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A Very English Savage | some loose ends, updates and errata etc.

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on November 29, 2023 – 12:15 pm
Filed under A Very English Savage, Comment, Curatorial Projects, Photography

A Very English Savage is aimed at a general reader and, so, breaks many conventions associated with academic publishing. curator.ie goes one step further in introducing an online component on the Ballymaclinton blog site. This picks up any loose ends, errata etc in the book as well as adding additional research that followed the end of writing. It also creates an online space for engagement with readers of the book.

As far as motivation goes, lack of space combined with the complexity of the ground covered meant that I included heavily edited versions of some arguments in A Very English Savage, with the inevitable consequence of loose ends. That prompted this experiment in hybrid, interactive and engaged publishing. After all, that is what Haddon did in the 1890s when he combined journalism and slide shows as a work around to limits of the publication of his photographs and his unorthodox, anticolonial views on the nature of anthropology.

A montage of two portraits of Alfred Cort Haddon and John Millington Synge. Left. Haddon on board the S. S. Brandon in 1885 (detail), with permission Royal Irish Academy © RIA. Haddon is dressed in sailor's outfit and soft hat and stares off camera. Right. Synge in Paris in 1897 (curator.ie collection). Synge is dressed as a fashionable young man about town.

Left. Haddon on board the S. S. Brandon in 1885 (detail), with permission Royal Irish Academy © RIA. Right. Synge in Paris in 1897 (curator.ie collection).

The first ‘loose end’ on the list is, of course, Synge and his photography. That is where this whole project started way back in 2009 and, post publication, remains an active area of investigation. I propose in A Very English Savage that Haddon’s work in the Aran Islands provided an ethnographic baseline for later work by literary modernists like Synge and cultural nationalists like Hyde. However, the evidence presented was limited by space to a series of outlines and the Ballymaclinton blog provides the space to publish the notes that furnished those outlines as well additional research carried out in 2023.

A Very English Savage | ‘the head-hunter’ and ‘the playboy will be followed by updates on the importance of the field club movement as a contact point for Haddon, Synge and Hyde. The series will also include posts about the cameras used by Haddon and Synge in the field, along with separate posts on the twenty five photographs featured in the Haddon and the Aran Islands exhibition currently on show in the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Other ‘loose ends‘ include what it meant to become an anthropologist in 2020, when a stand off between a humanitarian tradition of engaged anthropology and an academic discipline of political utility achieved a level of controversy in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. This part of the series will pick up on what it means to engage with the history of anthropology at a time when the very idea of anthropology is contested and, so, add a critical and contemporary edge to the series. That strand kicks off on 4 December 2023 with the inaugural, online conference of the History of Anthropology Network.

John Millington Synge took this  photograph of a young man and a boy posing alongside a drystone wall that is traditional in the Aran Islands. Both are dressed in traditional home spun vest, shirt, waist coat and trousers. The man wears rawhide sandals while the boy wears boots. Lilo Stephens identified the man as Martin McDonagh. photo credit: John Millington Synge. 1898, Digital photographs from scanned silver gelatine negatives (Timothy Keefe, Sharon Sutton 2009). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin. Alt text by Ciarán Walsh, curator.ie.

John Millington Synge. 1898, Digital photograph from scanned silver gelatine negative (Timothy Keefe, Sharon Sutton 2009). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin.

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Twenty five photographs that change the history of anthropology

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on October 30, 2023 – 1:08 pm
Filed under Anthropology, Curatorial Projects, Photography, Research

A. F. Dixon, Untitled, 1890. Digital print from scan of silver gelatine, glass-plate negative (Ciarán Rooney, 2019). The original negative is held in in the School of Medicine, Trinity College, University of Dublin.
© curator.ie

‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ is an exhibition of twenty five photographs that builds on Ciarán Walsh’s newly published book on Alfred Cort Haddon’s work as a photographer and anthropologist in Ireland in the 1890s. A Very English Savage will be launched in the Royal Anthropological Institute on 31 October 2023. More at Ballymaclinton.

