resisting traditions: ceramics, identity, and consumer choice in the outer hebrides from 1800 to the...

International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Vol. 3, No. 1,1999

Resisting Traditions: Ceramics, Identity,and Consumer Choice in the Outer Hebridesfrom 1800 to the Present

Jane Webster1

On a number of levels, "peripheral" status has been imposed on the Outer He-brides (Scotland) since the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745. Drawing on a series ofinterviews with Hebridean families, this paper explores the changing meaningsof ceramics imported into the islands from the early nineteenth century and dis-played on wooden dressers. It is argued that in renegotiating their identity in theface of a series of externally generated economic changes, rural communities inthe Hebrides have acted as thoughtful consumers, appropriating mainland ma-terial culture to their own ends. Throughout this process, imports have behavedambiguously. This ambiguity is crucial to our understanding of the relationship—here characterized not as "resistance" but as "resistant adaptation"—betweenthe Hebrides and the mainland.

KEY WORDS: identity; consumption; nineteenth and twentieth century; Outer Hebrides.

INTRODUCTION

Eulogy of traditional aspects of Highland life (small village social structure, Gaelic, crofting,turf-roofed houses and so on) is...itself an external imposition. It runs counter to the long-standing ambitions and practices of the majority of Scottish Gaels, who have been anxiousto move to towns, learn English, find jobs, and live in modern comfort. And why not? Whyshould difference be enjoined upon them? (Chapman, 1992, p. 109).

In many fields of historical archaeology, from accounts of foodways(Meadows, 1994) and iconography (Webster, 1997) in Roman Britain, throughstudies of the domestic artifacts of early African America (Ferguson, 1992), to theexploration of reciprocity in the post-colonial Pacific (Thomas, 1991), there is a

1 School of Archaeological Studies, University of Leicester, Leicester LEI 7RH, UK.

S3

1092-7697/99/0300-0033116.00/010 1999 Plenum Publishing Corporation

growing interest in the active appropriation of non-indigenous material culture bycommunities occupying the "margin"—in all senses of that word. In particular,these studies have suggested that, in contesting externally imposed social changes,and in renegotiating local identities in response to such changes, peoples in inferiorpositions of power make active use of the material culture of those who hold powerover them. In such contexts, non-indigenous artifacts may be said to be behavingambiguously, they are simultaneously desired and feared, loved and hated. Theyplay a critical role in what Stern (1982, p. 11) has called "resistant adaptation;"the everyday processes of pragmatic accommodation by which wider structuresof dominance are countenanced. This paper deals with the issues of consumptionand identity in the Outer Hebrides (a chain of islands to the northwest of HighlandScotland) from ca. A.D. 1800 to the present. Herein, I explore the use of importedartifacts by "marginal" communities on whom, as discussed below, a very complex"peripheral" status has been enjoined. I consider the changing role that importedpottery has played over time in resistant adaptation to both this peripheral status,and to changing economic circumstances. In particular, I argue that during thenineteenth century, a period of major agrarian and social changes, newly availablemainland ceramics were utilized in ways that limited the encroachment of lowlandScottish and English culture, and that maintained local identities.

This paper also explores dialogues between past and present: dialoguesthrough which Hebrideans have addressed their own past; and dialogues betweenHebrideans and external observers (including myself), in which the past has alsobeen addressed. Archaeologists should rightly be as interested in the present asthey are in the past, and in that context this paper offers an anthropological explo-ration of the current use of material culture to recast the past for today's politicalcontext.

Many overlapping stories are therefore woven together here, in a study thatis part ethnography, part archaeology and part reflexive critique. At its core is aseries of conversations about dressers and the objects displayed upon them, heldby families from two Hebridean islands (South Uist and Benbecula; Fig. 1) in1995/1996.

The research on ceramics described here is a result of my involvement withthe Flora MacDonald Project; an interdisciplinary study of an upland rural set-tlement named Airigh Mhuillin, on South Uist. The settlement was the birth-place of Flora MacDonald, the much-mythologized heroine of the 1745 JacobiteRebellion, and is the subject of a long-term survey and excavation program directedby James Symonds. The most commonly recovered ceramics from rural settlementslike Airigh Mhuillin are those dating to the nineteenth century. Despite their abun-dance these ceramics have received little attention. Indeed, Henry Kelly (1993,p. 34) recently remarked that the study of sponge-printed wares (discussed below)must be one of the most neglected in the history of British ceramics. Yet sponge-printed wares and other inexpensive ceramics, which are unmarked and hence

54 Webster

Resisting Traditions: Ceramics, Identity, and Consumer Choice

Fig. 1. The Outer Hebrides.

difficult or impossible to provenance, are so common a feature of nineteenth-century settlement that at Airigh Mhuillin we felt it important to do more thansimply assume they were there because they were the cheapest wares available.The research methodology described below—which approaches sponge-printedwares from the perspective of active consumer choice—was devised in this con-text.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONSUMERISM IN THE HEBRIDES

Mass-produced goods arrived in the Hebrides during a period of repeatedsocioeconomic upheaval. In the Uists and Benbecula, these changes may broadlybe broken down into four phases (Devine, 1994; Hunter, 1976; MacLean, 1989;

55

Withers, 1988): the Jacobite Risings (1715-1760); the era of kelp manufactureand protocrofting—the lotting of farms into smaller units (1760-1815); a phaseof clearance and emigration (1815-1852), which reached its height in the early1850s following the 1840s potato blight; and the era of large-scale sheep farming(1850-1917). Each of these changes brought a reorganization of landholding, andmarked a further stage in the development of agrarian capitalism.

