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the ancient celts
THE
ANCIENT
CELTS
Second Edition
B A R R Y C UNLIFFE
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Barry Cunliffe 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published by Oxford University Press in 1997
Published in Penguin Books 1999
Second Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
preface to the second edition
T
he First Edition of this book was written twenty years ago when the subject,
indeed the validity, of the Celts was being actively debated. Most archae
ologists were agreed that our perceptions of the ancient Celts, which had
changed little over the last century, were in urgent need of revision. A certain nostal
gic cosiness had crept in and although new data was accumulating fast there had been
little critical debate. Old mantras about ‘Celticness’ were repeated bringing comfort
rather than stimulation. In the debate that followed in the 1990s and the early years of
this millennium the way in which the concept of the Celt had been constructed was
energetically reassessed, old preconceptions were cast off, and new ways were devel
oped to try to improve our understanding of the European barbarians who were
referred to as Celts or Gauls by their Mediterranean neighbours.
What became clear, early in the debate, was that the models we had been using
were no longer fit for purpose. They were predicated on a theory, first coherently for
mulated in the early eighteenth century, to explain variations in a language group to
which the name ‘Celtic’ had been given. It was not until the early nineteenth century
that the nascent discipline of archaeology began slowly to yield relevant data. Since
philology was the senior discipline, the findings of the archaeologists were, inevit
ably, interpreted in terms of the linguistic model. So it was until the last decades of the
twentieth century, when it began to become apparent that the archaeological evidence
could no longer be forced to fit the old linguistic theories. It was in this atmosphere of
new-found confidence that some archaeologists began to consider fresh models sug
gesting that the Celtic language may have originated in the Atlantic zone of Europe
and may have spread eastwards, perhaps as early as the third millennium bc.
The discussion has continued over the last fifteen years or so, some groups trying
to find a rapprochement between archaeologists and linguists. Now, with the devel
opment of new techniques to extract ancient DNA from human bones, an entirely
new source of data is becoming available, totally independently of archaeology and
v
pr e face to t he second e di t ion
linguistics. Once sufficient ancient DNA evidence becomes available and is brought
into meaningful juxtaposition with the archaeological data, reliable narratives of
human mobility, exploring both connectivity and remoteness, will be able to be con
structed for Europe. These will challenge linguists to look anew at their long-held
theories. Out of all this the history of the people who spoke the Celtic language will
emerge. These are exciting times. The exploration of the Celts, then, is a worthwhile
pursuit since it draws us deep into the processes which help us to begin to under
stand the complexity of our past.
Barry Cunliffe
Oxford
December 2017
vi
preface to the fir st edition
F
or two and a half thousand years the Celts have continued to fascinate those
who have come into contact with them. For the Greeks and Romans the fascin
ation was tinged with fear tempered with a degree of respect for Celtic prowess
in battle. Later generations, further removed from the reality of the barbarian Celts of
the first millennium bc, generated their own myths and stereotypes about the past,
re-creating Celtic ancestors for themselves in the image of the day designed to explain
their own attitudes and aspirations and to provide a legitimacy for actions. The study
of the Celts and of our changing visions of them offer an incomparable insight into
the human need to establish an identity—and of the difficulties which this poses to
archaeologists, who, by their best endeavours, attempt to remain objective.
It could be argued that biased historical anecdotes, ill-understood patterns of
early language development, and hard archaeological ‘facts’—the artefacts, ecofacts,
and structures of the past recovered through excavation—should not, and indeed
cannot, be brought together to create a coherent picture of the past. The position is
firmly taken by some and energetically argued; it is not one with which I have much
sympathy. Given an array of disparate evidence, we would, I believe, be failing if we
were to fight shy of the challenges posed by using every available scrap in our attempt
to construct a European protohistory. In doing so we will, inevitably, be drawn into
simplification and generalization, laying ourselves open to criticism from the pur
ists, but better the attempt to create a whole, however imperfect, than to be satisfied
with the minute examination of only a part.
In writing this book, within the entirely reasonable constraints suggested by the
publishers, I have found it impossible to go into areas of detail which I would like to
have covered, while at the same time being drawn into the wider themes of European
pre- and protohistory. Rather than adhere to the preconceptions of my original plan,
I have allowed myself to be led by the subject. What emerges is much less an ‘archae
ology’ than it might have been.
vii
pr e face to t he fir st e di t ion
My other indulgence is to have written the text during a sabbatical term living in
a house on the north coast of Brittany, overlooking a narrow bay to the headland
of Le Yaudet beyond. In the Late Iron Age, the promontory was defended by a mas
sive rampart, and it is quite conceivable, though yet unproven, that it was one of the
communities attacked by Caesar in 56 bc. Living here in Brittany has provided a con
stant reminder of the Celtic world. In the nearby church at Loguivy-lès-Lannion we
attended a musical celebration for the pardon of St Ivy. The long address of welcome
was in Breton. Then followed music and singing dominated by bagpipes and bom
bardes identical to those played by the shepherds in the Adoration depicted on the
seventeenth-century altarpiece above. Two months later, in July, the local fête folk
lorique was held within the promontory fort of Le Yaudet. The event is an entirely new
creation only some ten years old, but it is fast becoming a focus for the community.
The displays of old farm machinery and ancient crafts are as fascinating to the local
population as they are to the tourists, and in the evening, as dinner in the open air
proceeds, old and young alike join in the singing of Breton songs and the dancing,
and listen to the telling of stories. It is, of course, a conscious re-creation of a past,
but a past not long gone and one which offers a much-needed sense of identity and
continuity in a fast-changing world.
The archaeology of Le Yaudet, the Breton language still spoken, and the under
lying sense of a Celtic ethnicity are aspects of the phenomenon of the Celts: in their
coherence and disparity they provide a leitmotiv for the book to follow.
Finally a few acknowledgements: to the editorial and design departments of
Oxford University Press for their help and advice throughout; to the many individ
uals and institutions who provided photographs; to Alison Wilkins for producing a
new series of line drawings; to Lynda Smithson for preparing the text; and to my fam
ily for their forbearance and understanding with my mild obsession.
Barry Cunliffe
Pont Roux
January 1996
viii
contents
1 Visions of the Celts 1

2 Constructing the Historical Celts 29
3 In the Beginning: 5500–1300 bc 53
4 The Atlantic System: 1300–200 bc 67
5 West Central Europe and the Mediterranean: 1300–450 bc 93
6 The Migrations: 450–50 bc 131
7 The Communities of the Atlantic Façade 159
8 Celts and Others on the Eastern Fringes 191
9 Warfare and Society 211
10 The Arts of the Migration Period 239
11 Religious Systems 273
12 The Developed Celtic World 311
13 The Celts in Retreat 347
14 Celtic Survival 379
15 Retrospect 393
A Guide to Further Reading 403

