"The Archaeology of Identity in Aran" by Veerendra Prabodh Lele

Veerendra Prabodh Lele

Deposited 2003

Abstract
This dissertation examines contemporary cultural identities in a region of Ireland through an investigation of the social and cultural practices involving archeological sites in this region. The research is centered in Inis Mór, largest of the three Aran Islands in the west of Ireland, part of the Irish Gaeltacht where Irish is the primary community language. My eighteen months of fieldwork research included interviews in Irish and English, participation in an archeological excavation of an Early Medieval Christian church, and archival research in Aran, Galway, and Dublin. Aran is an archeologically and ethnographically rich part of Ireland and my thesis examines the identities of Aran residents in relation to archeological sites ranging from the Neolithic to the nineteenth century. Archeology has been a part of the discursive formation of Aran as a repository of pure “Irishness”: pre-modern, ancient, Celtic. This critical ethnography explores contemporary meanings of these sites in relation to this historical formation. Using a semeiosic approach I examine the material correspondence of identity in Aran, providing ethnographic description and analysis by interpreting matter, practice, and meaning within a common domain.

The practice of archeology has influenced our understandings of sites in Aran: I argue however that there exists local knowledge that is a product of both the discursive history of and contemporary practices in Aran. Aran people distinguish between Christian and pre-Christian sites through differential social practices. My research shows that in certain (though not in all) aspects the Christian and related sites have greater contemporary resonance than the pre-Christian sites; nor are the religious sites considered to be archeological by residents. Religious practices such as the praying of the Rosary and kinship practices including veneration of the dead are two of the ways through which Aran people mark the differences between the pre-Christian and Christian, between the “archeological” and the “historical”, between the objective and the intimate. The sites themselves, as semeiosic material culture, regulate, anticipate, and persist in contemporary identities and meanings. Situated between cultural and archeological anthropology, this dissertation describes how Aran residents interpret current meanings of these archeological sites.