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‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ exhibition in Royal Anthropological Institute | London | Oct 2023

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on October 11, 2023 – 8:54 am
Filed under Anthropology, Curatorial Projects, Photography

A. F. Dixon. 1890. Untitled. Digital print of silver gelatine, glass-plate negative (Ciarán Walsh and Ciarán Rooney, 2019). The original negative is held in the School of Medicine, Trinity College, University of Dublin. © curator.ie.

I can’t tell you all the excursions we made in Aran. it wd be as tedious for you to read as for me to write suffice it to say that Dixon & I left very little unseen & what with sketches & photographs we have a good deal on paper.

A. C. Haddon describes the beginning of visual anthropology in a journal he kept aboard the S. S. Fingal during a survey of fishing ground off the west coast of Ireland in 1890

Previously unseen photographs of the Aran Islands feature in an exhibition Ciarán Walsh and Andrei Nacu curated for the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ opens on 15 October 2023 and features twenty five photographs that are organised around Haddon’s first ethnographic account of the Aran Islands, which he presented as a slideshow in Dublin at the end of 1890.

The photographs challenge the idea that anthropologists like Haddon were, by default almost, preoccupied with evolution bracketed by race and colonialism while their counterparts in cultural nationalism and literary modernism became fascinated by Island dwellers. John Millington Synge’s writing is usually presented as the antithesis of Haddon’s science but this exhibition points to a common interest in social documentary photography that manifests a deeper connection between the ‘Head-hunter’ and the ‘Playboy‘.

Haddon and Dixon spent a week in the islands in 1890 and they documented the extraordinary glaciokarst landscape, the people, their way of life, customs, folklore and numerous archaeological sites. On his return to Dublin Haddon used ten of Dixon’s photographs in a slideshow titled ‘The Aran Islands’, the first of six slideshows that included ‘Ethnographical Studies in the West of Ireland’ in the Anthropological Institute in 1894. He renamed this ‘On the People of Western Ireland and their Mode of Life’ when he showed it at a meeting of the anthropological section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science later in the year. Given the high profile this topic gained in the Home Rule crisis in 1895, the change registers a the overlap between Haddon’s photo-ethnography, his anticolonial activism and the Home rule crisis.

Dixon took over fifty photographs while working for Haddon on a fishing survey in 1890. Haddon sent a box of the glass plate negatives to R. J. Welch, a photographer in Belfast, to be processed as lantern slides. On their return, Dixon seems to have put them on a shelf under the ‘Old’ Anatomy theatre in TCD, where they lay undiscovered until 2014. Dixon’s camera was lost, but the camera shown here is a kit-built quarter-plate from the same period and matches the negative holders Dixon used (foreground). In 2019, Walsh commissioned Ciarán Rooney (Filmbank) to print a new set of photographs from digital scans of the negatives (photo Ciarán Walsh).

Haddon summarised his photo-ethnographic experiments in a manifesto published in 1899 and re-issued in 1912, but the document entered modern anthropology as it was becoming what Margaret Mead later called ‘a discipline of words’. Furthermore, a misplaced historiographical focus on Haddon’s career in zoology obscured his interest in art and photography and so masked the beginning of visual anthropology.            

This exhibition brings us back to that beginning: Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ photography in the Aran Islands in 1890. It features ten new prints from Dixon’s negatives of Haddon’s slideshow and these are contextualised by photographs from various archives in Dublin, Belfast and Cambridge that point to Haddon’s influences and impact, most of which have never been exhibited before. They include digital prints of the oldest surviving photograph of Skellig Michael (1868), a study of folk dance by Clara Patterson (1893) and a still from Haddon’s film of the last dance of the Malu Zogo-Le (1898). Synge first met Haddon in 1886 and and is represented by a photograph that registers the latter’s influence, which, in turn, indexes Haddon’s extraordinary modernism.

Walsh explores these developments in more detail in an RAI Research Seminar in the Royal Anthropological Institute on 31 October 2023 after which his book Alfred Cort Haddon: A Very English Savage will be launched. For details / registration see the events page on the Institute’s website.