With these agrarian changes came the exposure of the Hebrides to the marketsof both the Scottish lowlands and England. From the early nineteenth century, anever expanding range of mass-produced consumer goods became available to eventhe poorest and most isolated families, a process accelerated in the 1860s-80s by thedevelopment of the rail network to the west of Scotland and the increase in steamerroutes (Emery, 1996, p. 187). This growth of consumerism is strikingly illustratedon Hirta (the main island of the St. Kilda group, some 160 km from the Scot-tish mainland), where recent excavations of houses on the Village Street, datingfrom 1830 to 1930, have produced transfer-printed wares of both Scottish andEnglish manufacture. They have also yielded a wide range of more readily prove-nanced stoneware and glass containers, including sauce bottles from Worcester,disinfectant bottles from London, and whisky bottles from Oban (Emery, 1996).Ceramics from the major Scottish producers and from English manufacturers (es-pecially the northern Staffordshire potteries) occur on South Uist from the early1800s, but, as on St. Kilda, are not widespread until the 1830s-1840s.

Thus, the fact of increasing consumption of imported goods in the nineteenth-century Hebrides is not in doubt. Nor is the desire to emulate mainland materialculture: the crude Craggan ware tea-sets from Barvas on the Isle of Lewis are awell known example here (Fig. 2; see also Curwen, 1938, pp. 280-283, and PlateIV.2). These tea-sets, which were first produced in the 1880s, were late products

Fig. 2. Craggan ware cups and saucers from Barvas, Lewis (after Curwen, 1938, Plate IV.2;original photograph lacks scale).

56 Webster

of a long-lived, handmade pottery tradition, and have long been regarded as anexample of local attempts to emulate mainland culture [as Curwen (1938, p. 282)puts it, these tea-sets show "Staffordshire influence"].

More interesting than the fact of consumption is the question: what sort ofconsumers were emerging on rural Hebridean settlements? In addressing this, wecould simply list excavated products and their known sources of production, as ispossible for St. Kilda (Emery, 1996, pp. 187-189). At face value, such lists im-ply an indiscriminate absorption of imported consumer goods, with a concomitantweakening of local identities. But at the same time, consumers actively employ thegoods they receive in the construction of both personal identity and social ideals:they appropriate what they consume. From this perspective, it is thus necessaryto consider whether Hebridean consumption patterns might not have reinforced,rather than weakened, local identity. The questions I want to ask, therefore, arewhat consumer choices were made, and why? Is it possible to determine whetherHebridean households bought from specific manufacturers for noneconomic rea-sons (for example, because they actively sought Scottish products), or were theysimply looking for the cheapest products from the most readily available source?Similarly, did these late consumers simply soak up everything that was offered tothem, or were they more selective?

I have been trying to look at these questions through the study of ceramics.Unfortunately, very little work has been done on the provenance of, and access to,the ceramics commonly found on nineteenth-century Scottish rural sites. This ispartly because much of the material comprises undecorated or simply decoratedceramics from the very bottom end of the market. Very few such items were markedby the manufacturer, and it is difficult to source the pieces with any confidence.Sponge printed wares, for example, were decorated by printing with portions cutout of the smooth root of a sponge. These wares were manufactured (or havebeen found) in 20 countries worldwide (Kelly, 1993, p. 5) but are very rarelymarked. The resultant difficulties in attributing sponge-printed ceramics to specificmanufacturers are compounded by the fact that the sponges were sometimes boughtin precut form from shared suppliers, making motifs common to several potteries.Often, it is impossible even to determine if unmarked wares were made in Scotlandor in England, a topic I will discuss below.

Faced with all these difficulties, and looking for other ways to address whyhouseholds bought the ceramics they did, I began to think about working fromthe known to the unknown and looking at patterns of ceramic use and displayamong South Uist households today. In the Hebrides there has been, since theearly 1800s, a tradition of displaying ceramics on wooden dressers, and it was tothis practice that I turned my attention. As I have already confessed, this approachwas much conditioned by my own perceptions of the conservative nature of SouthUist society, and what I offer here is a series of oral testimonies that highlight thecomplex relationship between past and present identities in the Hebrides.

Resisting Traditions: Ceramics, Identity, and Consumer Choice 57

(DE)-CONSTRUCTING HIGHLAND IDENTITIES

The Hebrides form part of the Gaidhealtachd, or Gaelic-speaking area ofHighland Scotland. Today, it is almost impossible to discuss Hebridean identitywithout addressing "Gaelic" and "Celtic" identity, because these terms have be-come inextricably woven together in discourses of identity concerning the ScottishHighlands and Islands.

It is increasingly understood in Iron Age studies that the ways in which ar-chaeologists have conceptualized the "Celtic" Iron Age is intimately linked todiscourses of identity about, and within, modern Gaelic-speaking societies (see,e.g., Chapman, 1992, pp. 24-42; Collis, 1996; Fitzpatrick, 1996). Indeed, myown interest in identity in Gaelic-speaking areas in nineteenth-century Scotlandis related to my research into the negotiation of "Romano-CeWc" identities inLate Iron Age and early Roman Gaul and Britain. It is widely recognized thatpresent-day Celtic constructs (Chapman, 1978,1992; Collis, 1996; Dietler, 1994),predicated on nationalist and romanticist notions of "timelessness" (Fitzpatrick,1996), or, more exactly, linear continuity (Hill, 1989) between past and present,condition our concepts of the Iron Age "Celts." These concepts, in turn, act backto inform our attitudes toward modern-day "Celts," "Gaels," "Highlanders" (andIslanders).