Chronological Tables 425
Map Section 431
Illustration Sources 463
Index 471
ix
1
Visions of the Celts
I
n a famous lecture given more than half a century ago, the Oxford scholar J. R. R.
Tolkien chided his audience, mostly comprised of Celtic specialists, by claiming
‘“Celtic” of any sort is . . . a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of
which almost anything may come. . . . Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twi
light, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.’ He was specific
ally referring to linguistic etymologies, but his words were true for Celtic studies in
general, which, after nearly three hundred years of introspection, had created a tissue
of self-sustaining myths far removed from the reality of the available data. By throw
ing into the ‘magic bag’ scraps gleaned from linguistics, classical sources, vernacular
literature, archaeology, and art history, and seasoning the mix with a dash of nation
alism and no small amount of wishful thinking, there emerged resplendent the image
of the Celt, an image fashioned by the needs and aspirations of those who created it.
When Tolkien’s lecture was published in the early 1960s, archaeologists were
already beginning to feel uncomfortable with the generalized concept of Celtic soci
ety then broadly accepted, and in particular with some of the invasionist theories
inherent in the traditional narrative. Indeed, some believed that the terms ‘Celt’ and
‘Celtic’ should be avoided altogether because they had led to distortions in the way
the archaeological record was interpreted and presented. One writer regarded ‘the
Ancient Celts of Britain and Ireland’ as a ‘bogus and recent invention’.
1
v isions of t he ce lts
Behind these early Celtosceptic debates lurked an entirely different question: when
and where did the Celtic language originate? The traditional view of Celtic origins
was that Celtic ‘culture’ emerged in the early first millennium bc, towards the end of
the Late Bronze Age, in west central Europe, the implication being that the language
developed at the same time, and that it was from this homeland Celtic language and
culture spread south, east, and west to encompass much of the European peninsula.
In the 1990s an alternative hypothesis began to be considered: that the language
developed much earlier in the Atlantic zone perhaps as a lingua franca and spread
eastwards into west and central Europe during a period of mobility characterized
by the Beaker phenomenon in the middle of the third millennium. The debate is still
continuing and these are questions to which we will return (pp. 58–63).
The subject of the ancient Celts, then, is one that generates much lively discussion.
In this chapter we will consider how the concept of the Celt has come into being and
how it has changed over the last two and a half thousand years.
Classical Sources and Archaeology

The first reference to the Celts in Europe is found in the work of the Greek geographer
Hecataeus of Miletus, writing at the end of the sixth century bc. Thereafter the Celts
are mentioned with increasing frequency by Greek and Roman writers. Without
their descriptions and speculations our understanding of the Celts—the Iron Age
communities of central and western Europe—would be very different. Alone, the
mute archaeological evidence would allow us to sketch a warrior society focused in
west central Europe, its aristocracy demonstrating its prowess through elaborately
equipped burials. Over the period from the eighth to the fifth century different ways
of displaying status were introduced. We would be able to recognize growing links
with classical cultures of the western Mediterranean, reaching a new intensity in the
period from the mid-sixth to the mid-fifth century bc, after which local schools of
fine metalwork, using concepts and techniques learned partly from the Mediterra
nean world, developed to serve the elite.
The archaeological evidence would amply demonstrate the emergence of a more
warlike society by the fourth century whose values and technology, reflected in the
material culture recovered from cemeteries, spread across much of Europe, from
northern France to Romania and from Poland to the Po valley. Towards the end of the
second century and throughout the first, in the decades preceding the Roman expan
sion we would observe an intensification in production and exchange over much of
the central area, focusing on large nucleated settlements, many of them defended,
which were beginning to appear at this time.
2
If we stood back and took a broader geographical perspective, it would become

immediately clear that at any one time there was considerable cultural variation
from one area to another: we would be able to identify core zones of innovation and
intensification, and peripheries in which these developments were reflected with
decreasing clarity as distance from the core increased.
What we would not be able to appreciate with any degree of certainty is the long
period of conflict between the Celtic communities of the Po valley and the Roman
world; and we would be largely ignorant of the violent raids of the Celts deep into
Greece in the third century bc and of the large-scale migrations of communities
from the Middle Danube into the heart of Asia Minor which followed. Nor would
we have in our minds visions of white-robed Druids cutting mistletoe with golden
sickles when the moon was just at the right stage of its cycle, or of harsh-voiced war
rior queens with waist-length golden hair, or of feasting warriors slurping their wine
through drooping moustaches while boasting outrageously of their prowess. Unlike
the archaeological evidence, the classical sources provide a narrative and action.
They offer us a range of characters, with a large supporting cast whose achievements
and failures are fascinating to follow.
While the purist archaeologist might argue that one should study the Iron Age
communities of Europe only through the archaeological data since the classical
sources by their inevitable partiality and deliberate manipulation distort our under
standing, to reject such a rich vein of anecdote would be defeatist: it would admit to
an inability to treat the written sources critically.
The Greek and Roman authors have provided us with their own vision of the Celts,
a vision born of contemporary or near-contemporary experience. That vision has
pervaded Celtic studies for 2,000 years and cannot be ignored.
The Graeco-Roman Vision

