Christian Maclagan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christian Maclagan (* 1811 in Baehead near Denny , Falkirk ; † May 10, 1901 in Ravencroft, Stirling ) was a Scottish archaeologist and probably the first female archaeologist in Great Britain. But she was denied full membership in the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland because she was a woman.

Life

Christian Maclagan: Drawing of Keir Hill, Gargunnock , circa 1870

Christian Maclagan was the daughter of the burner and chemist George Maclagan and Janet Colville. She was born on the family farm in Braehead near Denny. Her father died in 1818, as did her paternal grandfather, Frederick Maclagan, a parish minister in Melrose , and her mother moved the family to Stirling to a house in Pitt Terrace, an affluent part of town near the modern Stirling Council offices.

Her mother died in 1858 and by that time Christian Maclagan was involved in philanthropic activities such as improving living conditions in the slums of Stirling, founding a Sunday school and maintaining a public library. After the division of the Church of Scotland in 1843, the so-called "disruption" , she joined the Free Church of Scotland and in 1865 financed the construction of a new church. Her relationship with the Free Church deteriorated in the 1870s and she successfully sued for the return of the church, which she then donated to the established Church of Scotland. Apparently around the time her mother died, she received an inheritance from one of her brothers, which gave her some wealth. After her death, her fortune was estimated at £ 3,100 .

She was highly educated, mastered Latin, French, ancient Greek and Gaelic - her paternal grandfather had tried to translate the Bible into Gaelic. She also spoke some Italian and was a talented draftsman.

archeology

Maclagan put forward the theory that the megalithic stone circles and large stone tombs were the remains of houses and fortifications. At that time, the difference between wheelhouses and stone circles was not always clear, and there are Neolithic structures that were rebuilt in the Iron Age or the Early Middle Ages, such as Clettraval on North Uist, so the assumption is not as unlikely as it may first appear . Maclagan believed that an academic study of all of these sites would reveal a message through the archaeological 'language' required for such research. She developed a special method that squeezes of stone sculptures to customize and made hundreds of fives ( rubbings ) of processed stones of different sites, they were released on their own costs. These include some of the earliest made in the Wemyss Caves . Perhaps her greatest contribution to posterity was her meticulous collection of copies of Celtic crosses and Pictish symbol stones , which she made from around 1850. One of their main interests was the Scottish Brochs . In 1870 she examined the Livilands Broch in Stirling. She was one of the first to document the sequence of layers in the excavation.

Late years

As a woman, Maclagan could not become a member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland , but only Lady Associate . As such, could not officially publish with the Society and needed a man to publish their work under his name. As a result, she sent her copies to the British Museum . In 1888 and 1901 their copies were exhibited at the Glasgow Exhibition. The Smith Museum in Stirling has one of their models of a Broch Tower. She died in Ravenscroft, Stirling, her grave is in the old city cemetery of Stirling.

The blatant misogyny may have resulted in her work being overlooked and one of her key discoveries, Livilands Broch, being lost. The rejection of their views could be related to the misogynistic views of their time or to the anthropological comments Maclagan made on her archaeological studies. Her biographer, A. Millar, simply calls her a "bad scholar". In 2014, Stirling Council archaeologist Murray Cook began a project to rediscover the Livilands Broch, which led to a re-excavation in 2016.

Publications

  • The Hill Forts Stone Circles and Others Structural Remains of Ancient Scotland . Edmonston and Douglas, 1875 [1]
  • Chips from Old Stones . Self-published, 1881
  • What Mean These Stones? D. Douglas, 1894 [2]
  • A Catalog Raisonné of the British Museum Collection of Rubbings from Ancient Sculptured Stones . Edinburgh 1895

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry on Clettraval  in Canmore, the database of Historic Environment Scotland (English)
  2. ↑ a b Joanna Hambly: Archaic sculpturings to 4D Wemyss . YouTube. Recording archeology. Retrieved February 18, 2015 .
  3. ↑ https://christianmaclagan.wordpress.com/maclaganbio/
  4. ↑ Elizabeth L. Ewan, Sue Innes, Sian Reynolds, Rose Pipes (Eds.): The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women . 2008.
  5. ^ AH Millar, Maclagan, Christian (1811-1901) , rev. HCG Matthew, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, doi : 10.1093 / ref: odnb / 347712016
  6. ↑ https://christianmaclagan.wordpress.com/
  7. ↑ https://christianmaclagan.wordpress.com/
personal data
SURNAME Maclagan, Christian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH 1811
PLACE OF BIRTH Baehead, Denny , Falkirk
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 1901
Place of death Ravencroft, Stirling