As many of the recent discussions on the invention of the modem "High-lands" (and Islands) have suggested, the Highlands are themselves a construct[(Chapman, 1978, 1992; Trevor-Roper, 1983; Withers, 1992); for a study of theinternationalization of this construct through the depiction of Scottish themes onEnglish transfer-printed ceramics, see Brooks (1997)]. One of the most influen-tial of these studies has been Malcolm Chapman's 1978 book The Gaelic Visionin Scottish Culture. In a study centered on the imagery within Gaelic literature,Chapman argues that Gaelic life is symbolically subsumed by the majority UnitedKingdom society. He argues that the construction of the Highlands (and Islands)as a "peripheral" fringe of community, continuity, and folklore is one which hasserved the needs of the ever changing "center." In turn, the imposed imagery of theHighlander has gradually been appropriated within the literature of the Gaidheal-tachd itself, so that "Gaelic culture" has in effect "become the literary interpretationto which it was initially subjected" (Chapman, 1978, p. 28).

Chapman's (1978, p. 26) argument is that the Highlands have been constructedas a place of guardianship of (and indeed moral responsibility for) traditions whichthe center itself has eschewed. One of his major theses is that the Highlands hasbeen looked to as a place changelessly faithful to its own past, and one focus of thepresent paper will be to show my own culpability here. As I tried to find ways toinvestigate nineteenth-century ceramics in the Hebrides, the research methodologyI devised was one which was predicated on exactly this belief in a sense of seamlesscontinuity. As the stories given below illustrate, I was quickly disabused of suchnotions when I talked to Hebridean families about their own attitudes to the past.

58 Webster

At the same time, however, these conversations also led me to question someaspects of Chapman's analysis of Gaelic-speakers' attitudes concerning the past.As Rosemary McKechnie (1993, p. 134) has noted, studies of small communi-ties that involve the textual examination of the imagery through which peripheralidentities are created often find it difficult to bridge the gap between "the textual re-production of imagery and the experience of those we study" (emphasis added). InChapman's (1978,1992) case, the importance of his deconstruction of the textualimagery of Highland identity is undeniable. Yet his reading of the way in which themajority of island-dwelling Gaelic speakers (as opposed to a mainland intellectualand political minority) continue to experience that imagery in their everyday livesis perhaps less nuanced, particularly with regard to temporal change.

As Chapman (1992, p. 87, p. 109) rightly argues, and as I came to understandfirsthand, many on the "Celtic fringe" have resisted their imposed role as guardiansof tradition, and have actively sought to modernize. Nevertheless, in the course ofmy own research, it became clear that Hebridean attitudes to the past have fluctuatedmarkedly during the last fifty years. The stories below indicate that as political and,especially, economic conditions have altered, the Hebrides' dialogue with its pasthas altered, too, and not always in ways that have led to a rejection of what (inChapman's terms) are the bogus trappings of an invented tradition. These changingconceptions of and attitudes toward "tradition" are the central focus of the presentpaper, which examines the problems that these shifting dialogues cause for present-day research on the meaning of material culture in the nineteenth-century Hebrides.

This is in some ways a cautionary tale, at least in those parts which concernme. What I hope, however, I can also offer some insights into the ways in whichshifting contemporary responses to the past can cause interpretational difficultiesfor archaeologists studying nineteenth-century material culture.

ON DRESSERS

In Scotland, as in Ireland, the dresser was an outstanding feature of nineteenth-century domestic furniture. Hebridean dressers were generally made of driftwoodor imported deal (the islands are largely treeless) and comprised three or fourshelves and/or plate racks above a cupboard with two doors (Grant, 1961, p. 173).As in Ireland, Scottish dressers appeared in the nineteenth century [see Thomas(1866, p. 156) for a contemporary description of the blackhouse furnishings, in-cluding dressers, on the island of Lewis]. The dresser is probably descended fromthe court cupboard [these were stages, or "boards," for the display of vessels, whichgradually acquired shelving for the display of plate (Thornton, 1978, p. 231)]. Inthe Highlands, an antecedent for the display element is also to be found in thehanging wall rack. The earliest textual reference to a Highland dresser (referred toas a beisaif) occurs in 1800, in Leyden's Tour in the Highlands of Scotland (Grant,1961, p. 173).


60

I encountered my first Hebridean dresser in the South Uist Museum, atKildonan (Fig. 3). This dresser holds an excellent collection of nineteenth- andearly twentieth-century household items. They were brought together before theSecond World War by the creator of the island's first museum, a priest who ap-pears to have created the collection by appropriating select items from his con-gregation's homes. The ceramics on this dresser are thus a composite collection,but are representative of the wares available during the last century. Perhaps unsur-prisingly, unmarked wares from the bottom end of the ceramics market predom-inate, including sponge-printed bowls and plates (Fig. 4) and numerous highlydecorated white earthenware jugs. The latter, as Kelly (1996, p. 68) notes, wereextremely popular throughout Scotland in the second half of the nineteenth cen-tury. Among the marked wares are a number of late nineteenth-century exam-ples from the Staffordshire potteries, but transfer-printed plates and ashets (largemeat plates) from Glaswegian producers predominate. The two best-representedmanufacturers are the Glasgow Pottery (J. and M. P. Bell and Co., establishedin the early nineteenth century) and the Britannia Pottery (established byR. Cochran in 1857).

I encountered my second Hebridean dresser in a whitehouse (the successorto the traditional, chimney-less Hebridean blackhouse) at Glendale, South Uist(Fig. 5). The house was abandoned in the mid-1980s when the occupant, an elderlylady, died. The croft is owned by her son, who lives elsewhere. No effort hasbeen made to arrest the decay of the building or its contents, and the dresser and

Webster

Fig. 3. Dresser in the Kildonan Museum, South Uist.