Classical observers refer to the Continental Celts by a variety of names. The Roman
historians writing of the migrations from north of the Alps to the Po valley and
beyond called them Galli, and this tradition was followed by Polybius, to whom they
were Galatae, a name also commonly used in other Greek sources. Most of the first-
century bc writers, however, realized that these names were interchangeable with
the Greek Keltoi and Latin Celtae. Indeed Caesar, writing of the inhabitants of central
Gaul, specifically says: ‘We call [them] Gauls, though in their own language they are
called Celts.’ The second-century ad Greek writer Pausanias also stressed that Keltoi
was a more long-established term than Galli. The simplest way to explain this appar
ent confusion would be to accept that Celtae/Keltoi was the general name by which
3
the broad sweep of peoples stretching from north of the Alps to Iberia were known
to the classical world and knew themselves, and that Galli/Galatae was a specific term
applied to those tribes among them that chose to migrate to the south and south-east.
Caesar’s statement ‘We call them Gauls’ may be interpreted as implying that the term
had a Mediterranean origin. One possibility is that it comes from an Indo-European
word meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘enemy’, in which case it can hardly be an ethnonym.
Knowledge of the Celts grew slowly up to the fourth century bc. The geographer
Hecataeus had access to some information about the Celts. He was aware that the
Greek colony of Massalia, founded about 600 bc, lay in the land of the Ligurians near
the territory of the Celts, and that the settlement of Narbo (Narbonne) was Celtic.
Hecataeus thus firmly establishes the presence of Celts in southern Gaul in the late
sixth century. Elsewhere he mentions Nyrax as a Celtic city. No certain identification
can be offered, but Noreia in Austria has been favoured by some commentators.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus, writing in the early fifth century bc, makes refer
ence to Celts in his Histories, though he admits that his information about the west is
imperfect. He provides three geographical observations: that the source of the Dan
ube is in the land of the Celts; that the river rises near the Celtic city of Pyrene; and
that the Celts lived west of the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ (the Strait of Gibraltar) next to
the Cynetoi, who were the westernmost peoples of Europe. Thus Herodotus’ inform
ants seem to have believed that there were Celts living in both south-west Iberia and
middle Europe. The mention of Pyrene as being near the source of the Danube does,
however, present a difficulty since it is assumed to be related geographically to the
Pyrenees, some suggesting it to be the port of Emporion (Asturias). Herodotus’ con
fused geography is unlikely to be resolved.
By the fourth century the Greeks had come to accept that the Celts occupied a
large swathe of western Europe from Iberia to the Upper Danube. Ephorus (c.405–
330) regarded them as one of the four great barbarian peoples of the world, along
with the Scythians, Persians, and Libyans. In this he was reflecting the broad general
model which helped the Greeks to explain the nature of the periphery beyond the
civilized Mediterranean core. Strabo, writing more than two hundred years later, said
that Ephorus believed ‘Celtica’ to be so large that it included most of Iberia as far west
as Gadir (Cadiz).
It was during the fourth century that more detailed information about the Celtic
peoples began to accumulate, when Celtic bands—settlers, raiders, and mercen
aries—became involved in the politics and military affairs of the Mediterranean.
Knowledge of the large-scale migration of Celts from north of the Alps to the Po val
ley c.400, and of subsequent raids southwards against Rome and beyond beginning
in c.390, soon reached the Greek world, where Celtic warriors, along with Iberians,
4
began to be employed as mercenary troops in the war between the Spartans and
Thebes in 367 bc. Thus, when Plato (429–347) in his Laws describes the Celts as warlike
and hard-drinking, he may have been relying on first-hand experience rather than
simply repeating a stereotype of ‘barbarians’.
Aristotle (384–322) clearly had access to a number of sources on which to base his
generalized comments about Celtic peoples and he was certainly aware of the attack
on Rome. For him the Celts were a hardy northern people: they exposed their chil
dren to their harsh climate with little clothing in order to toughen them, and exces
sive obesity among men was punished. They were warlike, ferocious, and fearless to
the point of irrationality; the men took little notice of their women and rather pre
ferred male company; and they had strict rules of hospitality, especially to strangers.
A lost text, Magicus, sometimes ascribed to Aristotle, is said to mention the existence
of Druids and holy men among the Celts and Galatae. The Aristotelian stereotype is a
compound of anecdotal scraps presented within a vision of how barbarians ought to
be. The balance of fact and prejudice is difficult to assess, but as noted above the range
of information available from first-hand observation had greatly increased during
the fourth century and it would be surprising if Aristotle had not used it with judge
ment and discretion.
While the intrusion of Celtic peoples into the Mediterranean world increased the
familiarity of the classical world with them, expeditions, such as that undertaken by
Pytheas of Massalia in c.320, will have broadened the knowledge base still further.
Pytheas sailed along the Atlantic seaways in a voyage of discovery, his curiosity, no
doubt, inspired by economic considerations. He describes the Armorican peninsula,
which he considered to be a part of Kelticē, before going on to explore the coasts of
Britain, perhaps even venturing still further north. For him the British Isles lay north
of the land of the Celts and were known as the Pretanic islands. There is no suggestion
that he regarded the Pretani as Celtic.
In parallel with the scientific discoveries of men like Pytheas and the philosoph
ical considerations of Aristotle, Greek mythology expanded to take account of the
Celts. According to Timaeus, they were descended either from the union of Polyphe
mus and Galatea or from the giant Keltos. Another version sees the Galatians as the
descendants of Galatos, the son of Cyclops and Galatea. A different tradition assigns
the fatherhood of Galatos or Keltos to Heracles, who, during his wanderings in the
west, was seduced by Keltine, the beautiful daughter of King Bretannos. Unable to
resist her charms, and to overcome her reluctance to give him back the cattle of
Geryon, he felt impelled to sleep with her.
The Celts were brought into much sharper focus for the Romans and Greeks dur
ing the fourth and third centuries bc as hordes of warriors, sometimes accompanied
5
by migrating communities, thrust their way into Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor. For
Rome the dangerous conflict lasted from the initial advance southwards towards
Rome soon after 400 bc to the decisive battle of Telamon in 225. The Greek confron
tation was shorter-lived, centring on the invasion of 280–278, which culminated in
an attack on Delphi. In Asia Minor the Hellenistic and Roman armies were to con
front Galatians throughout the century or so after the migration from Europe in the
aftermath of their abortive Greek expedition.
It was during these two centuries that the Celtic stereotype was to acquire its
familiar form. They were unrestrained, fearless warriors, irrationally brave in the
first onslaught but prone to wild despair if the battle turned against them. Unpre
dictable and unreliable as allies, they could easily be aroused to battle fury but could
quickly become too drunk or too paralysed by superstitious fear to fight. And above
all they were barbarians: people of alien behaviour, cruel, and prone to such savagery
as human sacrifice and even cannibalism. It is easy to see in this broad sketch—a
sketch which any Greek or Roman schoolboy might have been expected to turn
out—a stereotypical, almost timeless, description of ‘the enemy from without’, and
yet beneath its simplistic exaggeration lie some elements of the truth learned from
the bitter experience of two centuries of confrontation and conflict.
The historians of Greece and Rome, writers such as Polybius (c.204–c.122 bc), Livy
(59 bc–ad 17), and Pausanias (late second century ad), were all attempting to project
particular images of history. Their individual presentations of the Celt were necessar
ily conditioned by this, but the common thread which they wished to communicate
was of their own systems triumphing over fearsome forces from without: the rational,
civilized order of the state contrasted with the wild, savage chaos of the primitive bar
barians. It was, therefore, the antitheses of the ideals of Graeco-Roman civilization
that were emphasized in the classical accounts of the Celts. To point up the classical
achievement, however, the enemy had also to be seen as a worthy opponent, fearless
in battle and with a savage nobility that made his defeat the more remarkable.
These attitudes come together in the dramatic visual reality of contemporary
sculpture. The violent savagery of Gauls looting a temple is brilliantly portrayed in
a sculptured frieze of the second century bc from Civitalba (Ancona), but the power
and nobility of the Celt is nowhere better captured than on the victory monuments
erected by the Attalid kings at Pergamum and at Athens in the third and second cen
turies bc. The acropolis monument at Pergamum, commissioned by Attalus I in
the 220s, is known to us only from later Roman marble copies: the famous Dying
Gaul, a Gaulish warrior committing suicide beside his dead wife, and the head of a
bearded Gaul. Together they convey the vision of an enemy one could be proud to
have defeated.
6
Round monument
Long monument
Temple
of
Athena
The Acropolis
of Pergamum
Altar of Zeus
0 50 100 metres
1.1 The acropolis of Pergamum in western Turkey was the focus of Pergamene power in the third and
second centuries bc. The two religious precincts, the temple of Athena and the altar of Zeus, were focal
points for the display of sculptural compositions celebrating Pergamene victories over Celtic raiders.
Through these monuments the kings of Pergamum were laying claim to be the saviours of Hellenism.
7
1.2 The Dying Gaul. The marble statue, now in the Capitoline Museum, Rome, is the image par excellence
of Celtic nobility in battle. The naked warrior, with tousled hair and drooping moustache and wearing a
neck torc, reclines bleeding on his shield, his discarded sword nearby. The statue is generally considered to
be a copy of an original which adorned the monument erected in Pergamum by Attalus I after 228 bc and
is thus a reliable representation of the Celts of Asia Minor in the late third century bc.
The Pergamene kingdom as the saviour of Hellenism is the theme displayed in an

even more dramatic form in a victory monument erected on the acropolis of Athens
after the final defeat of the Gauls between 168 and 166 bc. Here, according to Pausanias,
the Pergamene defeat of the Gauls in Asia Minor was presented in parallel with the
Greek victory over the Persians at Marathon and both were balanced with mytho
logical battles, the Greeks against the Amazons and the ancestors of the Pergamenes
against the Giants. The claim of the Attalids was, thus, blatant: they, like the Greeks,
have throughout time been the saviours of civilization against the external forces of
chaos and destruction. The allusion was already there in the Hymn to Delos, written by
Callimachus, who lived at the time of the Celtic attack on Delphi, in which the Celts are
likened to ‘Latter-day Titans’. Of the many Gauls who would have been depicted among
the hundred or so statues that formed the monument, five survive in Roman marble
copies (one in the Louvre in Paris, one in Naples, and three in Venice); all are portrayed
at their moment of defeat as cowed by the might of their conquerors. A similar mes
8
sage was conveyed by the great frieze carved around the

