Celtic Peoples Research Articles

Magnetic prospecting of diachronic structures (antiquity to First World War) on the site of the sanctuary of Ribemont-sur-Ancre (Somme, France)

The site of the sanctuary of Ribemont-sur-Ancre (Somme, France) is of major scientific interest for the knowledge of the Celtic civilization in Europe. It also presents other peculiarities: two clearly identifiable periods of occupation—the first one as early as third century BC- to the second century AD and the second one from 1914–1918. In the area disrupted through military operations, the remains of several epochs are intermingled. In order to obtain a precise knowledge of the space time organisation of each occupation, a magnetic survey was carried out. The comparison of geophysical results with the aerial photographs shot during the war allows an exact determination of the origin of the anomalies. It becomes possible to separate the magnetic anomalies which are contemporary, anterior or probably posterior to the conflict of 1914–1918. The range of magnitude and the sign of polarity of anomalies appear as a means to facilitate the identification of the features of each period. Among the anomalies detected, some of them, such an the elliptic enclosure, have been identified by the excavations as unknown archaeological remains. Generally speaking, the ability of the magnetic method for surveying any structure in such a disrupted environment suggests a more frequent use in prospecting of the sites which were battlefields in Historic periods. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

“An unprecedented influx”: Nativism and Irish Famine Immigration to Canada

During the dreadful famine summer of 1847, as thousands of indigent Irish streamed from floating coffin ships to meet their fate in the cities and countryside of British North America, growing number of people vociferously expressed fears that had been simmering for well over decade. Disquieted members of Canada's House of Assembly, for example, unanimously agreed to address Queen Victoria with their apprehensions concerning the unprecedented influx of Emigrants from Great Britain and Ireland in state of destitution, starvation, and disease, unparalleled in the history of this province. [1] Genuine concern for the condition of the immigrants was swiftly tempered, and then virtually disappeared, as native-born and immigrant Protestants considered the possible ramifications that the accelerated introduction of large numbers of Irish Catholics would have on British North American society. Within decade, the same Toronto newspaper that had once greeted the famine migration with humanitarian appeals for aid had hardened its opinion into nativist resolve to bar further Irish-Catholic emigration entirely. In response to news from the United States that thousands of unenlightened and bigoted Romanists might slip northward across the border, the Globe predicted a great calamity, dangerous to our civil and religious liberty, calamity which every true patriot, Protestant as well as Roman Catholic, should endeavour, by all means in his power, to avert. [2] The first clear episode of nativism--the emphatic rejection of immigrants because of their foreign identification--in pre-Confederation Canadian history was triggered by the events of the late 1840s. Strikingly, this response to the famine Irish, which was fueled by mixture of Protestant anxiety over the global spread of Roman Catholicism and an antipathy to Celtic peoples, has to date received little historiographical attention. [3] Yet the Canadian experience coincided with nativism in the United States, more widely recognized phenomenon that became an integral component of nationalism and political-party formation. Canada's nativism may even have matched America's in fervor during the mid-nineteenth century, although its manifestations were certainly different. This study seeks to identify and explain the nativist response to the famine Irish who made their way to Canada. British North American nativism was complex and varied, depending on economic, demographic, and social themes in various provinces, yet its disparate elements may be characterized by several interrelated themes. The first might be understood as critical mass dynamic, which suggests that dramatic number of Irish-Catholic immigrants rapidly surpassed an acceptable threshold when they settled among or near native-born and immigrant Protestants. The international context of anti-Catholicism, pervasive impulse in the Western world of the nineteenth century, represents another basic principle at work. The third addresses chronology, suggesting confluence of events as this immigrant cohort altered and was in turn shaped by British North America's political, economic, and social landscapes. Nativism was one of the tremors that rippled across North America as powerful ethnoreligious plates collid ed in the mid-nineteenth century. This event will be best understood by first considering the theoretical and historiographical contexts of and then by focusing on the themes just described. Nativism has been recurrent social and political force in the last two centuries of American history. John Higham, who concentrated his energies on American movements, defined nativism as the intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign... connections, or defensive type of nationalism. Though Higham cautioned that the word nativism, of nineteenth-century derivation, over time assumed pejorative connotations, his definition provides durable intellectual device for analyzing host population's reaction to immigrants. …

ENGLISH ‘NATIONALISM’, CELTIC PARTICULARISM, AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

This review suggests that recent historiography on nationalism can help us to see that the English Civil War was, in part, a conflict about national identity and ethnic difference. It argues that, even before the war began, the supporters of the parliament were associated with a narrowly intolerant strain of Englishness, and that this helps to explain why the Celtic peoples of Wales and Cornwall rallied to the king. During 1642–4, parliament's close links with the Scots – together with the presence of many foreign mercenaries in the roundhead armies – prevented the identification of parliament's cause with that of England itself from becoming absolute. Following the creation of the New Model Army, however – an army from which ‘strangers’ of all sorts were deliberately excluded – relations between the Scots and parliament rapidly deteriorated, and it became possible for the parliamentarians to make an unequivocal appeal to English patriotic sentiment. The defeat of the king – and of the Welsh and Cornish troops who had done much to sustain his cause – was the result.