Resisting Traditions: Ceramics, Identity, and Consumer Choice

Fig. 4. Sponge-printed wares from the Kildonan Museum dresser, South Uist.

Fig. 5. Mairi Ruiridh's house, Glendale, South Uist.

61

62

other furnishings are rotting away (Fig. 6). The Glendale dresser made a strongimpression on me, because both dresser and contents, even in their present state,bore such a close resemblance to the composite image I had seen in the museum,and I knew that this dresser had still been in use in the early 1980s. It was infact the Glendale dresser that made me think that it might still be possible to findsome households where dressers continued in use, and where the histories of theceramics they contained might still be known. Having seen the Glendale dresser,I thus decided to track down as many dresser-owning families as I could, and askthem to tell me the histories of the dressers and their contents.

An obvious place to begin my quest for dresser-owning families might havebeen to trace the donors of the objects in the Kildonan museum, but unfortunatelythere were no accession records for any of the ceramics there, so I was unable totrace the families who owned those items. As described below, I was fortunatelyable to work through other channels.

What I wanted were material culture biographies, and below I present somestories that I recorded in this biographic quest. Two things are immediately apparentfrom these stories. First, that I am a generation too late to get comprehensiveanswers to the questions I want to ask. Even so, there is a discursive thread betweenpast and present that has enabled me to identify some interesting issues regardingconsumer choice and social identity. Second, it is clear that the period since theSecond World War, Hebridean families have successively sought to throw down abridge with the past and then to reconstruct it.

Webster

Fig. 6. Main Ruiridh's dresser.

THREE DRESSER BIOGRAPHIES

Through the channels of the Catholic Church and the South Uist HistoricalSociety, my search led me to Christina MacDonald, who, I was informed, owneda dresser of considerable proportions. In fact, Christina's dresser proved to be acarver (a cupboard with doors to either side of a recessed inner shelf, surmountedby a large mirror, and used for the carving and serving of cooked meats). It was oneof several examples that I encountered in modern Hebridean households, and theirpresence has much to do changing attitudes to Hebridean traditions. ChristinaMacDonald was born on South Uist. She is in her thirties and lives with herhusband and three children in a modern bungalow (i.e., a ground-floor house) onthe west side of the island. Christina's carver—an enormous item that dominatesher living room—was inherited from one of her uncles. It was bought at an auctionon the mainland, and came from "a big house." To the disgust of her uncle, it cost£6.00 to buy and £10.00 to ship to South Uist. Christina mainly uses the carverto display family photographs. It also has a recessed shelf that houses the familyguinea pig.

Christina explained that since the 1930s and 1940s it has been commonpractice for islanders working on the mainland to send furniture back to theirfamilies. I later saw a similar carver in the house of the island veterinary surgeon,who bought it some years ago from a gamekeeper. Furniture began to be shipped inquantity, Christina said, because people began to want nontraditional furnishingsin their own homes. Christina MacDonald has a very clear understanding of localattitudes to "tradition," and spelt this out to me in a description of the fate ofthe very dresser that had first excited my interest: the dresser in the abandonedGlendale whitehouse. It transpired that Christina had grown up at Glendale andknew the owner of the dresser well. She even has a photograph of the dresser,taken in the 1970s. The Glendale house was owned by Mairi Ruiridh, who in heryouth had been a "herring girl," meaning that she gutted fish on herring boatsworking between the islands and various Atlantic ports. The dresser was made inthe house from driftwood, by Mairi's brother. When Mairi died, the dresser wastoo large to remove from the house, and was left there. Mairi's son, Christina toldme, took from it "everything he thought was valuable," and left behind the rest.Christina acquired some of the unwanted things, including a set of the distinctive,tinted, miniature whisky and sherry glasses that are often seen in older Hebrideanhouses. Island ladies of Mairi's generation, Christina told me, were very keenon these objects. They were usually acquired from "packmen": itinerant tinkerstravelling the islands with huge packs full of household items. Leitch (1990) hasrecently inventoried the diversity of items carried by packmen, including glasses.He has also highlighted the importance of these tinkers in illuminating "the smallnooks and crannies of material culture which tend to be overlooked" (Leitch, 1990,p. 185). Mairi had followed the herring, and so some of the items that I saw on


the dresser reflected her travels—souvenir plates from Germany, Yarmouth, andso on—where the herring boats put in.

The things left behind in the house by Mairi's son—the little glasses andthe tillies (oil lamps), for example—were abandoned, Christina said, because theycarried the stigma of poverty. Christine made it very clear that certain artifacts,including dressers themselves and those elements of their contents that have nointrinsic value, are today perceived to reflect a material poverty from which manyislanders want to distance themselves. When Christina talked about this, it was clearthat she saw the changeover to this attitude occurring in the 1950s. The postwarperiod was one in which many islanders made a conscious effort to shed traditionallifeways and to buy into mainland mass culture. For many people of Christina'sgeneration, the 1950s represent the bad old days, and "traditional material culture"symbolizes neither community nor continuity, but poverty. Christina offered anexample of this within her own family. Her modern bungalow is situated next tothe remnants of a whitehouse that she would like to renovate as a garage. Herown leanings tell her this building should rightly be thatched; her husband will notagree to this plan because thatch (even now) suggests a poor household.