outside of the altar of Zeus at Pergamum showing Zeus
and Athena defeating the Giants while the Attalids defeat
the Gauls. Here again the Pergamene rulers are claiming
to be the heroes who saved the civilized world.
In these remarkable survivals, the classical vision of
the Celts as it was perceived by those with the power to
purvey their own version of history and its messages
stands out in sharp focus. Once created it has remained
in the consciousness of all subsequent observers.
With the threat of the Celts as a force for destruc
tion receding in the second century, a somewhat differ
ent metaphor began to develop. The most informative
source is the work of Poseidonius (c.135–c.50 bc), a Syr
ian Greek from Apamaea. Poseidonius wrote a series of
Histories in fifty-two books, beginning his narrative in
the mid-second century to follow on from the Histories
of Polybius. Book 23 contained an ethnographical intro
duction about the Celts as a background to the Roman
conquest of Transalpina completed in 121 bc. For this he
had access to a variety of earlier sources augmented by
his own travels in Gaul. The information at his disposal,
then, comprised much anecdotal material reflecting ear
lier times which he was able to present alongside his own
more systematic observations. The Histories are no longer
extant but were extensively used, sometimes with direct
acknowledgement, by three later writers, Strabo (c.64 bc–
ad 21), Diodorus Siculus (who wrote c.60–30 bc), and 1.3 A Celtic warrior committing suicide in defeat by the body of
his dead wife. The group, now in the Museo Nazionale Romano,
Athenaeus (c. ad 200), and they may also have been used Palazzo Altemps, is probably a marble copy of an original which
by Julius Caesar as a source for the ethnographic descrip once adorned the Temple of Athena Nikephoros at Pergamum
commissioned by Attalus I at the end of the third century bc.
tions in his Book 6 of the Gallic War. Poseidonius was a
Stoic philosopher, and, as Athenaeus tells us, in describ
ing the customs of many peoples he composed his work ‘in accordance with his philo
sophical convictions’. In essence Poseidonius believed that contemporary barbarian
peoples reflected a condition closer to the Golden Age than civilized societies, and that
in that Golden Age people were ruled by the wise. To this extent his account of the Celts
has something of a rosy glow about it. Thus he approves of their bravery and of their
honouring of the brave, and comments favourably upon their hospitality to strangers.
9
1.4 Marble relief from the sanctuary of Athena Nikephoros at Pergamum, now in the Antikensammlung,
Staatliche Museen, Berlin. The relief gives an accurate impression of Celtic armour of the late third cen
tury bc showing a tunic of chain mail, shields, a spear, and an animal-headed carnyx (war trumpet).
10
1.5 The ‘round monument’, only the base of which remains, in the sanctuary of Athena at Pergamum, is
thought by some scholars to have been the focus for the display of statues of the defeated Celts. Marble
copies of these works were taken to Italy, where several have survived. This imaginative reconstruction by
A. Schober was published in 1952.
He excuses their fondness for war and their impetuous nature, saying that they were
really a straightforward people and not of evil character; he even came to terms with
the idea of Celtic headhunting. They were, in fact, only like boisterous schoolchil
dren. ‘To the frankness and high-spiritedness of their temperament must be added the
traits of childish boastfulness and love of decoration.’ But they were ruled by wisdom
because among those specially honoured and given authority were the Druids, who
were the natural and moral philosophers and men of science. ‘They are believed to be
the most just of men.’ In his Celtic ethnography Poseidonius can fairly be accused of
being a ‘soft primitivist’ who shielded himself and his readers from the realities of Celtic
societies. This same attitude is evident in the works of the Alexandrian school from the
first century ad onwards which, using written sources rather than field observation,
present Celtic religion and Druidism as on a par with Pythagorean systems.
From the middle of the first century bc a new sense of reality was instilled by writ
ers such as Caesar, Lucan, and Tacitus, who reported on the conquest of the Gauls
and the Britons. Although there was some recourse to the old stereotypes for the
11
12
standard ethnographic introductions, these writers convey much of the atmosphere

of political turmoil among the Celtic peoples. Thus Caesar: ‘In Gaul there are factions
not only in every state and village and party but practically even in individual house
holds’; and Tacitus: ‘Once they owed obedience to kings: now they are distracted
between the warring factions of rival chiefs.’ Implicit in comments of this kind lies the
justification for conquest: not only was such instability on Rome’s borders intoler
able to her but also conquest and Romanization would bring peace to the benighted
barbarians. The point is explicitly made in a set-piece speech which Tacitus attributes
to Petillius Cerialis in ad 69, though in all probability it is the historian speaking:
Throughout the whole of Gaul there were always despots and wars until you passed
under our control. We ourselves, despite many provocations, imposed upon you by
right of conquest only such additional burdens as were necessary for preserving peace.
Stability between nations cannot be maintained without armies, nor armies without
pay, nor pay without taxation. Everything else is shared equally between us.
(Hist. 4. 73)
Tacitus takes a rather more realistic view when he puts into the mouth of the British
war leader Calgacus, facing the Roman army in northern Scotland in ad 84, a damn
ing indictment of Rome: ‘Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their
indiscriminate plunder . . . to robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name
of “government”; they create a desolation and call it peace’ (Agricola 30).
While Caesar has a specific political agenda to achieve through his presenta
tion of the Gauls, Tacitus uses the Britons and Germans as part of a general tirade
against what he perceives to be the shortcomings of the Roman leadership. Modern
decadence and indiscipline and the loss of individual liberty are his themes, and the
Britons and Germans provide convenient characters through which to insinuate his
views. The Celts are no longer a serious threat to Rome; it is the danger from within
that is more destructive. For Tacitus, then, the Celts provide the allegory.
From the end of the first century ad barbarians other than the Celts provided the
raw material for invective and polemic, and attitudes began to mellow as second-
and third-generation Gauls and Britons became creative and influential citizens of
the empire. Martial, born in ad 40 at Bilbilis (now Calatayud in Saragossa, Spain),
1.6 (Opposite) The city of Pergamum, in Aegean Turkey, was the capital from which the Attalid dynasty
led the struggle against Celtic war bands in the third century bc. To monumentalize their victories they
created many great buildings ornamented with sculptural compositions often depicting their enemies,
particularly the Celts. One of the most impressive of these was the great altar of Zeus excavated in the
nineteenth century. All that now remains is the sad ruin of its stepped foundation: the superstructure was
removed and is now on display in the Pergamonmuseum, Berlin.
13
several times proclaimed his pride in his Celtiberian origins (‘we who are descended
from Celts and Iberians’) and both Iberia and Gaul produced men of real literary
talent. Only in occasional disparaging references to the northern Britons—such as
Ausonius’ epigram that matus (drunk) rather than bonus (good) is a more appropriate
description for a Briton—can we see the old Celtic stereotype recurring.
Oblivion and Awakening: c.1500–1700

From the fourth century until the sixteenth century
ad the world cared little for Celts. The classical texts
were largely lost or forgotten, and the universal appeal
of Christianity, with its own texts, mythologies, and
stereotypes, provided all the models that were required
to order behaviour and to inspire origin myths and
protohistories. Yet it was Christianity that kept alive a
knowledge of the Celts in the manuscript copies of the
classical sources preserved in monastic libraries.
In the sixteenth century many of these texts began
to become more widely available in printed form. The
manuscript of Tacitus’ Agricola reached Rome about
1470 and was published in Milan five to ten years later,
while Caesar’s Gallic War was published in Venice in 1511.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century most of the
major texts were available in their original languages and
in translation. This coincided with a general awaken
ing in western Europe of the need to create national
prehistories based on fact rather than myth. In Britain
the scholar John Leland (1503–52) began to collect data
avidly on his travels throughout the country, while at
the end of the century William Camden (1551–1623) pro
duced the first serious attempt at explaining the early
origins of Britain in his Britannia, first published in 1586.
1.7 A seventeenth-century vision of an Ancient Briton: a wood In France the Celts were beginning to come to the fore
cut from John Speed’s Historie, published in 1611. The ultimate in such works as Jean Le Fèbvre’s Les Fleurs et antiquités des
source seems to be a watercolour drawing by John White dat
ing to about 1588. White’s ideas were based on his first-hand Gaules, published in 1534, and particular attention was
observations of native Americans. Nakedness, body-painting, beginning to be paid to the practices and philosophy of
long hair, neck torcs, and headhunting are all characteristics of
the generalized ‘Celt’ derived from classical sources, which were the Druids throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth
becoming available in printed form at about this time. centuries.
14
1.8 Raphael Holinshed’s vision of Queen Boudica (Boadiccea as she was then known), queen of the Brit
ish tribe the Iceni, who in ad 60 led a rebellion against the Romans. Illustrated in his Chronicles (1578). The
similarity to Queen Elizabeth I reviewing her troops is unmistakable.
The discovery of the New World with its startling range of ‘primitive peoples’, each
living in their own distinctive ethnographic present, and the beginning of the explor
ation of Africa and the East provided ample comparative material for those writing
about the prehistory of European society. Samuel Daniel could liken the tribal war
fare of pre-Roman Britain to that of the American Indians, while John White could
use his field drawings of Virginian Indians as models for Picts and Britons. What
was beginning to emerge throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was
the concept of the Celts, Gauls, and Britons as Noble Savages, not unlike the soft-
primitivist approach of Poseidonius. It was a trend which was to develop still further
in the eighteenth century after an awareness of the islanders of the South Seas enliv
ened the European consciousness.
Celtomania and Nationalism: c.1700–1870

