The Celts: Search for a Civilization

The persistence of the standard model is puzzling – and yet, despite a paucity of evidence, there are still a few archaeologists clinging on to it. This perplexes geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer, who has written: ‘The current orthodox view of the origins of the Celts is one of the last remaining archaeological myths left over from the nineteenth cen

Whatever his misgivings about Pytheas’ veracity, Strabo agrees that Britain is separate from Celtica. So the Britons, it seems, were not Celts – at least as far as the Greek geographers were concerned.

There’s one source, in particular, which tells us that the Galatians – despite becoming Hellenized and, later, Romanized – still hung on to one crucial part of their Celtic culture. As late as the fourth century AD, St Jerome wrote that the Galatians spoke a language that was very similar indeed to that spoken by the Treveri tribe, of Trier, in Ger

the Romans lump Celts and Galatians together and call them all ‘Galli’ – or Gauls.

we’re defining Celts as people who speak Celtic, can we really find Celts as early as the fifth millennium BC?

. Lokobo niirabo to araiai kalte lokon ane narke kak isiinkolobo ii te-ro-bare be tasiioonii.’

While hunting Celts at home and elsewhere, I preferred to think about Calgacus. He is the first named ‘Scot’ – and certainly a Celt. We know his name because the son-in-law of a Roman general wrote it down (or, more likely, made it up).

Long after the Iron Age, in the Middle Ages, the Celtic tales themselves were committed to paper (or, possibly, to vellum) in the form of the Irish and Welsh myths. An oral tradition became preserved in written form. The earliest manuscripts of the Ulster Cycle and the Mabinogion date to between the eighth and fourteenth century AD, and were writte

In 1968, the state archaeologist of Badem-Wurttemburg in south-west Germany was alerted to a large quantity of stone being ploughed up in a field near the village of Hochdorf an der Enz. This site, perhaps unpromising at first, would turn out to be one of the most astonishing Celtic discoveries of the twentieth century.