What is most interesting from Christina MacDonald's account of MairiRuiridh's dresser is the point that the stigma of poverty appears to override eventhe sentimental value of objects within families: Mairi's son felt no need to retainitems simply because they were his mother's. Rather, he saw them as representinga poverty he would rather forget. And that seems to be a prevailing attitude; anelderly member of the Historical Society told me that dressers were rarely found"since the standard of living went up." I find this interesting not so much in thatHebrideans do what ordinary people in the Highlands and islands have alwaysdone: modernize "without sentimentality" (Chapman, 1992, p. 109), but becauseof my own assumption that they would not. Here I fell prey to Chapman's chargethat outsiders—needing for their own reasons to believe in bastions of continuityin a changing world—impose upon "peripheral" places such as the Hebrides theguardianship of values of cultural continuity (Chapman, 1992, pp. 97, 108-109).

This is only part of the story, however. Seen from a longer-term perspective,the issue is even more complex, because the rejection of the past that I havedocumented here belonged to a generation now in their fifties and sixties. For thepresent generation there is a shift in the dialogue with the past once again, one thatentails a new meaning for nineteenth-century ceramics.

I met signs of a change in perceptions among the generation now in theirtwenties and early thirties, and particularly among those who have at some timelived on the mainland. Among this generation there is a growing desire to retain orreproduce items that they regard as "traditional." The problem here, as I show inmy final dresser story, is that the thread between this group of dresser ceramics andtheir original meanings has been lost. Nevertheless, the first evidence I obtainedfor this new attitude to the past was the growing trend for reproduction Highland

64 Webster

furniture (settles, box beds, and dressers). Asking about reproduction settles I hadseen in some houses, I was directed to Angus MacDonald of Benbecula, a furnituremaker. I was told he makes dressers, and so he does, but they are Welsh dressers,made from Swedish pine. And they sell extremely well. Mr. MacDonald sent meto one of his friends, Angus MacDonald the piper, who has in his kitchen a dressermade by Angus Stewart, the last traditional furniture maker on Benbecula, whodied in 1995.

The MacDonalds are in their thirties, and live in a modem house. Donaldis from the area, but lived in Glasgow for 10 years, where he met his wife Effie,who is from the Highlands. They moved back to Benbecula 10 years ago. Justalong the road from their own modem house is a traditional whitehouse whichthey recently bought and renovated, following the death of its owner. The house isnow let to holidaymakers and is filled with modem versions of old-style furniture,including a dresser and a box bed, made by Angus MacDonald, the Welsh dressermaker. But when the MacDonalds bought it, the whitehouse was in a dreadfulcondition. An elderly woman had lived there, with no electricity or running water,for many years. The dresser, now in the MacDonald's own kitchen, was the onlypiece of furniture they were able to salvage. Effie MacDonald clearly loves thisdresser: she admitted one reason she wanted the whitehouse was to save it. Whenthey moved the dresser to their own home, they also took the ceramics that hadbeen standing upon it. These comprise a very fine collection of sponge-decoratedbowls and plates (Fig. 7). The MacDonalds have stacked the ceramics in the sameway as they found them: plates on the display shelves and porridge or milk bowlsstacked upside down at the front of the dresser. The plates are unmarked, graysponge-printed variants of "Grecian," one of the best-known of the sponge-printeddecorative patterns (Kelly, 1993, p. 7), with a central element comprising a group oftrophies, surrounded by a wreath of leaves. As Kelly (1996, p. 20) notes elsewhere,the taste for grey-printed wares dates from 1875, suggesting an approximate datefor the MacDonald's plates.

The MacDonalds have preserved both a dresser and its contents. But havingnever really known the owner, the family know nothing about the material culturethey have protected; that knowledge died with the original owner. Today, onebiographical layer may be lost, but the dresser is acquiring a new one. Althoughthe MacDonalds have replicated every detail of their dresser as they found it, itis not preserved in aspic and is gradually acquiring items that are full of theirown memories. Effie MacDonald insisted that I remove these before I took anyphotographs, but she put them back immediately afterward.

Ultimately, I could not find a dresser displaying ceramics with a rememberedhistory. I still hope that I will be able to find one somewhere, but this is perhapsunlikely. Throughout Scotland, opportunities to record such histories are rapidlyslipping away. A recent account by MacKay (1995, pp. 118-119), documenting ef-forts by Historic Scotland and Cairdean nan Taighean Tugha to preserve a thatched


66

Fig. 7. The MacDonald's dresser, Benbecula.

house at No. 12 Lower Ardelve, Kintail, suggests that where such opportunitiesdo exist, they are not being seized. In the parlor of No. 12 Lower Ardelve was afine dresser, with an excellent collection of ceramics (especially jugs) and otherpersonal items [it is illustrated in MacKay (1995, p. 119)]. The owner was stillliving when the house was taken into the guardianship of Historic Scotland, butother than one or two anecdotes noted by MacKay (1995, p. 118), there doesnot appear to have been any systematic attempt at a material culture biographyhere.

My own failure to find a "living" dresser in the Uists was due partly to the factthat I am a few years too late (a decade, perhaps, at most) to interview the elderlypeople on whose memories these material culture biographies depend. But I wasalso too late because their children's generation saw no need to preserve certainforms of "traditional" material culture. Indeed, they did their best to eradicate them.An Englishman now living on South Uist once remarked to me that no one overfifty in the Hebrides ever talks about the good old days—sentimentality for thematerial remains of the recent past has for some decades been singularly absent.This is something that I completely overlooked in my own first encounters withthe Hebrides, which I wanted to see as a place of traditional values. The reality ismuch more complex.