In search of Wales: travel writing and narratives of difference, 1918–50

Travel writers since the eighteenth century have sought to portray Wales as a place of «difference» with its own culture, history and legends woven into the landscape. Their texts were later to inspire twentieth-century travellers. These later travellers also drew on the academic work of geographers, anthropologists and archaeologists such as H.J. Fleure, Cyril Fox and E.G. Bowen who wrote extensively and influentially on their ideas of identity and race grounded in the landscapes of Wales. One recurrent theme throughout these popular travel narratives, like H.V. Morton'sIn Search of Wales , was that of a Celtic history and culture, evident both in landscape and in the people. Travellers» books recorded journeys punctuated by visits to the monuments of this Celtic past with its hill-forts and standing stones, and by encounters with the peoples of Wales. The literature of travellers and academics combined to create a particular form of text for Wales that in turn became the language for the promotion of tourism and for the images and experiences of Wales that could be taken away by those who came to visit.

Familial defective apolipoprotein B-100: a mutation emerged in the Mesolithic ancestors of Celtic peoples?

As part of the WHO MONICA project, plasma low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) concentrations were determined in 3341 randomly selected individuals from Switzerland [ [1] Burnand B. Wietlisbach V. Riesen W. et al. Lipides sanguins dans la population suisse: enquête MONICA 1988–89. Schweiz. Med. Wschr. 1993; 123: 29-37 PubMed Google Scholar ]. Mean LDL-C was 16% higher than in US Caucasians, and 4–60% higher than in other European populations [ 1 Burnand B. Wietlisbach V. Riesen W. et al. Lipides sanguins dans la population suisse: enquête MONICA 1988–89. Schweiz. Med. Wschr. 1993; 123: 29-37 PubMed Google Scholar , 2 US Department of Health and Human Services, Lipid Research Clinics Program. Population Studies Data Book. Vol. I, The Prevalence Study. Washington DC: Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health (NIH 80-1527) 1980. p. 27-81. Google Scholar , 3 Verschuren W.M.M. Jacobs D.R. Bloemberg B.P.M. et al. Serum total cholesterol and long-term coronary heart disease mortality in different cultures. Twenty-five-year follow-up of the Seven Countries Study. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 1995; 274: 131-136 Crossref PubMed Google Scholar ]. If the cut-off of the National Cholesterol Education Program (LDL-C >4.14 mmol/l [ [4] Expert Panel on Detection Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults. Summary of the second report of the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) Expert Panel on detection, evaluation, and treatment of high blood cholesterol in adults (Adult Treatment Panel II), J Am Med Assoc 1993;269(23):3015–3023. Google Scholar ]) is applied to US Caucasians, then 12–32% of males and 5–40% of females have elevated LDL-C [ [2] US Department of Health and Human Services, Lipid Research Clinics Program. Population Studies Data Book. Vol. I, The Prevalence Study. Washington DC: Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health (NIH 80-1527) 1980. p. 27-81. Google Scholar ], whereas in the Swiss, 31–56% of males and 14–66% of females have LDL-C above this cut-off [ [1] Burnand B. Wietlisbach V. Riesen W. et al. Lipides sanguins dans la population suisse: enquête MONICA 1988–89. Schweiz. Med. Wschr. 1993; 123: 29-37 PubMed Google Scholar ]. Although this data is based on a relatively small sample, it raises the question as to whether the higher prevalence of hypercholesterolemia in Switzerland compared to other populations is due to genetic differences.

Dauvit Broun. The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. (Studies in Celtic History.) Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer. 1999. Pp. x, 228. $75.00. ISBN 0-85115-375-5.

Dauvit Broun. The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. (Studies in Celtic History.) Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer. 1999. Pp. x, 228. $75.00. ISBN 0-85115-375-5. - Volume 32 Issue 3

Lordship and tradition in barbarian Europe

This text develops an hypothesis about the interaction of lordship and tradition, and about how such tradition was generated and propagated among the peoples of barbarian Europe. It shows how orally transmitted tribal and dynastic tradition was crucial to the legitimization of political authority. It contributes to literary historical scholarship by showing how pre-Christian oral tradition was politically significant to early medieval aristocracies, thereby elucidating the social context in which texts like Beowulf originated and within which they must be interpreted. This study of the subject draws on an extensive range of evidence relating to a variety of early Germanic and Celtic peoples.

