Crystal Clear: Centuries-Old Stones Uncovered by Archaeologist Reveal Stories of Ireland’s Mystical Past

The crystals that Brighton's team unearthed in 2018 and 2024 date back to perhaps 1780.

Six years later, four more quartz crystals turned up in the dirt of an adjacent field, leading to his latest discovery about a long-neglected corner of Irish history.

As the world celebrates St. Patrick’s Day on Monday with green beer and music, Brighton’s research spotlights the decades in Ireland before and after the 19^th century potato famine, a period of abject poverty under British rule. The associate professor of anthropology is the only American licensed to lead excavations on the Emerald Isle, and part of a small group of archaeologists dedicated to that time period in Ireland.

Where empty homes succumbed to destruction and entombment, Brighton’s team arrives with shovels. Each layer of soil reveals increasingly older items, forming a 200-year timeline of Irish peasant lifestyle.

“We put a face on those broken teacups, children’s toys and sewing materials to demonstrate that these nameless people were human, and they were here,” said Brighton, who supplements his findings with archival research.

His work fills a gap in Irish history that local archaeologists generally avoid because of its painful context. According to Barra O’Donnabhain, a senior lecturer of archaeology at University College Cork and National Museum of Ireland board member, some students in Ireland are instructed that the field of archaeology ends at 1700, even though the diaspora period, from 1750 to 1922, shaped the country.

“There’s an echo from all of that forced starvation, impoverishment and death, and Stephen’s work takes the perspective of the people impacted most directly,” O’Donnabhain said. “He’s looking at a group who disappeared from the landscape.”

Searching for roots
In Brighton’s childhood New Jersey home, his mother banned discussion of their Irish heritage—his ancestors arrived in the United States around the time of the famine—and stressed assimilation, an attitude he retained as a college archaeology student at Montclair State University. After graduation, the company he worked for was tapped to excavate a tract in Lower Manhattan where disease-infested tenements once housed 19^th-century Irish immigrants. (The neighborhood, once known as the Five Points, was featured in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film “Gangs of New York,” whose recreated landscape was informed by Brighton’s dig.)

Later, as a Boston University doctoral student, he explored why many Irish immigrants abandoned much of their culture and spent the next decade excavating sites where Irish Americans once lived and worked: Blue Ridge Mountain shanty camps that emerged during railroad construction; West Baltimore backyards used as outhouses and garbage disposals; a Northern Maryland quarry whose materials helped form the Washington Monument.

As Brighton studied 12,000 years of Irish history and unearthed Irish American relics, he dug into his own ancestral line, too. “I had an idea of this imaginative homeland but no notion of where home was,” he said. “It was this rootlessness.”

He learned, for example, that his American-born relatives returned to the old country to exhume kinsfolk from paupers’ graves and give them Catholic burials. With his prodding, even his mother began embracing their roots. During her maiden trip across the pond, she planted a foot in the sod and said, “It’s good to be back in the homeland.”

Brighton joined the UMD faculty in 2005, and in 2009 authored the book “Historical Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora: A Transnational Approach.” In 2014 he became the second American to obtain an Irish archaeology license, following his graduate school mentor, he said.

For the past decade he’s led annual field schools in Ireland near the southwestern town of Skibbereen, an epicenter of 19^th century emigration not far from his ancestral home.

A pair of discoveries, six years apart
The single-story cabin, dating to around 1860, was typical for its day, with a stone-and-clay foundation measuring 33 by 20 feet, and a thatched gable roof and two hearths. It once housed a farming family of 12.

A different family arrived in 1911 and immediately fell into a dispute with neighbors, Brighton learned through archives. The family was evicted but refused to leave. One day after a court appearance, they returned to find the home burned down.

In 2018, Brighton and his students arrived in the townland of Lackaghane and began digging for the cabin’s remains. One day, a student discovered a quartz crystal buried alongside burnt cloth and a Virgin Mary medallion. Though uncut, the stone boasted elegant, geometrically symmetrical lines.

The cloth was likely a pouch for the medallion, but Brighton wasn’t sure about the crystal. Weeks later, however, when his team uncovered three more near what appeared to be cow stables, Brighton grew curious: “I thought, ‘Huh, this is interesting. I don’t know what to think, but I’ll back-burner it.’”

Last summer, the team moved to an adjacent field, where an 18^th-century home was thought to have stood. Students eventually uncovered a cornerstone then a quartz crystal. Three more crystals appeared near what may have been cow stables.

Kate O’Sullivan, a second-year anthropology graduate student with a background in Irish paganism and assistant field director for the dig, was ecstatic.

“They’re not just in the ground,” she recalled. “People must have been using them.”

She consulted with Brighton, who recalled the crystals from the original site six years prior.

A culture of magic
After poking around a University College Dublin repository documenting the history of Irish folklore, Brighton and O’Sullivan found an explanation: During the centuries leading up to and including the famine, Irish families used quartz for protection against malevolent fairies who they believed appeared the first week of every May. The fairies, sometimes summoned by people to attack enemies, cursed the damned with bad luck, illness, even death.

For a family whose neighbors hated them—enough to set their house ablaze—bundling a quartz crystal with a Virgin Mary medallion inside the home exemplified the Irish custom of appealing to both Catholic and pre-Christian powers.

Brighton and O’Sullivan further learned that Irish farmers believed that wrathful fairies cast their spells on livestock, causing sick cows and sour milk. To protect their main source of food and finances, farmers looped quartz crystals around their cows’ necks. Suddenly, the UMD researchers understood why seven of eight crystals were discovered near stables.

“I was so stinking happy,” O’Sullivan recalled. “Since Ireland has an oral tradition of storytelling, it can be hard to find certain folklore written down. So finding accounts that talked about crystals was awesome—it meant we had ground to stand on.”

Beyond that, the findings belied the idea that modern Ireland was always the “land of 100,000 welcomes,” and was instead an island where feuding neighbors engaged in mystical showdowns.

Brighton and O’Sullivan are completing a paper on the crystals, which they learned date back perhaps to 1780. In addition, Brighton is writing a book about the family whose house was burned. Next summer, he will bring a new group of students to continue excavating the second house.

In the meantime, Brighton has uncovered a personal treasure that also runs deep: By collecting once-cherished artifacts, he is fulfilling his decades-long quest to understand his cultural identity. “Looking at other people’s lives and experiences is a cathartic way to feel good about my background and family,” he said. ”The past is us.”