J. M. Synge. 1898. Islanders of Inishmaan. Digital print from scan of glass plate negative (Timothy Keefe, Sharon Sutton, Gill Whelan 2009).  TCD MS11332_28_b courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin

circle of texture grey back ground with the words www.curator.ie embossed on it. designed by Ciarán n Walsh

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STORYTELLING FESTIVAL LAUNCHES BUSY AUTUMN SCHEDULE FOR CURATOR.IE

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on September 14, 2023 – 11:45 am
Filed under Curatorial Projects

Listowel International Storytelling Festival kicks off a busy Autumn and Winter schedule for curaor.ie.

On Thursday 14 September Ciarán Walsh ‘curates’ The Bolex Boys: An Adventure in Storytelling in Film, a public conversation with filmmakers John Lynch & Michael Mulcahy. They created an extraordinary cinematic record of the changing social and cultural landscape of North Kerry from the 1970s onwards.

The Storytelling event marks the beginning of a collaboration with Kerry Writers’ Museum with funding from the Regional 2023 Museum Exhibitions Scheme. The project involves the digitisation of Lynch and Mulcahy’s 1978 film The Way I Remember It, featuring a soundtrack created by Eamon Keane. The film will be the centre piece of The Bolex Boys exhibition which opens in Kerry Writers’ Museum on 19 October.

In the meantime, Berghahn Books (New York and Oxford) will publish Ciarán Walsh’s radical telling of the story of Haddon ‘the Head-hunter‘ in Ireland. The book will be launched in the Royal Anthropological Institute in London on 31 October and Walsh will curate an exhibition of photography for the occasion.

Pages from Dixon photo album © National Library of Ireland

Haddon and the Aran Islands will be constructed around an ethnographic account of the Islands Haddon presented as a slideshow in 1890. Haddon used photographs Andrew Francis Dixon took under his direction. Walsh discovered Dixons negatives in 2014 and commissioned a new set of digitised images in 2019.

This exhibition is the first time this remarkable photographic experiment will have been shown in public. The exhibition will also include a critical review of Haddon’s influences and impact and will include the a scan of oldest surviving photograph of Skellig Michael (1868) and a photographJohn Millington Synge took in the Aran Islands in 1898.

A digital scan from the negative made in 2009 for Walsh’s groundbreaking exhibition John Millington Synge, PhotographerCourtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin (2023).

circle of texture grey back ground with the words www.curator.ie embossed on it. designed by Ciarán n Walsh

curator.ie finds oldest surviving photo of Skellig

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on August 8, 2023 – 4:35 pm
Filed under Curatorial Projects, History of Anthropology, Photography

William Mercer, c. 1868, St Michael’s Church and Cell, digital scan of gelatine silver print. Permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA.

“Skellig provided J. J. Abrams with the perfect location for the birthplace of the Jedi. The challenge of filming Star Wars on a steep rock twelve kilometres out in the Atlantic has added enormously to the mystique of a place with a long tradition of pilgrims scaling its twin peaks. 150 years before Abrams landed on Skellig, Edwin Wyndham-Quin noticed a monastic complex on the first ordnance survey map of the rock and included it in his study of pagan forts, Christian hermitages and mediaeval churches. William Mercer photographed each site between 1866 and 1869 and the discovery in April 2023 of his print of “St Michael’s Church and Cell” provides an opportunity to revisit an adventure in photography that surpasses Abrams’ determination to film on the rock.“

For more on this story go to the Irish Examiner.

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stolen skulls start the long journey home to Inishbofin

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on July 15, 2023 – 11:04 am
Filed under Curatorial Projects, Stolen Skulls

#stolenskullstcd start the long journey home to #inishbofinfuneral pic.twitter.com/LOQvyiV4dK

— Ciarán Walsh (@CiaranWalshnoe) July 15, 2023

Inishbofin burial: the most import anthropological event in Ireland since 1930s?