Webster

Part of this complexity lies in the fact that "traditional" material culture nowhas a new appeal, for a newer generation. One wonders, in this context, whatMalcolm Chapman would make of Angus and Effie MacDonald's sense of tra-dition. He would perhaps suggest, as he argues for today's young Bretons onanother part of the "Celtic" fringe (Chapman, 1992, pp. 260-261), that they havelet an invented past take "a certain hold" because its a useful vehicle for "alterna-tive" political and economic views. But again, the situation is more complex thanChapman's academically rigorous logic allows. The "traditions" to which this gen-eration of Breton (or Gaelic) speakers are responding are, on many levels, inventedones. All traditions are constructs in some sense (see Brooks, 1997, p. 40), how-ever, and this does not make them, at the point of appeal, bogus. It is one thing for"the center" to diagnose its "periphery" as an historical construct; but how shouldthose who live on the periphery act upon this diagnosis? To what "authentic" past(if any) may the MacDonalds justifiably turn in trying to make sense of the present?And who should decide what is authentic in this context? However one respondsto these questions (for myself, they make me uneasy), it remains the case that theMacDonalds are engaged in a dialogue with the past and that dialogue is givinganother layer of meaning to an old material culture.

CONSUMER CHOICE? 1: PROVENANCE

As I outlined earlier, one of the issues I want to explore is whether Hebrideanhouseholds chose to buy, where possible, from Scottish, as opposed to English,manufacturers, and in this context it may be significant that the nineteenth-centurywares 1 can identify are almost always of Scottish origin. Lowland Scotland had athriving nineteenth-century factory pottery industry, centered on Glasgow and EastLothian (Cruickshank, 1987), and the demand for its products in the Highlandsand Islands is evident on nineteenth-century sites. This demand is not in itself,of course, evidence of a demand for Scottish products, as opposed to accessiblecheap wares that emulated English ones. Hebridean households could have boughtfrom Scottish manufacturers simply for reasons of accessibility; and it shouldbe remembered here that the biggest Glasgow companies (the Britannia Potteryand the Glasgow Pottery) produced on a scale not even matched by the largerStaffordshire pottery companies (Cruickshank, 1987, p. 20).

Yet at the same time, inexpensive English wares, especially from Stafford-shire, do appear to have been readily available from the principal Scottish emporiasuch as Glasgow. Given the ready availability of cheap English ceramics, it doesseem noteworthy that, wherever goods can be sourced, they are almost always ofScottish manufacture. I should emphasize here that I am not equating the desireto buy Scottish products with simple anti-English Scottish nationalism. I merelywish to suggest that there does appear to be a Hebridean preference for Scottishproducts, and that we do not as yet fully understand the reasons for this preference.


Sponge-printed wares, which I have mentioned several times above, providea good example of this preference for Scottish products. Although sponge-printedwares were made by many English potteries, particularly in Staffordshire, thetechnique of sponge-printing has always been particularly identified with Scotland.It is, indeed, likely that the technique originated in Scotland in the 1830s (Kelly,1993, pp. 3-4, 19). Modern commentators (including Cruickshank, 1982; andKelly, 1993) have all accepted the early suggestion by Fleming (1923) that sponge-printing originated in Scotland.

The production of Scottish sponge-printed wares appears to have centered onGlasgow, Bo'ness, Kirkaldy, and Prestonpans (all important centers of the Scottishpottery industry); waste dumps in all four areas have produced spongeware sherds(Kelly, 1994, p. 4). Unfortunately, little excavation has been undertaken on manu-facturing sites. Kelly (1993, pp. 15-16) notes work at the Clyde Pottery, Greenock,and some partial work during redevelopment of the Bo'ness Pottery site which sug-gests that the technique may have been pioneered there. Recent excavation at thesite of the Britannia works in Glasgow (Alan Leslie, 1997, personal communica-tion) may contribute significantly to the sourcing of sponge-printed wares.

In the course of my own work, I have found that where, for stylistic reasons,I can suggest a source for sponge-printed wares, those sources are almost withoutexception Scottish. For example, a number of the pieces on the dresser at theSouth Uist Museum bear a close resemblance to the distinctive "Auld HeatherWare" range produced by Methven's Links Pottery in Kirkaldy (Kelly, 1993, PI.XIII). Similarly, the "Grecian" motif plates on Angus and Effie MacDonald'sBenbecula dresser were almost certainly produced in Scotland. Four of the fiveknown manufacturers of sponged Grecian were Scottish—J. and M. P. Bell and Co.(Glasgow Pottery, Glasgow), R. Cochran and Co. (Britannia Pottery, Glasgow),Methven Links Pottery (Kirkaldy, Fife), and J. Marshall and Co. (Bo'ness Pottery,West Lothian)—and the fifth (Maling) was from Newcastle on Tyne, in northernEngland (Kelly, 1993, p. 7). Grecian motif spongeware (again almost certainly ofScottish manufacture) also figures strongly in the domestic assemblages from theVillage Street, Hirta (Emery, 1993).

CONSUMER CHOICE? 2: FOODWAYS

Without further excavation of manufacturing sites, the exploration of con-sumerchoice through vessel provenance will remain problematic. Perhaps a closelyrelated, yet more useful avenue than vessel provenance is vessel form. As Kelly(1996, p. 68) has noted, ceramic assemblages from the Highland zone exhibit acharacteristic that separates them from both English and Lowland Scots assem-blages: the prevalence of bowl forms over plate forms. The Highland preferencefor bowl forms has been noted in a number of recent excavation reports. On Hirta(St. Kilda), where the Village Street was constructed in 1830 and occupied until

68 Webster

the island was evacuated in 1930, plates are present, but the number of bowls(sponge-printed, transfer-printed, and hand painted) is far greater (Kelly, 1996,p. 68). This pattern is repeated in nineteenth-century contexts throughout the He-brides and continued to be reflected in the contents of dressers until very recently.In his account of Highland folkways made in 1961,1. F. Grant (p. 175) gave a briefaccount of dresser contents which appears to reflect this pattern: he saw a greatdeal of transfer-printed ware made by Bells of Glasgow, and also many "charming,gaily patterned milk bowls, some of them made in Perth."

