Re-approaching Celts: Origins, Society, and Social Change

Rachel Pope

doi:10.1007/s10814-021-09157-1

Abstract

This work re-approaches the origins of “the Celts” by detailing the character of their society and the nature of social change in Europe across 700–300 BC. A new approach integrates regional burial archaeology with contemporary classical texts to further refine our social understanding of the European Iron Age. Those known to us as “Celts” were matrifocal Early Iron Age groups in central Gaul who engaged in social traditions out of the central European salt trade and became heavily involved in Mediterranean politics. The paper focuses on evidence from the Hallstatt–La Tène transition to solve a 150-year-old problem: how the Early Iron Age “Celts” became the early La Tène “Galatai,” who engaged in the Celtic migrations and the sacking of Rome at 387 BC.

Highlights

A good place to begin is to state what this paper on Iron Age “Celts” does not do
Having employed chronologically sequenced archaeological data and contemporary classical texts, we find that the original use of “Celts” refers to matrifocal Early Iron Age groups in central Gaul, as Caesar (DBG 1.1) almost had it
Archaeology, linguistics, and aDNA studies all point to the same conclusion, that Celts had Bronze Age origins; they did not “arrive” from anywhere else, with small groups settling in North Italy by the seventh century BC (Golasecca, Adriatic)

Summary

Introduction

I do not address modern “Celtic” identity (see Collis 2017; James 1999), nor do I consider “Celts” of the early medieval period (papers in Karl and Stifter 2007)— each has relatively little to do with the task of understanding the people of Iron Age Europe. My primary aim is to further refine our knowledge of the historical Celts (Kελτoí, Keltoi)—their origins, the nature of their society (plural), and social change (between 700 and 300 BC). To this end, I use a large dataset and new method to produce an evidence-based narrative, one that foregrounds chronology, regional archaeological traditions, and the integration of evidence from contemporary historical texts.

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion