Sidestep: The Roscrea Head

This artefact is a lifesize wooden head, allegedly found near Roscrea, County Tipperary, Ireland. It was on display in the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, but has now been acknowledged as a fake.

The discussion that follows deals with its original assessment by the British scholar Dr Anne Ross, well-known for her seminal work on Pagan Celtic Britain (1967) and for her ability imaginatively to combine folklore with archaeology and literature. Ross was commissioned by the Menil Collection to comment upon the Roscrea Head and published an essay upon it in 1987. She noted that it was made of ‘bog oak’ which radiocarbon tests dated to the fourth or fifth centuries AD (more recent tests have moved the date into the period AD 680–880[23]). She compared the decorative motifs to a variety of Celtic objects in La Tène style, from various parts of Europe and ranging in date from the fourth century BC to the sixth century AD, then discussed ‘tattooing and skin painting in Ancient Europe’. It is clear that she supposed that the carving represent tattooing, presumably because of the obvious similarity to Maori art—though this is not stated.

Drawing on a range of literary and folk traditions she concluded that the Head may be that of a pagan divinity and that the find-place may therefore be a Christianised pagan sanctuary, for ‘the godhead and the severed head both symbolised the power of faith and in Ireland, unconquered and but slightly affected by the Roman Empire, the melding of the old and new beliefs must have presented no serious problems’. Her final words were: ‘The harmonious fusion in Ireland of Druidic divinity with compelling Christianity resulted in the magnificent imagery and design that was to become the glory of Irish ecclesiastical art. Nowhere is this to be witnessed more poignantly and dramatically than in the Wondrous Head of Roscrea’.

Setting aside the lyricism required by an art catalogue, it is interesting to see how Ross is thinking. She accepts without question the romantic premise that the Irish were an unchanging people, untouched by the Romans and hardly affected by Christianity. This approach has been described as the ‘nativist’ position and is nowadays well-understood as a hybrid child of the Celtic Revival and the Irish nationalist agenda. The anti-nativist position rejects the idea that the epic literature from which Ross draws her social constructs is of any great antiquity. Indeed Kim McCone has gone so far as to suggest that the famous ‘severed head’ motif is actually borrowed from the Bible rather than representing a pre-Christian Irish practice.

Why does Ross feels the need to mention Christianity? Why not simply accept the Roscrea Head as an object of the La Tène period, since that is where she finds most of her analogies? The reasons are twofold. Firstly the comparisons with La Tène art are not convincing. Secondly, and more importantly, the alleged find-place happened to be the very well-known ecclesiastical site of Monaincha, to which much folklore is attached. It is this folklore which gave depth and some plausibility to the Ross interpretation. But, as we have now learnt, the dealer simply invented the provenance, which appealed to his ‘highly educated, logical, romantic imagination’ and the Head has no connection with Monaincha, or Roscrea, or anywhere else. Dr Ross and the Menil Collection were both cruelly deceived.

However, Irish scholars had always been very reluctant to accept the antiquity of the Roscrea Head, which had been offered on sale in Dublin as a Maori artefact since 1955. In 1971 the National Museum of Ireland had refused to acquire it on the grounds that it was more likely to be Maori than Irish. Many people suppose that it is Maori, or a copy on Irish oak. In fact it cannot be authentic, nor a copy of an authentic original, because it does not conform to the grammar of Maori tattooing, moko. In moko each line is a sign, giving a message about lineage, status, occupation and personal history, but there are some unvarying motifs, particularly the set of curved lines which brackets the mouth. This is not present on the Roscrea Head, which also differs by the treatment of the hair, which in Maori carving is usually a topknot or not shown.