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the antiquarians concerned with early
Europe had access to the principal classical texts, a varied array of ethnological anal
ogies, and a growing knowledge of the prehistoric monuments and artefacts of their
own countries. The three elements were combined, particularly in France and Brit
15
ain, to create a vision of the past peopled by Celts and

Druids. In Britain the movement was led by William
Stukeley (1687–1765), who began in 1723 to write a his
tory of the ancient Celts in four parts. The work was
never completed, but his two volumes on Stonehenge
and Avebury, published in 1740 and 1743, ascribed both
monuments to the ‘British Druids’. In the wake of Stuke
ley’s energetic proselytizing, virtually all the megalithic
monuments of Britain—tombs, circles, and align
ments—were considered to be the preserve of Druids,
while the hillforts were seen as ‘Ancient British’ strong
holds or as the camps of Caesar built during his exped
itions in 55 and 54 bc.
In France the same enthusiasms prevailed. In 1703
Paul-Yves Pezron, a Breton priest, published his Antiquité
de la nation et de la langue des Celtes, autrement appellez Gaulois.
By the end of the century the belief that the megaliths
were Celtic was firmly entrenched in such works as
Théophile-Malo Corret de La Tour d’Auvergne’s Origines
gauloises (1796) and Jacques Cambry’s Monumens celtiques
(1805), which assigned all the Breton megaliths to the
Celts.
Another pursuit of those caught up in the romance
of Celtomania was to ‘discover’ Celtic literary trad
itions still extant in the folk memory of peasants living
in remote areas. The most blatant case of invention
came from Scotland, where James Macpherson created
single-handedly the poems of Ossian, which he pub
lished between 1760 and 1763. This complete fabrication
was to have a profound effect throughout Europe in the
fight for national identity: Ossian features large in the
freedom poetry of the Hungarian Sándor Petó´fi (1823–
49). Nor were the Welsh free from romantic invention.
1.9 A Druid seen through the vivid imagination of William In 1792 the ceremony of Maen Gorsedd was created. It
Stukeley. From his volume Stonehenge, published in 1740. The axe
in the belt is of Bronze Age type, but such details were unappre
was held on the autumn equinox and involved Welsh
ciated in Stukeley’s time. bards in an extended performance of pompous ritual
heavy with symbolism, requiring for its props an altar
and a circle of stones. The entire pastiche of an ‘ancient
16
tradition’ was the invention of the Welsh stonemason

Edward Williams, who preferred to be known by his
bardic name, Iolo Morganwg. By managing to have the
Gorsedd attached to the more ancient and respectable
ceremony of the Welsh Eisteddfod in 1819, Williams
ensured the survival of his nonsensical Celtic creation.
In Brittany folk memories and ancient songs were
avidly collected by Théodore Hersart, vicomte de La
Villemarqué, whose Barzaz-Breiz (Songs of Brittany)
was first published in 1839, at a time when the French
government was attempting to wipe out Breton culture
and language. He was roundly condemned by some of
his contemporaries, who claimed that his songs were
inventions, but his field notebooks have come to light
showing that he had, in fact, recorded genuinely ancient
material passed on orally among the country people
over generations.
The Celtomania of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, with its mixture of facts and fantasies, has its
place in the history of scholarship. It was a stage through
which western European antiquarianism, almost inevi
tably, had to pass, since it provided the first faltering
attempts at bringing together classical sources, the study
1.10 Statue of Vercingetorix, the Gaulish resistance leader who
of antiquities, oral traditions, and language to create a confronted Caesar at Alesia in 52 bc. The statue, which domi
European past. What is more surprising is that much of nates the plateau of Alesia, was erected at the instigation of the
emperor Napoleon III in 1865. Napoleon organized a detailed
the romantic nonsense of this phase still persists. field study of Caesar’s campaigns. There is a certain stylized
The French archaeologist Salomon Reinach, looking resemblance between the emperor and the statue.
back over the outpourings of Les Celtomanes, could sati
rize their beliefs:
The Celts are the oldest people in the world; their language is preserved practically
intact in Bas-Breton; they were profound philosophers whose inspired doctrines have
been handed down by the Welsh Bardic Schools; dolmens are their altars, where their
priests the Druids offered human sacrifice; stone alignments were their astronomical
observatories.
He could afford to be scathingly dismissive, for after 1870 the results of archaeo
logical activity throughout western Europe were casting an entirely new light on the
culture of the Iron Age (see Chapter 2).
17
1.11 Queen Boudica as she appears resplendent in her chariot on the Thames Embankment facing the
Houses of Parliament. The statue, erected in 1902, depicts the British queen as the model of late Victorian
regal nobility.
Beneath the romantic Celtism of the eighteenth century lay an undercurrent

of nationalism which intensified and became more explicit in the nineteenth cen
tury. The classical sources provided a galaxy of national heroes—Boudica in Brit
ain, Vercingetorix in France, Ambiorix in Belgium, Viriathus in Iberia—all of whom
could be used as symbols of national identity and freedom when required. The statue
of Vercingetorix erected at Alise-Sainte-Reine (Côte d’Or) in 1865, that of Ambiorix
in heroic guise unveiled at Tongeren in Belgium not long afterwards, and the bronze
Boudica set up on the Thames Embankment in London in 1902 were there to provide
much-needed inspiration for creating national identity in the tumultuous century
between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of the First World War.
In much of this, France took the lead. The famous statue of the Dying Gaul, bought
at great expense by the French monarchy in 1737, was eventually transferred to France
by Napoleon Bonaparte, on whom the potency of the image will not have been lost.
18
Bonaparte established the Académie celtique in Paris in