Most interestingly, the preference for bowl forms is one that clearly pre-dates the widespread introduction of mass-produced imported ceramics in themid-nineteenth century. At Allt Chrisal, Barra, for example, bowl forms dominatedin a largely pearlware assemblage from the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century farm buildings (Foster, 1995, p. 117). Here, it is necessary to considerthe ways in which preexisting vessel traditions (in turn, related to foodways) mayhave influenced the choices made by emerging nineteenth-century consumers ofimported ceramics.

While our knowledge of local post-medieval coarseware production in theHebrides is limited, imported wares were not filling an aceramic void. In areaswith good clay resources, imported ceramics gradually replaced local, handthrowncraggans (round-based vessels) glazed with milk and fired either on the hearthor (as at Barvas, Lewis) in a clamp kiln of turf and seaweed (Fig. 8; see alsoCurwen, 1938, pp. 280-282; Holleyman, 1947). Recent excavations have shownthat craggans were also produced on St. Kilda (Emery 1996, p. 19, pp. 58-68).Several Village Street locations (House 7,1830-1860 phase; House 8; BlackhouseW; and the rubbish pit to the rear of House 7) all produced locally made sherds(MacSween 1996, pp. 19-20,58-68,120,153). These vessels were predominantlyof globular form, but some larger, bucket-shaped vessels with corrugated exteriorsurfaces were also present. In some parts of the Hebrides, including the island ofTiree, craggan manufacture, which was carried out almost exclusively by women,persisted until the early twentieth century (Holleyman, 1947, p. 205). The CragganWare tea services from Barvas, Lewis, mentioned earlier, were late products of amuch older craggan industry.

The term craggan specifically denotes a round-based, globular vessel with aneverted rim, varying in height from 100-360 mm, and used for cooking, storing andcarrying food (MacSween 1996, p. 67; Grant, 1961, p. 178). These large, globularforms were not the only products of the craggan repertoire, however. Holleyman(1943, p. 205-206) noted that, on Tiree, cup-shaped vessels, used in the consump-tion of milk products, were also traditionally produced (also see Holleyman, 1947,PL VII, Nos. 2,4-6). On Tiree, the cup form appears to have become dominant overtime (Holleyman, 1947, p. 208). Cattle were a crucial element in the transhumantfarming economy of the Hebrides, and milk and milk products played an importantpart in the diet. In this context, there is a particularly strong association between


70 Webster

Fig. 8. Round-bodied craggans from Lewis [after Holleyman (1947, Figs. 1-4); originaldrawings lack scales].

the smaller craggan forms and milk. Several commentators on the manufacturingprocess have recorded the fact that milk was poured over newly fired craggans. Ona functional level this may simply have served to make them less porous (Curwen,1938, p. 282). Holleyman's (1947) account adds an additional dimension, how-ever. He notes (1947, p. 208) that on Tiree it was believed that milk was a remedyfor illness, particularly consumption, and refers to a procedure whereby a cragganwas heated on the fire, milk was drawn into it from the cow, the vessel then heatedagain, and the milk administered to the invalid. On Tiree, he adds (1947, p. 208),each household reserved a small craggan especially for this purpose.

Pottery manufacture of course depended upon ready clay supplies, and priorto the introduction of factory-produced ceramics from the mainland, the use of

wooden vessels existed side by side with (or in some areas, in place of) localpottery manufacture in the Hebrides. The most commonly documented woodedvessel is the cuach or quaich, a small, pedestal-based bowl, usually with two ormore flat lugs near the rim (for an illustration see Grant, 1961, p. 179, Fig. 25). Insize and shape, it is very similar to the later factory-produced earthenware milk orporridge bowl.

It is clear that bowl forms, including a range of small bowls used in theserving of milk products, were predominant in the Hebrides prior to the intro-duction of imported ceramics. It also seems clear that following the introductionof factory produced wares, bowl forms continued to predominate in rural domes-tic assemblages. The prevalence of these forms in the Highland zone throughoutthe nineteenth century suggests that nascent Hebridean consumers did not indis-criminately absorb all that became available to them from mainland markets, butmade careful choices. While plates and other vessel forms in the lowland ceramicrepertoire were sought, bowl forms were consistently preferred, I would suggest,because they facilitated the continuation of existing dietary preferences and dininghabits. With reference to the latter, I have resisted referring to Hebridean bowlsas "table-wares" because it is clear that tables (and chairs) were among the lastmodern items of furniture to be adopted by Hebridean households, for whom thehearth long continued to be the focal point at meal times. Writing in 1866, Capt.F. L. W. Thomas (1866, p. 156) caught this point exactly when he noted that whiledressers and bedsteads had become quite usual items of furniture, tables and chairswere still "almost unknown." I would suggest that what is at work here is localpreference, reflecting local dietary preferences and eating arrangements; and therange of ceramics sought by Hebridean families (single bowls rather than morecomplex place settings) reflects this preference.

CONCLUSION

As Nicholas Thomas (1991, pp. 83-124) notes in a recent discussion ofthe indigenous appropriation of European artifacts in the Pacific, we too oftenoverlook the localized, cultural reasons that inform the demand for particularimported commodities on the "periphery." Thomas was specifically discussingthe movement of commodities between western Europe and the Pacific Islands,but a similar point may justifiably be made with reference to England and its"Highland" periphery: the use of imported ceramics throughout the Hebrides wasso widespread in the nineteenth century that we have, perhaps, taken too littleaccount of the ambiguities that underlie the presence of these wares.

