Archaeology and Celtic Myth

Jonathan M. Wooding

doi:10.33356/temenos.83423

Abstract

This article arises from a plenary invitation to compare myth and archaeology in the context of Celtic-speaking cultures. Approaches to myth in this context have undergone significant reassessment in the light of revisionist approaches to definitions of ‘native’ culture and ‘Celtic’ identity. These reassessments have implications for comparisons that are made between archaeological evidence and narratives, or elements thereof, that are arguably identifiable as mythic. New approaches to data in both subject areas affect roles that have long been played by myth in public reception of archaeological discoveries and in supporting cultural identities. Past approaches to such comparisons inspire caution, even scepticism, but some critical use of myth as an idea can be seen as productive – for example, in questioning conservative interpretations of textual or material data.

Highlights

This article arises from a plenary invitation to compare myth and archaeology in the context of Celtic-speaking cultures
As the opportunity, of engaging with a spectrum of complex ideas and entrenched perceptions!. In accepting this invitation to compare studies of myth and archaeology, I am encouraged by some archaeologists who have recently questioned the tendency, which emerged in the mid-twentieth century, to present archaeological knowledge as discrete from the types of knowledge found in texts
Medieval Literature, Myth, and Archaeology In Celtic-speaking Britain and Ireland, from the period after c. 400 CE, we find another point on the proto-historic horizon at which myth potentially converges with archaeology

Summary

Geopolitical myths

Another proto-historic context in which the archaeology of Celtic-speaking peoples regularly comes into contact with what could be seen as ‘mythic’ narratives is at the beginning of the Roman era in Gaul and Germany. In particular, the work of Colin Wells there has been a strong trend in scholarship to compare archaeology and these texts dialectically to suggest that Celtic identities in Gaul were substantially invented, or reinvented, to serve the requirements of Roman propaganda (Wells 1972, 23–30; Wells 1995, 603–20; Green 1990, 13) This interpretive model respects the disjunctions that are often evident between claims of recent migration in Classical histories and the evidence of archaeological cultures, which often shows longer patterns of continuity. Recent studies by Clifford Ando (2005) and Ralph Häussler (2012) invite us to consider that later provincial encounters of Roman and native knowledge were often two-sided, not one-sided, conversations – evinced, amongst other evidence, by the fact that equations between Roman and Celtic deities are diverse rather than normative It has proved easy for some archaeologists to argue that conceptions such as ‘Celt’ are a myth in the sense of something false or invented, sometimes only because historic identities are not coterminous with archaeological cultures.

Sacred and profane seafaring

Concluding thoughts