Seeing the Spirals: The Power of a Photograph

The photos from our ten day visit to Ireland are currently being uploaded to my website.  I'll be writing about this trip in more detail next week.  I'll be talking about the locations more specifically and also will give some travel recommendations for those who have Ireland on their bucket list.  This week, however, I want to touch on a more personal aspect of this particular trip.

Ballycarbery Castle

Ireland has fascinated me since I was a child.  Unlike most children, it wasn't Ancient Egypt that piqued my interest in archaeology, it was the more obscure culture of the Celts.  The Celtic peoples of mainland Europe and the islands of Britain and Ireland are rarely touched on in American schools, if at all.  The main reason for this is that they weren't conquerors in the traditional sense nor were they literate.  All they left behind were ritual sites and material culture.  I'm not really certain how I discovered them in my youth.  But, I have a distinct memory of coming across references in several modern retellings of the Arthur legend.  It didn't take long to discover that the culture mentioned in these stories was real, and I turned away from fiction to legitimate research to learn as much as I could about these people who seemed relegated to the mists of history.  My investigations, conducted through library books, began with the Urnfield peoples, then jumped over to the salt mining community of Hallstatt, then the shores of a lake in Switzerland, then it quickly spread all across Europe including pre-Roman France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Northern Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary along with bits of ancient Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and even Turkey.  I learned that when the Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians, he was writing to Celts.  Of course, as my research progressed I encountered the Romans, who quickly chased out or absorbed the continental Celtic peoples.  I followed the roads of Rome in my readings meeting the Celts in Britain, and hints of their existence in the never Romanized lands of Scotland and Ireland.  When Rome finally fell, eventually becoming a deadened husk propped up in Constantinople (Istanbul), most of the Celtic speaking peoples of Europe were no more, now considered just plain Romans who overrun and absorbed by the Germanic peoples of the east.  Their story ended on the continent, but it was far from over on the hinter lands, the areas known today as the Celtic Fringe- Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, and the pointed tip of France, Brittany.  Following the trail of the Celts led to a lifelong fascination with the Celtic Fringe nations, especially that completely Celtic island of Ireland.  I poured over photographs of its Neolithic and Celtic sites.  The iconic imagery of standing stones, mounds, ring forts, and tombs pulled me in.  They told a story, one which fascinated me to no end.  Here, in Ireland, the Celts were still very much above the surface.  They never left, they just progressed, and the ruins of their ancestors were the most visually compelling I had ever seen.  They weren't the cold, orderly structures of the Greeks and Romans, the overwhelming and bombastic remains of Egypt.  They were rings and structures of raw stones.  They were fit together like pieces of a puzzle, not straightened and squared.  What was scrawled on their surfaces were evocative spirals and shapes. These people were different.  They loved their landscape and what they left behind melded with the landscape.  The ruins of Ireland were sites that captured the imagination.  The pictures I found in books compelled me to learn more and that led me to archaeology.

Newgrange UNESCO World Heritage Site

Unlike the Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans, the popular choices for archaeological study, the Celts prior to Roman rule are entirely reliant on the archaeology to tell us who they were.  They never wrote anything down.  There are no great pre-Roman Celtic texts.  Even after they encountered the literate Romans, very little is mentioned about them. Except for a few writings of Caesar and others like Tacitus, historians can't really flesh out their tale.  The Romans, as conquerors, were certainly rather one sided in their documentation. So, in discovering the Celts, I discovered archaeology.  Initially, as I entered university I wanted to pursue an archaeological career that focused on Celtic studies.  Other things eventually took my interest, and even though I did go on to earn my degree in archaeology, it was in the studies of a more accessible time and place- the 19th and early 20th centuries in Ohio.  Eventually, my road went in a completely different direction.  Or did it?

For there I was, right back where I began.  Instead of looking at a photograph of a neolithic site in Ireland, however, there I was crafting my own.

It was just after 5:00am.  It was a little windy and quite chilly.  The sky was just getting that look, the one it gets on mornings when there are passing showers- purple, blue, and pink.  Before me, on a bizarre plain of exposed limestone was a prehistoric monument.  There wasn't a soul around except for a few cows.  And, then it hit me.  If my 13 year old self could see me now, she would go crazy.  She would have gone crazy multiple times over the last week.  We had spent several hours at places like this one- Cahergall Ring Fort, an obscure wedge tomb tomb high above the landscape of the Dingle Peninsula, and multiple castle and church ruins from the Middle Ages.  This spot, the Poulnabrone Dolmen, was the last location, and for me the most stirring.

The Poulnabrone Dolmen wasn't built by the Celts, but they probably used it.  It was, in fact, built by a different people, the original inhabitants of Ireland, sometime around 3600BC.  They were the same people of Ireland who built the massive sites of Newgrange and the other complexes at Brú na Bóinne.  It served as a tomb.  Excavations revealed the remains of about 30 people underneath.  Except for the collapse of one of the support stones in 1985 (which was replaced) the dolmen's simple structure of four standing stones supporting a large capstone has stood the test of time for over 5,600 years, longer than Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza.  It stands in a dramatic landscape of grooved and channeled exposed limestone of The Burren in County Clare.  It's an incredible place.

There I was, standing before one of the most visually arresting neolithic sites of Ireland.  It was dawn, and we had the place to ourselves. We were able to stay there for over an hour as the light grew and changed and the sun rose over the stones.  The place was ours.  It was an incredible morning.

Photographs are powerful things, and perhaps I didn't realize their true power until that morning.  It was photographs of places like the Poulnabrone Dolmen that created a love in me of prehistoric places and spaces, and the narratives of peoples otherwise gone from the landscape.  The photographs led to a interest and eventual study of archaeology which led to a whole host of other choices and relationships in my life, which eventually brought me to that dolmen at dawn, holding my own camera.  At one time, I had hoped to partake in study and excavations of such a place, but I realized that it wasn't the study of data provided by bits of bone, ceramics, and stone that I loved, it wasn't even the archaeology.  I no longer wanted to strip away the layers to see the thing in charts and graphs, I wanted to appreciate the place as it is now and create images of it.  The point was the imagery itself.  For it showed me who these people were, gave me a glimpse into their souls, more than an archaeological report ever could.  It was with a camera that I was intended to explore these locations, not with a trowel.

Cahergall Ring Fort

Life isn't necessarily a straight line, leading from one event to the next.  Instead it often resembles the emotive spirals found in the art of the neolithic and Celtic people of Europe.  One moment or idea branches into many journeys and ripples.  Each journey is unique, but centered in the same place.  A photograph studied as a child captured my imagination, which rippled for a time into the study of archaeology, which spiraled into a completely new phase, a journey that brought me in an unexpected way to the place of original inspiration.  The photograph I stood there to create was in turn inspired by that original image, but also by a life long study of the ancient peoples who shaped the land I was standing in.  Everything up to that moment had been the work of a photograph.  And, now I was creating my own.

That is pretty incredible.