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on July 6, 2023 – 11:14 am
Filed under Advocacy and Activism, History of Anthropology, Stolen Skulls

Archaeological excavation at St Colman’s Monastery on Inishbofin in preparation for the return and burial of ancestral remains stolen in 1890 and held in the Anatomy Dept TCD since 1892 (photo: Marie Coyne)

The opening of a grave in a community burial ground marks the end of a ten-year campaign seeking the return and burial of the ‘stolen skulls’ of Inishbofin. Community representatives will remove the remains of their ancestors from the ‘Old‘ Anatomy Dept at Trinity College, University of Dublin at 11am on Wednesday 12 July and, following a funeral service at noon in the college chapel, will begin the journey home. The burial will take place at 1pm on Sunday 16 July. See www.inishbofin.com for details.

Christopher Day (top) making the coffin in the same way that his great grand uncle James Cunnane (bottom) made coffins in Inishbofin in the 1960’s (photos: Marie Coyne).

This is the first repatriation project of its kind in Ireland and is probably the most important anthropological event since the Harvard Anthropological Mission to the Irish Free State in the 1930s. To begin with, the story of the ‘stolen skulls of Inishbofin’ captured the public imagination in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter Movement and generated extensive media interest in the history of anthropology in Ireland. Furthermore, the controversy triggered a critical engagement with the idea of anthropology at a community level and this will have a major impact on how institutions deal with communities in relation to colonial legacies. For instance, the Colonial Legacies Review Working Group at TCD contested the use of ‘repatriation’ to denote ‘return and burial’ because, ironically, of its unwelcome colonial connotations in an Irish context. The debate that followed clarified important aspects of the legislation governing the retention of human remains, not least (a) the distinction between archaeological and ethnological collections from the colonial era and (b) the automatic right of return for burial in the case of the latter. The controversy also raised serious questions about the ‘evidence based’ methodology employed by the Colonial Legacies Review Working Group, which ultimately had to concede the unconditional right of communities in Inishbofin, Aran Islands and St Finian’s Bay to have ancestral remains returned for burial.

The Inishbofin remains will be buried as close as possible to St Colman’s Monastery, where they rested until Haddon and Dixon stole them in 1890. The site was chosen because of the low risk of disturbing earlier, unmarked burials – the source of the remains – or any settlement associated with the monastery. Nevertheless, archaeologist Franc Miles from Archaeology and Built Heritage supervised the opening of the grave by Ryan Lash, John Burke, John Cunnane, John Michael Coyne, Ryan Coyne and Máirtín Lavelle.

Marie Coyne documented the process in the following slideshow.

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Masterclass at the 2023 Atlantic Anthropological workshop on 23 April .

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on April 21, 2023 – 4:13 pm
Filed under Anthropology | Curatorial Projects, Conference

I will present a masterclass at the 2023 Atlantic Anthropological / Antraipeolaíochta Atlantach workshop at the Sacred Heart Dingle Campus in Daingean Uí Chúis, Co. Kerry. Convened by Dr. James Cuffe (University College Cork) and Dr. Fiona Murphy (Dublin City University), the workshop offers a multi-modal exploration of anthropology in its broadest sense, an objective that resonates profoundly with historical and contemporary themes in my research, which Berghahn Books will publish in September 2023.

To explain: In 1895 Haddon called for the study. of anthropology in its widest sense, challenging restrictions placed on the investigation under the name of anthropology of a variety of social, philosophical and political topics, a doctrine enforced by anatomists who advocated a politically conservative construction of evolutionist biology. In 2020, I completed my doctoral research on Haddon’s involvement in the skull measuring business in Ireland, when a similar debate was happening in anthropology and sociology. That focussed my attention on what, practically speaking, becoming an anthropologist means nowadays, especially as I come from a visual arts background, and becoming an anthropologist was somehow accidental. As contradictory as it sounds, that is the theme of my masterclass.

