An Alternative to ‘Celtic from the East’ and ‘Celtic from the West’

Patrick Sims-Williams

doi:10.1017/s0959774320000098

Abstract

This article discusses a problem in integrating archaeology and philology. For most of the twentieth century, archaeologists associated the spread of the Celtic languages with the supposed westward spread of the ‘eastern Hallstatt culture’ in the first millenniumbc. More recently, some have discarded ‘Celtic from the East’ in favour of ‘Celtic from the West’, according to which Celtic was a much olderlingua francawhich evolved from a hypothetical Neolithic Proto-Indo-European language in the Atlantic zone and then spread eastwards in the third millenniumbc. This article (1) criticizes the assumptions and misinterpretations of classical texts and onomastics that led to ‘Celtic from the East’ in the first place; (2) notes the unreliability of the linguistic evidence for ‘Celtic from the West’, namely (i) ‘glottochronology’ (which assumes that languages change at a steady rate), (ii) misunderstood place-name distribution maps and (iii) the undeciphered inscriptions in southwest Iberia; and (3) proposes that Celtic radiating from France during the first millenniumbcwould be a more economical explanation of the known facts.

Highlights

Philology and archaeology have had a difficult relationship, as this article illustrates
Their main efforts, have always been devoted to the reconstruction of protolanguages, working back from the attested data to starred proto-forms, using well-tried comparative methods. Valid though they may be in context of the discipline, such reconstructed languages tend to belong in ‘asterisk reality’, fixed neither in time or space. This is frustrating from an archaeological standpoint, since ‘“when?” and “where?” are precisely the questions which archaeologists . . . like to ask’ (Renfrew 1987, 286)
Misunderstood classical texts and placenames led nineteenth-century philologists to locate the origin of the Celtic languages in southern Germany and Austria c. 500 BC, and their opinion led archaeologists to label the ‘Hallstatt culture’ as Celtic, a label which in turn led philologists to use ‘Hallstatt’ archaeology as a basis for linguistic geography—and so on by a circular argument

Summary

Introduction

Philology and archaeology have had a difficult relationship, as this article illustrates. This lingua franca, spoken ‘from Portugal to Britain by the middle of the first millennium BC’, was Celtic, and could be argued to have ‘developed gradually over the four millennia that maritime contacts had been maintained, perhaps reaching its distinctive form in the Late Bronze Age’ (Cunliffe 2001, 293, 296) He termed it ‘Atlantic Celtic’ to ‘distinguish it, conceptually, from the language which is generally assumed to have been spoken by the historical Celts whose migrations were recorded by the classical writers’, adding that this suggestion takes with it no implication that the two languages were different. Dates such as ‘3200 BC ± 1,500 years’ for the arrival of Celtic in the British Isles are pure fantasy

Ancient Celtic-looking place-names

Findings

Conclusion