If the Head is not Maori, it is still likely to have been made in Ireland, however uncertain its specific provenance. It is carved from north European oak, quantities of which were used in medieval trackways and artificial islands (crannóg), where it aged into the richly coloured ‘bog oak’. But the radiocarbon date of 680–880 AD applies only to the wood, not to the carving. The dendrochronologist Michael Baillie has pointed out that ‘the carving looks as if it were performed after the wood was already aged’, beginning to crack in a characteristic radial pattern which the hairstyle can ‘both exploit and disguise’. In other words the timber had first aged, then been dug out and exposed long enough for it to crack. Masses of bog oak were obtained during nineteenth-century drainage operations and from the 1850s there was a vogue for using it for decorative objects typically using Irish or La Tène motifs.

It is conceivable that the Roscrea Head was created in that antiquarian spirit: the Sydney archaeologist Catherine Palmer, studying the carving from detailed photographs, has shown what the first stage would have looked like. The stiff down-combed hairstyle is typical of Irish ecclesiastical objects of the eighth to tenth centuries AD, most notably the metal crucifixion plaque from Rinnagan, County Roscommon, now in the National Museum of Ireland. This also has the best parallel to the spiral decoration on the cheeks of the Roscrea Head, as Ross points out.

(1) - The Roscrea Head: ‘Head of a God’, oak with traces of pigment, 15x7¾x7½ in. Reproduced from p. 51 of The Menil Collection: A Selection from the Paleolithic to the Modern Era, New York: Harry N. Abrams. (2) - The Roscrea Head without surface decoration, drawing by Catherine Grant Palmer, Sydney 2000.

I can imagine a Celticising design created as a scholarly witticism by someone who was acquainted with Classical references to woad-painted Britons—a cliché of antiquarian reconstruction. The designer had to be aware of Maori tattoo, for the resemblances are too striking to be just a coincidence. Most antiquarians would have been aware of moko, for the Maori were a popular subject of enquiry throughout the nineteenth century and by the 1880s moko was so well embedded in Irish scholarly culture that W.F. Wakeman needed neither references nor illustrations to support a comparison with the carvings at Newgrange: ‘We find that New Zealanders, and not a few other savage tribes, were in the habit of tattooing their persons with figures almost exactly similar’.

Tattooing had been a fascinating topic ever since Cook's voyages, when at least one tattooing implement was collected. The use of tattoo was discussed by James Burney and very probably in his family’s salon. There was a minor craze for Maori heads (some of which were tattooed after death to meet the demand) and for Maori carvings in general. Two of Cook's companions, the surgeon James Patten and second lieutenant James King, gave substantial collections to Trinity College, Dublin, including at least one carved wooden head. This head bears a certain resemblance to the Roscrea Head and could have served as an inspiration. Other sources of inspiration could have been books such as John Craik's The New Zealanders (1830) and the hugely popular collection of Maori portraits by George French Angas, exhibited in London in 1846 and published as The New Zealanders Illustrated (1847). The interest in moko continued to be catered for by Horatio Robley's articles in the Illustrated London News 1864–1868 and by his books thereafter.

My ‘Celticising witticism’ scenario runs counter to Edmund Carpenter’s view that the Head was a commercial modern fake. Why create such a fake? It apparently remained unsold for over 30 years and singularly failed to impress any scholar other than Anne Ross, who happened to be sincerely committed to a certain view of the Celtic past and was misled by the alleged provenance. It also deceived Carpenter, who recommended that the Menil purchase the Head, but he does not claim to be an expert in Celtic art. He wrote: ‘We wanted that story to be true. It was such a lovely head, such a lovely story’.

The word ‘lovely’ conjures up Oscar Wilde's unforgettable evocation in De Profundis of ‘Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no more than the life of a flower’—and therein lies the problem. To continue to imagine universal ‘Celts’ who are heroic, for Aileen Fox, or mystical, for Anne Ross, has seduced these two scholars and their audience away from the historical reality of the people who created the pa or the Roscrea Head. Conflating the identities of the Maori and of the Celts or Irish has made for good reading but has not adequately served scholarship. It has served only to reinforce the colonial mentality which constructed both the Celts and the Maori as generically different from their conquerors.