The Stolen Skulls of Inishbofin. Photo, by Marie Coyne (2022) of Inishbofin Island off the coast of Galway in Ireland. The ruin of St Colman's Monastery provides a backdrop for the contemporary burial ground in the foreground. Haddon and Dixon stole thirteen crania (skulls without jaw bones) from the monastery in 1890, and gave the collection to Trinity College Dublin. Marie Coyne and Ciarán Walsh began campaigning for their return in 2012.
The Skull Passage, TCD. Photo by Walsh (2016) of Victorian Display cases containg the Anthropological Collection of the Anatomy Museum in Trinity Colledge Dublin (TCD), which incudes a collection of 24 crania (skulls without jawbones) Haddon and Dixon stole from monasteries in the west of Ireland in 1890, and gave to TCD. The photo shows a narrow corridor lined with display cases . The stolen skulls from Inisshbofin held in the deisplay case in the foreground and are labelled ‘Inishbofin, Haddon & Dixon’ Marie Coyne and Ciarán Walsh began campaigning for their return in 2012.
Peadar Mór, Ciarán Walsh and Muiris Ó Conghaille taking a break during filming on Inis Meáin, 2014.
Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin, the last child to live on the Great Blasket Island with Dáithí de Mórdha, The Great Blasket Centre,  in front of a photograph of Gearóid with his Grandfather Maurice Mhuiris Ó Catháin, taken by Dan MacMonagle after the Island was evacuated in 1953.
A photograph of an article by Ciarán Walsh, www.curator.ie of an article published by him in the Irish independent. The article relates to the activities of Charles R. Browne (1867-1931), an anthropologist who was active in the west of Ireland between 1891 and 1900. Browne is the subject of a major project by Ciarán Walsh / www.curator.ie and a touring exhibition that is on a nationwide tour, from Dingle to the Aran Islands to Connemara and the National Museum in Mayo. The photo also contains a skull, a reference to Brownes habit of collecting skulls as anthropometric specimens, the origin of the projecta title: The Irish Headhunter.
circle of texture grey back ground with the words www.curator.ie embossed on it. designed by Ciarán n Walsh

a small book that will change a lot: a very English savage takes a step closer to publication …

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on April 21, 2023 – 2:53 pm
Filed under Anthropology, Curatorial Projects, Publications
Haddon, a radically modern anthropologist, sits next to Dr Rev Dr Samuel, President of the Royal Irish Academy in the cover photo of the book Alfred Cort Haddon, a very English Savage by Ciarán  Walsh, a curator who completed a PhD in the history and philosophy of anthropology in 2020. The cover indicates that the book is part of the series called Anthropology's Ancestors, which is edited by Aleksandar Bošković for Berghahn Books of New York and Oxford. The cover is a detail of a photograph taken in 1885 of a group of natural scientists on board a research vessel chartered for a survey of fishing grounds off the south west coast of Ireland. Haddon cuts a striking figure. He is dressed like a pirate amongst suited academics, a man of action whose natural domain was fieldwork. Sitting to his left is the Haughton, a fellow home rule supporter with a shared who shared a family history of anti-slavery and humanitarian action.

Prof Alfred Cort Haddon sits next to Dr Rev Dr Samuel, President of the Royal Irish Academy, and a fellow home rule supporter who also shared a family history of anti-slavery and humanitarian activism (with permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA).

Berghahn Books has just provided me with a typeset copy of my book on Haddon, which is due out in September as the fifth volume in the series on Anthropology’s Ancestors edited by Aleksandar Bošković. Details are available on the Berghahn website, and I discuss the choice of title and other aspects of this project in my Ballymaclinton blog.

Anon., Dredging party, 1885, with friends [plate 16] sitting, left to right: A. C. Haddon (in front of light suit), S. Haughton, W. S. Green, C. B. Ball; standing: Sir D’Arcy W. Thompson (light suit), Sir R. S. Ball (yachting cap), Valentine Ball (at end of trawl), 1885. Digital scan of silver gelatine print. Permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA.

circle of texture grey back ground with the words www.curator.ie embossed on it. designed by Ciarán n Walsh

An Island Funeral, Inishbofin, 16 July 2023.

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on March 29, 2023 – 10:25 am
Filed under Curatorial Projects, Repatriation Projects, Stolen Skulls
The Stolen Skulls of Inishbofin. Photo, by Marie Coyne (2022) of Inishbofin Island off the coast of Galway in Ireland. The ruin of St Colman's Monastery provides a backdrop for the contemporary burial ground in the foreground. Haddon and Dixon stole thirteen crania (skulls without jaw bones) from the monastery in 1890, and gave the collection to Trinity College Dublin. Marie Coyne and Ciarán Walsh began campaigning for their return in 2012.

