Ewan Campbell


Dr. Ewan Campbell is a Scottish archaeologist and author, who serves as the senior lecturer of archaeology at the University of Glasgow. An author of a number of books, he is perhaps best known as the originator of the historical revisionist thesis that the Dál Riata did not originate from Ireland. He has also authored works about Dunadd and Forteviot.

''"Were the Scots Irish?"''

The traditional narrative of Scottish history, is that the kingdom of Dál Riata was founded by Gaels from Ulster in Ireland, who crossed the Irish Sea after being squeezed by the ascent of Conn Cétchathach's descendants. This position is upheld in medieval Gaelic texts such as the Duan Albanach, which attributes to the a descent from Síl Conairi of the Érainn. This is held to be the means by which the Gaelic language came to northern Britain and where the clans who founded Scotland first entered the region. During the 2000s, advances in DNA studies confirmed the Dál Riata Scots as belonging to Haplogroup R1b, with the marker L1335 associated specifically with them.
Campbell authored a paper in 2001, named Were the Scots Irish?, in the Antiquity, which attempted to challenge the relationship between the Gaels of Ireland and those of Dál Riata. He stated that there is no archeological or placename evidence of a migration or takeover. This lack of archeological evidence was previously noted by English archaeologist Leslie Alcock. Archeological evidence shows that Argyll was different from Ireland, before and after the traditionally held migration, but that it also formed part of the Irish Sea province with Ireland, being easily distinguished from the rest of Scotland.
Campbell suggests that Argyll and Antrim formed a "maritime province", united by the sea and isolated from the rest of Scotland by the mountainous ridge called the Druim Alban. This allowed a shared language to be maintained through the centuries; Argyll remained Gaelic-speaking while the rest of Scotland became Brittonic-speaking. Campbell argues that the medieval accounts were a kind of dynastic propaganda, constructed to bolster a dynasty's claim to the throne and to bolster Dál Riata claims to territory in Antrim. This view of the medieval accounts is shared by other historians.

Works