1805, but it was left to Napoleon’s nephew Louis Napo
leon to initiate what must surely be the earliest planned
research programme in Iron Age archaeology. Return
ing to France after a period in exile, he was elected presi
dent of the Second Republic in 1848, seizing further
power four years later to become emperor, thereafter
styling himself Napoleon III. France had been through
a long period of upheaval and was facing the threat of
increasing Prussian militarism.
Napoleon III was a scholar as well as being a polit
ician and skilfully combined his personal academic
inclination with the need to boost French morale by
sponsoring a spectacular campaign of fieldwork and
excavation to provide archaeological data for his pro
jected work, the Histoire de Jules César. The fieldwork
was undertaken between 1860 and 1865 by Colonel E.
Stoffel with the aid of up to 300 assistants and labour
ers. The colonel’s task was to research the topography
of Caesar’s campaigns and to identify the battlefields, an 1.12 Napoleon III was emperor of France from 1852 until 1870,
when he was defeated and captured by the Prussians at Sedan.
assignment completed with varying degrees of success, During the Second Empire, largely as a result of Napoleon’s
the highlight being the discovery and excavation of the scholarly interests, the archaeological study of Iron Age Gaul
siege works and battleground of Alesia, where the war flourished. Painting by Charles-Édouard Boutibonne, 1856.
leader Vercingetorix made his last heroic stand against
Rome. To provide further Celtic background to these events, Napoleon initiated a
large-scale excavation of the principal oppidum of the Aedui at Bibracte (Mont Beu
vray, near Autun), a task which he entrusted to J.-G. Bulliot. Of the three projected
volumes of the Histoire, two were published, in 1865 and 1866. The foundation of Le
Musée des Antiquités nationales in Paris in 1863 ensured that his growing collection
of Celtic antiquities, complete with models and reconstructions, would become
readily accessible to the general public.
In intensifying, and possibly even creating, public awareness of the Gauls and of
their heroic resistance to the external aggressor, Rome, Napoleon III was deliber
ately setting out to inculcate a national spirit. His attitude to Caesar was ambivalent.
Caesar confronted Gaulish opposition, but he did so, Napoleon claimed, because
otherwise the country would have been overrun by Germans—the parallels would
not have needed stressing to the French public in the 1860s. But the Roman conquest
also had the advantage of unifying Gaul during a long period of peace in a way never
19
1.13 Colonel Stoffel, who led the research team set up by Napoleon III to excavate Alesia, in his quest to
discover details of Caesar’s military installations cut trial trenches to test the existence and form of buried
ditches and pits. This careful work enabled him to produce plans of Caesar’s forts and associated defen
sive works. The illustration, taken from Napoleon III’s Histoire de Jules César (1865–6), is the plan of one of
Caesar’s camps on the outer circumvallation designed to restrain the army of Vercingetorix at Alesia.
before or after achieved. When in 1870 Napoleon rode out at Sedan to lead the French
army to a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Prussians, one wonders whether it was
Vercingetorix or Caesar that provided his role model.
The Romantic movement which had gripped Europe in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries provided a major stimulus to Celtomania in those regions
which could claim to be Celtic. The ‘discovery’ of poetic traditions like the Ossian
epic invented by Macpherson and the nonsenses which sprang from the fertile
imagination of Iolo Morganwg should not detract from more serious work, such as
Evan Evans’s Some Specimens from the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (1764), La Ville
marqué’s Barzaz-Breiz (1839), or, for that matter, the literary genius of Sir Walter
Scott, whose novels and poems gave a new nobility to the Highlander at the moment
20
1.14 (Top) Plan of the oppidum of Alesia showing the siege works constructed by Julius Caesar in 52 bc. The
plan, based on fieldwork and excavation undertaken by Colonel Stoffel, was published in Napoleon III’s
Histoire de Jules César in 1865–6.
1.15 (Bottom) A model of Caesar’s circumvallation of Alesia based on descriptions in his Commentaries and
excavations undertaken by Colonel Stoffel in the 1860s.
21
when all things Celtic were being proscribed in Scotland. Out of this ferment of
literary and folkloric outpourings more solid structures began to crystallize: the
foundation of the Society of Cymmrodorion in 1751 and the Cambrian Archaeo
logical Association in 1846 provided a sound academic framework for Wales, while
in Scotland the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland was instituted in 1780. In Ireland
the Royal Irish Academy came into being in 1785 and the Royal Institution of Corn
wall emerged in 1818.
For the most part these organizations provided structured forums where the
like-minded could research and celebrate their past, but inevitably such societies
provided, often unwittingly, an underpinning for nationalist sentiments, and the
perceived Celtic ancestry offered a degree of unity. This was particularly developed
in Brittany, where, in 1867, La Villemarqué set up the first of a series of Interceltic
Congresses to which were invited ‘kith and kin’ from Wales, ‘brothers’ from Corn
wall, and ‘cousins’ from Ireland and Scotland. It was from these roots that the Breton
separatist movement Breiz Atao (‘Brittany for Ever’) was to grow in the interwar years.
Pan-Celticism provided strength. It also offered an identity of otherness: we the Celts
as opposed to them the French and English. This is nowhere better illustrated than
in an essay written by the Breton priest-scholar Ernest Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic
Races, published in English in 1896. The essay begins by describing the stark contrasts
experienced by a traveller passing from Normandy into Brittany:
A cold wind arises full of a vague sadness, and carries the soul to other thoughts; the
tree-tops are bare and twisted; the heath with its monotony of tint stretches away into
the distance; at every step the granite protrudes from a soil too scanty to cover it; a
sea that is almost always sombre girdles the horizon with eternal moaning. The same
contrast is manifest in the people: to Norman vulgarity, to a plump and prosperous
population, happy to live, full of its own interests, egoistical as are all these who make
a habit of enjoyment, succeeds a timid and reserved race living altogether within itself,
heavy in appearance but capable of profound feeling, and of an adorable delicacy in its
religious instincts.
The Celt as ‘other’ living in the wild extremities of Atlantic Europe is a metaphor still
very much alive today.
The Contribution of Archaeology: 1870–1970

The growing awareness of the material culture of the pre-Roman Iron Age in the mid
dle of the nineteenth century began to introduce a new realism into the study of late
prehistoric Europe, but it was not until 1871 that the historic Celts could confidently
22
be identified with the recognition that the cultural assemblages found in the graves of
Champagne and the lakeside site of La Tène in Switzerland were closely matched by
those associated with a series of burials inserted into the ruins of the Etruscan town
of Marzabotto (see Chapter 2). Thereafter the belief that the movements of people
could be traced in the archaeological record gained wide acceptance, and the inva
sionist model became central to much archaeological writing.
Material of La Tène type found throughout central and eastern Europe was
directly related to the historic expansion of the Celts, though the extreme paucity of
La Tène material in Greece and Asia Minor, where the Celts were known to have been
active, was a salutary warning of the adage that absence of evidence is not evidence
of absence.
In the west the situation was more complex. The study of ancient European lan
guages had shown that forms of Celtic were spoken over much of the Iberian pen
insula, the British Isles, and Ireland, and yet there was no historical record of Celtic
migrations into these areas. It was, therefore, left to archaeologists and linguists to
construct models of invasion from their two disparate viewpoints. Since each relied
heavily on the other, a considerable degree of circularity developed in the arguments.
In Iberia the classical sources indicated a Celtic presence by the sixth century bc, and
this was supported by linguistic arguments that suggested that the Celtic spoken in
the peninsula was more ancient than that recorded in Gaul (see Chapter 4). Thus it
was incumbent on archaeologists to identify evidence for the Celtic migration from
west central Europe through the Pyrenees by searching out the material culture of
the Iberian Late Bronze Age. This approach was most influentially propounded by
P. Bosch-Gimpera in his famous paper ‘Two Celtic Waves in Spain’, published in 1939
in the Proceedings of the British Academy. In Britain and Ireland invasionist theories
were summed up in the elegant formulations of Christopher Hawkes, presented in a
paper entitled ‘Hillforts’, published in the journal Antiquity in 1931, in which a series of
migratory waves were envisaged.
Simple invasionist theories of this kind were in common use until the 1960s and
are still found from time to time in the more popular literature. Their modelling was
based partly on the classical accounts of Celtic movements, but also derived inspir
ation from an awareness of the migrations of the late Roman and early medieval
periods. Behind it all lay the knowledge, gleaned from recent history, of the dramatic
cultural changes, linguistic and material, that had been brought about by western
European imperial expansion across the world. This strengthened the implicit belief
that cultural change was most simply to be explained as the result of folk movement.
The Celts that emerged during this period still retained the image of the warrior
intent upon feasting and raiding—in other words the classical vision—but, in a
23
1.16 Celtic domesticity as imagined by A. Forestier in his illustration of 1911, based on the excavated evi
dence derived from the examination of the lake village of Glastonbury, Somerset.
century dominated by recurring war, much of it resulting from German militarism,

a new image began to develop in which the Celt was given a more homely, creative
guise in contrast to other barbarians, in particular the ‘warlike Germans’. In other
words, the Celt was becoming domesticated. This was subtly, and perhaps uncon
sciously, achieved by putting increased emphasis on artistic and technical achieve
ments and on the hearth-and-home aspects of the archaeological record. Such an
approach was particularly well developed in Britain, where the creative originality
of Celtic art had long been recognized, and where the extreme paucity of cemeteries
producing warrior equipment forced archaeologists to focus on settlement sites and
the productive systems that sustained them. The first recognizable ordering of the
British agrarian landscape became known as Celtic field systems, and the term was
readily, if inappropriately, adopted in the Low Countries and Denmark.
The Celt of the period 1870–1970 is, therefore, a complex creation. In the image of
the nineteenth-century imperialists, he was prepared to fight his way into new ter
ritories, taking his women and children with him, but there to settle down to till the
soil while the womenfolk spun, weaved, and ground the corn. His love of art was well
developed and he was served by craftsmen of great originality and skill. Even his wife
24
could add to the artistic ambience of the home by making pleasantly decorated pots.
He was not unduly aggressive but would fiercely protect his family and home if dan
ger threatened. The discovery of a ‘war cemetery’ at the gate of the hillfort of Maiden
Castle in Dorset, attributed to the gallant Celts defending their settlement against
Roman invaders, provided a potent image which caught the grim public mood in
the late 1930s, and, by the time that the excavation report was finally published in the
depths of the Second World War, the ‘war-mad’ Celt of the Poseidonian tradition had
become celticus domesticus.
In France, too, opportunity for allegory was not lost. In 1949, in the aftermath of
the Second World War, a monument was erected on the plain of Les Laumes below
Alesia. It records:
On this plain 2,000 years ago Gaul saved her honour, pitting, at Vercingetorix’ call, her
peoples against Caesar’s legions. After her reversal upon the battlefield, reconciled with
the victor, united, defended against the invasions of the Germans, open to the enlight
enment of Greece and Rome, she knew three centuries of peace.
Celts at the End of the Century