St Colmans’s Monastery and burial ground, Inishbofin. Photo Marie Coyne.

Inishbofin community representatives and repatriation campaigners met with Eoin O’Sullivan and Ciarán O’Neill of TCD last night (28 March 2023), and agreed in outline arrangements for the return and burial of ancestral remains held in the Haddon Dixon Collection; in accordance with island traditions and community archaeology guidelines. 

The remains will be handed over to the community at a ceremony in TCD and taken by an undertaker to Galway before being transferred by boat to the island, where they will be buried on Sunday 16 July 2023, one hundred and thirty three years to the day after they were taken. 

It seems that this will serve as a model for the return and burial of the remains taken from St Finian’s Bay and Oileán Árann.

It’s been a long and, at times, difficult process, but the motto of the cooperative movement in Ireland is ní neart go cur le chéile (with unity comes strength) and we thank all of our supporters. This would not have happened without them.

We also thank Andrew O’Connell of the Provost’s Office in TCD. His intervention was a turning point in our negotiations with TCD. We especially thank Eoin O’Sullivan and Ciarán O’Neill, who got the deal across the line. Also, thanks to Mobeen Hussain and Patrick Walsh of the colonial legacies project TCD.

Marie Coyne and Ciarán Walsh

on behalf of the

The Haddon Dixon Repatriation Project

Marie Coyne, Inishbofin Heritage Museum. 

Dr Pegi Vail, NYU, anthropologist, filmmaker, and community representative Inishbofin.

Cathy Galvin, poet and journalist. 

Deirdre Casey, Comhlacht Forbartha an Gleanna (St Finian’s / the Glen). 

Niamh Cotter, anthropologist, geographer, and community representative, Inis Mór, Árann.  

René Gapert, independent forensic anthropologist.

Dr Fiona Murphy, Anthropologist.

Máirtín Ó Conceanainn, community representative, Inis Mór, Árann.  

Pádraig Ó Direáin, community representative, Inis Mór, Árann. 

Pat O’Leary, Comhlacht Forbartha an Gleanna (St Finian’s / the Glen). 

Ciarán Walsh, curator and anthropologist. 

Inishbofin Community and Friends

Inishbofin Development Company

Tuuli Rantala, Community development Co-Ordinator

Tommy Burke

Ryan Lash

Pauline King

Aoife King

Every person who attended the public meeting on Inishbofin on 4 November 2022, those who signed the petition on Inishbofin and online, and made submissions to TCD on our behalf.

Eamon Ó Cuiv TD

Deaglán O’Mocháin, Dearcán Media.

Ana Ivasiuc, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures.

All the journalists who covered the story in the media.

Teampall Cholmain 2023 – 1890

A composite photograph by Ciarán  Walsh of St Colman's Monastery, showing Marie Coyne's 2014 colour recreation (left) of the photograph of A. C. Haddon's black and white original (right), recording the location of the skulls (bottom right corner) he and Dixon stole under cover of darkness on 16 July 1890. The photographs show the eastern gable of the mediaeval monastery, and in Haddon also recorded the scene in an identical sketch in his journal, and that sketch illustrates a vivid account of the theft.

A composite photograph of St Colman’s Monastery, showing Marie Coyne’s 2014 recreation (left) of the photograph of A. C. Haddon’s original (right), recording the location of the skulls (bottom right corner) he and Dixon stole under cover of darkness on 16 July 1890. Haddon also recorded the scene in an identical sketch in his journal, and that sketch illustrates a vivid account of the theft.

circle of texture grey back ground with the words www.curator.ie embossed on it. designed by Ciarán n Walsh
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A Very English Savage | some loose ends, updates and errata etc.



Twenty five photographs that change the history of anthropology



‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ exhibition in Royal Anthropological Institute | London | Oct 2023



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