As I mentioned when I set out, this paper has been something of a cautionarytale. I had hoped to find some hints about the meaning of nineteenth-centurymaterial culture by working from the present to the past. Instead I found that sincethe 1950s many Hebridean families have sought to put behind them a history of


poverty. In so doing they have resisted the role of guardians of timeless tradition(Chapman, 1978) that the outside world has attempted to impose upon them.But, through this act of resistance, they have also broken the threads that wouldhave made it possible for me to investigate more fully an earlier kind of resistantadaptation to changing circumstances—one in which an identity threatened byexposure to mass-produced consumer goods was, perhaps, actively renegotiatedthrough the localized appropriation of those same imported goods.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks are due to James Symonds and to the staff of the Kildonan Museum,South Uist. I should also like to thank the South Uist Historical Society for helpingme to locate dresser-owning families. I am above all grateful for the time, andkindness, of the families I interviewed in the course of this research. In order topreserve the privacy of their living rooms, I have altered the names of some peopleand places.

REFERENCES CITED

Brooks, A. M. (1997). Beyond the fringe: Transfer-printed ceramics and the internationalization ofCeltic myth. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 1: 39-55.

Chapman, M. (1978). The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture, Croom Helm, London.Chapman, M. (1992). The Celts: The Construction of a Myth, St Martin's Press, New York.Collis, J. (1996). Celts and politics. In Graves-Brown, P., Jones, S., and Gamble, C. (eds.), Cultural

Identity and Archaeology, Routledge, London, pp. 167-178.Cruickshank, G. (1982). Scottish Spongeware, Edinburgh.Cruickshank, G. (1987). Scottish Pottery, Shire, Buckinghamshire.Curwen, E. C. (1938). The Hebrides: A cultural backwater. Antiquity 12: 261-289.Devine, T. M. (1994). Clanship to Crofter's War, Manchester University Press, Manchester.Dietler, M. (1994). "Our Ancestors, the Gauls": Archaeology, ethnic nationalism, and the manipulation

of Celtic identity in modern Europe. American Anthropologist 96: 584-605.Emery, N. (1996). Excavations ofHirta, 1986-1990, HMSO, Edinburgh.Ferguson, L. (1992). Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America 1650-1800,

Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington.Fitzpatrick, A. (1996). "Celtic" Iron Age Europe: The theoretical basis. In Graves Brown, P., Jones,

S., and Gamble, C. (eds.). Cultural Identity and Archaeology, Routledge, London, pp. 238-255.Fleming, J. (1923). Scottish Pottery, Glasgow.Foster, P. (1995). The early modern pottery. In Branigan, K., and Foster, P. (eds.), Barra. Archaeological

Research on Ben Tangaval, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield, pp. 117-118.Grant, I. F. (1961). Highland Folkways, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.Hill, J. D. (1989). Rethinking the Iron Age. Scottish Archaeological Review 6: 16-24.Holleyman, G. A. (1947). Tiree craggans. Antiquity 21: 205-211.Hunter, J. (1976). The Making of the Crofting Community, John Donald, Edinburgh.Kelly, H. E. (1993). Scottish Sponge-Printed Pottery, Lomonside Press, Glasgow.Kelly, H. E. (1996). Crockery: Red and white earthenware. In Emery, N., Excavations ofHirta 1986-

1990. HMSO, Edinburgh, pp. 19-20, 68-70, 120-123,153-154.Leitch, R. (1990). "Here chapman billies take their stand": A pilot study of Scottish chapmen, packmen,

and pedlars, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 120: 173-188.

72 Webster

MacKay, S. (1995). Behind the Facade: Four Centuries of Scottish Interiors, RCAHMS, HMSO,Edinburgh.

MacLean, G. (1989). Locheynort South Uist: Appraisal ofUist Documentary Sources c. 1600-1980(unpublished report to Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist A Deas).

MacSween, A. (1996). Coarse pottery. In Emery, N., Excavations of Hirta, 1986-1990. HMSO,Edinburgh, pp. 19-20, 58-68, 120,153.

McKechnie, R. (1993). Becoming Celtic in Corsica. In MacDonald, S. (ed.), Inside European Identities,Berg, Oxford, pp. 118-145.

Meadows, K. (1994). You are what you eat: Diet, identity and Romanisation. In Cottam, S.,Dungworth, D., Scott, S., and Taylor, J. (eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth Annual TheoreticalRoman Archaeology Conference, Oxbow Books, Oxford, pp. 133-140.

Stern, S. J. (1982). Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest, University ofWisconsin Press, Madison.

Thomas, F. L. W. (1866). On the primitive dwellings and hypogeaof the Outer Hebrides. Proceedingsof the Society of Antiquaries ofScotland 7(1): 153-195.

Thomas, N. (1991). Entangled Objects: Exchange. Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific,Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Thornton, P. (1978). Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, Yale University Press, NewHaven, CT.

Webster, J. (1997). A negotiated syncretism: Readings on the development of Romano-Celtic reli-gion. In Mattingly, D. (ed.), Dialogues in Roman Imperialism, Journal of Roman ArchaeologySupplementary Series No. 23, pp. 164-184.

Withers, C. W. J. (1988). Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region, Routledge, London.Withers, C. W. J. (1992). The historical creation of the Scottish Highlands. In Donnachie. I. and

Whatley, C. (eds.), The Manufacture of Scottish History, Polygon, Edinburgh, pp. 143-156.


resisting traditions: ceramics, identity, and consumer choice in the outer hebrides from 1800 to the...

Documents