Irish possessed of a rich, *La Tene-derived, ornament industry seem to have been uninterested in Roman trinkets. Moreover in the South East, in Leinster, which has produced a fair number of Roman objects and even Roman-style burials and cemeteries, native material is surprisingly rare. From the archaeology alone we would infer substantial intrusions into the South East around the beginning of the 1st century AD, an inference supported by the fact that tribal names recorded by Ptolemy in the early 2nd century are identical to the names of tribes in Gaul and Britain. Furthermore, the early medieval peoples of the area had a strong tradition of a British origin, as well as using Roman and British loan-words in their literature and placenames. Ancient Irish literary myths are not, nowadays, accepted as 'history', but some of Ireland's finest scholars have accepted them as a shadow of history. One myth tells of an Irish chieftain, Tuathal, who spent some time in Britain early in the present era and returned with an army to seize power in the Irish Midlands. Curiously, Tacitus tells us that Agricola, while pondering the invasion of Ireland, had with him an Irish chieftain for use in just such an exercise. At about the same time, Juvenal specifically tells us, Roman 'arms had been taken beyond the shores of Ireland'. The myth of Tuathal connects him to a number of Irish places, some of which have been excavated and have produced Roman material of the late 1st or early 2nd centuries AD. Indeed, the sparse inland distribution of early Roman material matches Tuathal's 'mythical' campaign remarkably well. We may interpret Tuathal as an exiled warrior/ adventurer seizing and keeping power with the aid of Roman arms, who was followed by a number of other exiles with similar support over the next couple of centuries. We can say this because the sites that produce early Roman objects also produce later Roman material. In particular Tara, the midland ritual complex, and Clogher, a northern hillfort, have produced early and late Roman material, but no native objects. Both became capitals of the new ascendancies whose ancient origin-tales derived them, with their armies, from Britain. The town of Cashel in Tipperary, the southern capital of just such a group, has not only produced a stray late Roman brooch, but was named from the Latin castellum. It is not acceptable to dismiss this concatenation of evidence simply on the grounds that neither a Roman stone fortress nor straight road have been found. Nor may we easily dismiss the extraordinary fact that the material and, to a great extent, social culture of the upper class Irish from the 6th century on owes far more to Roman than to native Irish precursors. To give just two examples among many: the favoured Irish cloak-fastener from the 4th-11th century, the penannular brooch evolved from a Romano-British brooch and the early medieval Irish sword was both in form and in name, a borrowing from that of the Roman army. In short, early medieval Ireland has all the appearance of being, culturally, an heir to the Roman world of which, we are supposedly to believe, it was never part. ENDS |
| ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ We are indebted to the English magazine 'British Archaeology' for their kind permission to publish this article. There are two world-renowned collections of Celtic artefacts in Europe. One is at Hallstatt near Salzburg in Austria; the other is at *La Tene at the northern end of Lake Neuchatel in western Switzerland. |