Since 1970 there has been a subtle change in the vision of the Celt, with an increas
ing emphasis on the economic systems which underpinned society and with the use
of world-systems models. The development of coinage and the emergence of oppida,
widely believed to be of urban character, are areas upon which much research has
been focused. These developments were, in part, the result of a more widespread
interest in economic structures among archaeologists, a trend which can be related
to a much broader awareness of global economics occasioned by political moves
towards a more united Europe. The pan-European image of the Celts was highly
appropriate to this political imperative.
The mounting of the spectacular exhibition ‘The Celts, the Origins of Europe’
in Venice in 1991, under the auspices of Palazzo Grassi and sponsored by the multi
national Fiat company, is an example of the soft political use to which the Celts were
being put. The point was explicitly made by the President of Palazzo Grassi in his
introduction to the exhibition catalogue The Celts:
This exhibition is a tribute both to the new Europe which cannot come to fruition
without a comprehensive awareness of its unity, and to the fact that, in addition to its
Roman and Christian sources, today’s Europe traces its roots from the Celtic heritage,
which is there for all to see.
25
It is in the light of this vision that one can best understand the initiative of President
Mitterrand in providing lavish funds from the French state to support a new pro
gramme of multinational excavations at the Aeduian capital of Bibracte. In doing
so he was echoing the gesture of Napoleon III, though for rather different political
motives.
Jacquetta Hawkes summed it all up in the memorable thought that each genera
tion gets the archaeology it deserves. Put another way, it is difficult, indeed impos
sible, to study the past without being affected by the transient values and aspirations
of the moment. By attempting to understand the distortions wrought on the past by
previous generations we can be on guard against introducing distortions of our own
and accepting those created for their own ends by our political leaders.
Celts in the New Millennium

Programmes of fieldwork and excavation across Europe daily produce new data rele
vant to the study of the historical Celts. The record increases at an exponential rate
and, with it, our understanding of the complexity and diversity of the European Iron
Age grows to the extent that we must constantly question whether the term Celt has
any ethnic or historical validity. I believe that it does to the extent that there was a
common shared language, versions of which live on in the western extremities of the
Continent. There were also shared belief systems and value systems, manifest in the
surviving material culture, suggesting a high degree of connectivity over consider
able areas, a connectivity explained, in part, by an innate restlessness leading at times
to folk movements on a large scale. It was these mobile groups, from large popula
tions on the move to small raiding parties, that the Mediterranean world came to
know as Celts. ‘Celt’, then, is a term that may legitimately be used at a level of general
ization, much as the names Iberian, Scythian, Greek, or Etruscan help us to construct
intelligible historical narratives.
One of the questions that had come to be debated in the last two decades is what
can be said of the origin of the Celts. This issue has been studiously avoided in the
past, perhaps because it cannot be answered with any degree of certainty. But one
way to approach it is by considering the possible origins of the Celtic language in rela
tion to what is now known about the early prehistory of Europe. This has led some
scholars to suggest that the language may have developed early in the Atlantic zone
as a lingua franca and later, perhaps in the mid-third millennium, to have spread east
wards into western and west central Europe with the early Beaker movements (see
Chapter 3). To what extent this hypothesis will stand up to close scrutiny remains
26
to be seen. Much will depend on the results of current work on ancient DNA, which
will enable population movements to be characterized and quantified in a way never
before possible. But we must await a significant body of such data before beginning
to create new historical narratives. What is certain is that our vision of the Celts will
change, possibly quite dramatically, over the next decade.
27
2
Constructing the
Historical Celts
T
he concept of the Celts has many realities born of different disciplines. The
earliest vision of the Celt was that created by the Greek and Roman writers—
a stereotype based on close observation but simplified and highlighted in
such a way as to form a generalized image easy to comprehend. By stressing certain
aspects of appearance and behaviour these writers created a caricature of the barbar
ian other, different in every way from us who are civilized. This topos was translated
into visual form in Hellenistic statuary, which became widely known across the Med
iterranean world through Roman copies. The ‘classical Celts’ were real to the people
who created the concept. Endowed with motives, passions, and names, they were
fearsome and alien, the very thought of them sending a shiver down the spine.
The Celt of the classical authors served as a model for antiquarians in the eight
eenth and nineteenth century attempting to understand the past, but there was much
new to be incorporated. A growing understanding of the languages of the Atlantic
fringes of Europe, which from the early eighteenth century began to be called Celtic,
introduced new complexities, not least the need to explain their origins. A little later
the vernacular literature of these Celtic-speaking peoples in Ireland and Wales came
to be more widely known. In it there were resonances of the world of the classical
Celts—of chariots, feasting, and single combat—but much more besides. It was a
febrile world of magic and uncertainty, with deities who could change shape at will
always poised to interfere in the destinies of humans.
29
const ruc t ing t he histor ic a l ce lts
Archaeological advances in the nineteenth and twen

tieth centuries provided a new reality through the dis
covery first of the weapons and artefacts used by Celtic
peoples and later of the settlements in which they had
lived and the detritus of the economies which had sus
tained them. Finally, in the 1930s and 1940s, the art of the
Celts became recognized as a subject worthy of study,
making it possible to bridge the gap between the classi
cal vision, the vernacular mystery, and the somewhat
mundane archaeological reality. The excitement of the
subject is that it can be approached from these very dif
ferent directions, all of which have validity within their
own academic parameters. Yet what emerges presents
an altogether different set of images.
In the previous chapter we considered the classical
model and its evolution in broad outline. Here it is nec
essary to explore in more detail the main classes of evi
dence that have helped to expand and modify that model.
The Celtic Language

Celtic belongs to the family of Indo-European lan
guages. It is closest to the Italic languages such as Latin,
to such an extent that some linguists have postulated a
2.1 Statue of a warrior embossed from bronze sheets. The eyes common Italo-Celtic origin for both. This hypothetical
are inset with glass paste. The swept-back hair and long drooping group is believed to be broadly equivalent to two other
moustache are characteristic of Gaulish representations of Celtic
warrior deities. Probably first century bc. From Saint-Maur-en- European families, one from which the Baltic, Slav, and
Chaussée, Oise, France. Musée départemental de l’Oise, Beauvais. Germanic languages were to evolve and the other ances
tral to Greek. The point at which Celtic began to be dis
tinguished is much debated. The more conventional view has, for a long time, been
that Italic and Celtic separated and developed in the regions in which they were to
flourish during the period 1300–800 bc, before outward migration of the Celts and
the Latins in the first millennium. But more recent work, using computer-modelling
procedures to analyse standard vocabularies, has offered a different picture suggest
ing that the Celtic language group first became distinguishable from the rest of the
Indo-European languages of the European peninsula around 4000 bc and that the
distinction between the Goidelic and Brythonic groups of Celtic languages took place
about 900 bc. The implications of this new work will be considered in Chapter 3.
30
No
data
R.Thames
.R
R
hine
. Sei
R
ne
R. G a
ron
ne
R. D a n u b e
GALLAECCI R.
Eb
ro
R. Douro
CELTIBERI
LUSITANI GALATIANS
(possibly Celtic)
R.Tagus
CELTICI
CELTICI
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%
2.2 The frequency of surviving ancient Celtic place names in Europe and Asia Minor mapped as percentage
contours. The absence of names in western Ireland is because no data is available; after S. Oppenheimer,
The Origins of the British (London, 2006), Figure 2.1b, 2006. Based on data from Patrick Sims-Williams, 2006.
Celtic languages are spoken now only in the extreme Atlantic periphery of Europe,
but originally they extended in a broad swathe from south-western Iberia, through
Gaul and the Alpine region, into the Middle Danube, with one group of settlers, the
Galatians, introducing Celtic into central Asia Minor, where, according to St Jerome,
it was still recognizable in the fourth century ad.
The different types of recorded Celtic may be divided into two broad groups: Con
tinental and Insular. Continental Celtic is known from the evidence of place names
and personal names recorded by classical historians from coins, and from a compara
tively small number of inscriptions. Using this evidence it is possible to distinguish
four, possibly five, Continental Celtic languages. In Iberia, Celtiberian was spoken
31
2.3 Stone slab from Vaison-la-Romaine, Vaucluse, France, inscribed in Graeco-Gaulish. It probably dates
to the middle of the first century bc and records the gift of land to the goddess Belesma by Segomaros, son
of Villonos, citizen of Nemausus (Nîmes). Musée Calvet, Avignon.
over much of the centre, west, and north of the peninsula. The earliest inscriptions
date to the third century bc, but, as we have seen, the Greek writers record that Celts
were to be identified in the region at least two centuries earlier. A recent study of
inscriptions discovered in the extreme south-west corner of Iberia, written in Phoe
nician script, strongly suggests that the language transcribed was Celtic. The earliest
of these inscriptions dates to the eighth century bc (see Chapters 3 and 4). In Gaul,
the Gaulish language was spoken extensively in the first century bc and is well rep
resented in a hundred or so inscriptions. South of the Alps in the north-western part
of the Po valley a distinctive form of Celtic known as Lepontic has been identified in
about seventy inscriptions. The earliest of these date back to the sixth century bc.
Finally, in the Middle Danube valley place names and personal names indicate that the
Celtic spoken here differed from the western Celtic languages, but little is known of its
structure or date except that many of the names are no later than the first century bc.
The Insular Celtic languages were spoken in Great Britain, Ireland, and Brittany. It
has been conventional to divide them into two groups: Q-Celtic, or Goidelic, spoken
in Ireland, the Isle of Man, and western Scotland, and P-Celtic, or Brythonic, which
32
2.4 A bilingual inscription in Latin and Celtic from Todi, Italy, dating to the second century bc. Museo
Gregoriano Egizio, Musei Vaticani, Rome.
forms the basis of modern Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. The long-established belief
has been that Q-Celtic was the older form and was adopted by the Atlantic communi
ties at an early date but was overtaken in Great Britain by the more recently evolved
P-Celtic, which was the basis of Gaulish. It was further believed that Q-Celtic was
reintroduced in Scotland and the Isle of Man by invaders from Ireland in the third
and fourth centuries ad and that P-Celtic was reintroduced to Brittany by settlers
from south-west Britain arriving in the fifth century ad. Recent work has, however,
suggested that this model is probably a considerable oversimplification. It has been
noted that P-Celtic place names are recorded in Ireland, though they may be translit
erations of Q-Celtic names by P-Celtic speakers reporting them to the geographers
of the classical world. The introduction of the Breton language poses more problems
and it is probably more in keeping with reality to interpret it as native Armorican
P-Celtic, surviving beneath an overlay of Latin, reinvigorated by the similar language
of the British settlers. A further factor to bear in mind is that the division between the
two types of Celtic may be less significant than was originally believed.
Awareness of the character of the Insular Celtic languages emerged in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, inspired by the researches of the Oxford
scholar Edward Lhuyd, Assistant Keeper at the Ashmolean Museum from 1687 and
its Keeper from 1691 until his death in 1709. As a true polymath, Lhuyd had many
interests and skills, but it was in the field of comparative Celtic linguistics that he
33
made his most lasting contribution. In 1695 he pre

sented a prospectus for an ambitious publication to be
entitled Archaeologia Britannica, which was to contain a
comparison of Welsh with other European languages,
especially Greek, Latin, Irish, Cornish, and Armorican.
After extensive travel in the west of Britain and in Ire
land, he returned to Oxford in 1701 to begin writing.
The first volume of Archaeologia contains grammars
and vocabularies of Irish, Breton, and Cornish, with
supporting discussions and etymologies. He noted the
close relationship between Gaulish, Irish, and British,
and the similarities between Welsh, Cornish, and Bre
ton, but he did not systematize it as a Q/P distinction.
In the Welsh preface to Archaeologia, as well as in cor
respondence, he used his linguistic studies to put for
ward a scheme to explain the ‘colonization’ of Britain,
2.5 Part of a stone relief from Bormio, Sondrio, Italy, dating to
the fifth century bc. The warriors appear to be equipped with suggesting that the Irish Britons were a colonial move
Celtic-style arms. Recent work on the Lepontic language of this ment from Gaul who settled first in southern Britain.
area suggests that Celtic was spoken here as early as the sixth–
fifth centuries bc, before the historic migrations began. Soprin They were pushed out into the north of Britain and
tendenza Archeologia della Lombardia. over to Ireland by a second wave of Gaulish settlers. In
attempting to relate language, through the careful study
of etymology, to people and migrations, Lhuyd was formulating a model which was
to dominate Celtic studies for 300 years. An alternative view, that the Celtic languages
originated in the Atlantic fringes of Europe, will be presented in Chapter 3.
Lhuyd was working in one corner of the web of European languages. Already, a cen
tury before, Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) had divided the European languages into four
groups (characterized by their word for God). Subsequently various attempts were
made to trace the European and related languages back to a common ancestor. In 1796
Sir William Jones, a judge of the Supreme Court of India, suggested, in a lecture, that
language groups as disparate as Celtic, Gothic, Sanskrit, and Old Persian might belong
to the same family. It was from this stream of scholarship that the concept of a common
Indo-European language began to develop, to be systematized, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, by Augustus Schleicher (1821–68). Schleicher developed the notion
of the tree-like growth of languages. Beginning with a primeval Indo-European lan
guage, groups diverged until seven ‘fundamentals’ emerged, one of which was Celtic;
this in turn split still further, giving rise to the individual branches of Celtic such as
Cornish, Welsh, and so on. The model was a convenient way of ordering the data then
available and formed a significant stage in the development of Indo-European studies.
34
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1 Visions of the Celts 1

A Guide to Further Reading 403

Classical Sources and Archaeology

If we stood back and took a broader geographical perspective, it would become

The Graeco-Roman Vision

The Pergamene kingdom as the saviour of Hellenism is the theme displayed in an

sage was conveyed by the great frieze carved around the

standard ethnographic introductions, these writers convey much of the atmosphere

Oblivion and Awakening: c.1500–1700

Celtomania and Nationalism: c.1700–1870

ain, to create a vision of the past peopled by Celts and

trad­ition’ was the invention of the Welsh stonemason

Beneath the romantic Celtism of the eighteenth century lay an undercurrent

Bonaparte established the Académie celtique in Paris in

The Contribution of Archaeology: 1870–1970

century dominated by recurring war, much of it resulting from German militarism,

Celts at the End of the Century

Celts in the New Millennium

Archaeological advances in the nineteenth and twen­

The Celtic Language

made his most lasting contribution. In 1695 he pre­

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tradition’ was the invention of the Welsh stonemason

Archaeological advances in the nineteenth and twen

made his most lasting contribution. In 1695 he pre