117j Getting Up Close with Gaelic Archaeology

Episode 117j Getting Up Close with Gaelic Archaeology

Description: Today Dr. Carly McNamara brings us up close and personal to history through her personal experience in participating in an archaeological dig on the Isle of Lismore in Scotland.

About Today’s Guest:
Dr. Carolyn McNamara
On Twitter: @MedievalCarly
Education Evolved: @EducationEvolvd www.educationevolvedltd.com/
Lismore Gaelic Heritage Centre - www.facebook.com/IsleofLismoreGaelicHeritageCentre
www.lismoregaelicheritagecentre.org/

Argyll Archaeology - www.facebook.com/argyllarchaeology
www.argyll-archaeology.co.uk/

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Begin Transcript:
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Today Dr. Carly McNamara brings us up close and personal to history through her personal experience in participating in an archaeological dig on the Isle of Lismore in Scotland. We discuss the importance of connecting the history of actual artifacts and texts to make a clearer understanding of history. Dr. McNamara also explains the benefits and drawbacks of reliance on texts and archaeology in the study of the past.
With that, here is the next piece of the mosaic of the history of the Popes of Rome and Christian Church.
[00:00:00] Welcome back to another exciting episode in our series on Irish Christianity. And we are joined again by Dr. Carlene McNamara of the university of Glasgow. And today's a little bit of, we're stepping out of the exact narrative of Irish Christianity. But we're going to focus in on one really specific and interesting aspect of the study of Christianity and this whole area of the world.
And that's true. The lens of archeology and Dr. McNamara was. Able to participate in an actual archeological dig in Scotland. And that's what we're really going to discuss today. So some specifics about this particular site and some of the overview of the importance of archeology and practically how archeology is done.
Dr. McNamara, how are you doing today? I'm doing excellent. You know, had some [00:01:00] recuperation time now from the dig, which was great fun. So I'm happy to be here to talk to you about it today. Well, yeah, we're, I'm definitely excited to learn more. Now. I guess the broadest question that we could ask is what is archeology.
Yeah, that's an excellent question. So my, my first thoughts on that are that it's a method of examining the past and kind of an approach and methodology that we can. Used to examine the past. And then in addition to that, it's a science. So it's something exciting and you can put that meticulous scientific brain.
You have to archeology as much as you can put that more. Free forum kind of historical brain towards that. And I like to just take a moment to talk about all the different kinds of hard sciences that we might think about and can add to archeology. So there's no botany you can [00:02:00] do. Archeological botany specialty, where you look at the plants that are being dug up or that there's evidence that were around at the time, this biology, whether you want to look at people or animals or the environment, chemistry, zoology, which of course is going to be more about the animals, computer science, you can bring that into archeology, forensics, climate, or environment studies, geology, earth science.
Even astronomy and maritime studies, you can look at underwater archeology or coastal archeology. There's just so much that is encapsulated within archeology itself. That just, I think makes it mind boggling how much. To dig into for it. It's gotta be really difficult to be an archeologist because you really have to be an expert in the particular methodology of archeology, which is a PhD in, uh, in and of itself.
Then you have to [00:03:00] at least know something about the history, to know what you're digging for. And they have to have all sorts of specialized knowledge of the equipment they need to use. And if they have to use a backhoe or an underwater archeology, the whole thing. Killing yourself. Deep sea diving. Yeah.
Underwater archeology, I think is just astonishing because you're right at the very outset before you even get to do anything, archaeological you have to be a trained, skillful, scuba diver, and just the thought of having to then try to meticulously go through sta chick. Still take her a fee on the floor of a body of water.
Yeah, you're in this environment. It's not like you just put the dirt in a bucket and take it and dump it into a pile. Like there's just so much to dig into with that as a concept that it, I find it astonishing. Now we're doing a history podcast here in a history lecture series with you on the history of the papacy podcast on Irish [00:04:00] Christianity.
Why don't, what do we need to know archeology for? Why is archeology important for this? Yeah. So this is another great question. And I'll start by pointing out that I'm not an archeologist. Like that's not my primary area of research. And I don't consider myself an archeologists though. I work with archeological material and material culture, quite a bit in my own research.
So I find it quite useful as a interdisciplinary researcher to look to archeology as a. Another avenue of finding information about the past, and I can then try to connect it to the textual evidence that I have, or if there's no textual evidence in some times, which does occur. And especially at the site of Lismore that we're going to talk about today, there are periods where there's really very little textual evidence or no textual evidence.
And all we have is the archeology to [00:05:00] tell us more. So. Uh, in a more broad terms, you know, if an early author writes about an item and then we find it in an archeological dig and we can date that item to the time period when the author was writing about it, then that can help confirm that we can trust what the author said.
So it can give us some evidence of reliability in our textual records. And. Yeah. As I said, when there's no textual record, it can help to fill some gaps, even though they're not the same kind of evidence. And I wouldn't call them a one for one exchange, they are really useful to be interdisciplinary. And how you approach it.
Archeology can also give us a lot more detail about material culture or the things that we might get from just reading, you know, how much detail will an author go into and describing a medieval shoe versus what we can learn by finding one. What happened when the [00:06:00] textual evidence conflicts with the archeological evidence?
Yeah, this is a great question. And so the biggest question that comes up from that for me is why does it conflict and how does it conflict? Because those questions themselves may lead us to a better understanding of the situation, you know, If it's just one small piece of evidence, we might weigh that against the variety of textual accounts that survive.