The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christian Ireland (review)

256 Reviews The next two essays deftly introduce large and complex topics. Clare Lees's 'At a Crossroads: Old English and Feminist Criticism' frankly declares the ideological status of feminism as a politics, not just a hermeneutic. Her review of scholarship to date and her practical analysis of Elene provide a convincing critique of the intersection of gender and genre in the Old English poetic tradition. Carol Braun Pasternack's 'PostStructuralist Theories: The Subject and the Text' ranges over Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault and others before moving into a brief post-structuralist reading of Beowulf that highlights the 'fissures and slippages' which point to 'contradictions between an older oral-heroic social formation and the written-Christian formation attempting its conversion' (p. 185). O n e must sympathise with Peter Baker, but also celebrate, that i f this book is to remain in print, as one hopes it will, his chapter on 'Old English and Computing: A Guided Tour' will require frequent updating. H e admirably outlines the history and 'present' (circa 1995) state of humanities computing and Old English-related projects and bravely looks to the future which so rapidly becomes the past in this field. The challenge to humanities scholars is to design analytical and disseminatory frames for scholarly material that are not overtaken and rendered obsolete by hardware and software advances occurring before their completion. Several good pedagogical books on Old English have appeared recently, and Reading Old English Texts is as welcome as The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, George Jack's Beowulf: A Student Edition, Bruce Mitchell and Fred Robinson's Beowulf: An Edition, and some others. In Reading Old English Texts, most obviously, some ofthe challenges to the Old English teaching community laid d o w n by Allen Frantzen in his Desirefor Origins (New Brunswick, 1991) are being answered. Greg Waite Department of English University of Otago 6 hOgain, Daithi, The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christi Ireland, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press and Wilton, Cork, The Collins Press, 1999; cloth; pp. viii, 259; R.R.P. £25.00, US$45.00. Reviews 257 The beliefs of the pre-Christian Irish Celts have often been fancifully 'reconstructed', and the texts from which they are customarily derived are universally acknowledged as problematic. This is because the material was not committed to writing until after the conversion of the Irish to Christianity in the fifth century CE. This book attempts to combine archaeological evidence, Christian-influenced texts and surviving folkloric customs to arrive at a cautious reconstruction of the beliefs of the pre-Christian Irish. The archaeological remains of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Ireland is first considered, and the emphasis is on the megaliths and passage-graves which feature in later Celtic tales. 6 hOgain is careful not to speculate beyond the evidence and discusses in general terms Neolithic and Bronze Age cultural and social shifts which affected technology and attitudes to death. Chapter Two, 'Basic Tenets in the Iron Age', reviews the evidence for the arrival date of the Celts in Ireland and the earliest Greek texts which provide information about Ireland and the Celtic peoples. This involves discussion of archaeological hoards and the reconstructions ofIndo-European philologists concerning the relationship between the 'p' Celtic and 'q' Celtic language branches. The student of Celtic mythology will here recognise some of the motifs which are initially introduced archaeologically, but contribute substantially to the later tradition, for example the cult of the severed head (p. 49). At this point a difficulty with The Sacred Isle becomes apparent. W h e n dealing with the later textual material 6 hOgain does nothing strikingly original. His six-page discussion of the severed head is a workmanlike summary of other materials, nothing more. Yet, as the book is not written as a conventional introduction to the subject, it would not really be suitable to recommend to junior students. This impression deepens with the next chapter, "The Druids and Their Practices'. This is a conventional coverage of the Classical ethnographic texts (Julius Caesar, Strabo and others preserving sections of the lost work of Posidonius of Apamea) followed by the accounts of druids and their rituals and social...

‘Drinking the Feast’: Alcohol and the Legitimation of Power in Celtic Europe

Drinking and feasting were an integral part of life in Iron Age Europe and the British Isles. The distribution of food and especially drink in prescribed fashion played a key role in establishing and maintaining social relationships. Alcoholic beverages were important consumable status items in prehistoric Europe, serving as a social lubricant as well as a social barrier. The metal, ceramic and wooden vessels required for the preparation, distribution and consumption of these beverages were a vehicle for inter- and intragroup competition, and underwent considerable change, both symbolic and material, through time. This article will attempt a cognitive analysis of the material culture of Iron Age drinking and feasting by integrating archaeological and documentary evidence. The impact of contact with the Mediterranean world, gender configurations, and the ideology of power and patronage will be discussed in relation to changing material culture assemblages.

Marina Smyth. <italic>Understanding the Universe in Seventh-Century Ireland</italic>. (Studies in Celtic History, number 15.) Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell. 1996. Pp. 341. $70.00

Journal Article Marina Smyth. Understanding the Universe in Seventh-Century Ireland. (Studies in Celtic History, number 15.) Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell. 1996. Pp. 341. $70.00 Get access Smyth Marina. Understanding the Universe in Seventh-Century Ireland. (Studies in Celtic History, number 15.) Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell. 1996. Pp. 341. $70.00. Wesley M. Stevens Wesley M. Stevens University of Winnipeg Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 103, Issue 4, October 1998, Pages 1233–1234, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/103.4.1233 Published: 01 October 1998

Understanding the universe in seventh-century Ireland. By Marina Smyth. Pp 341. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. 1996. £35. (Studies in Celtic History XV)

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Ossian and the Invention of Textual History

Ossian and the Invention of Textual History Kristine Louise Haugen It is now controversial to call James Macpherson a forger or the poems of Ossian a hoax. 1 Encouraged by Derick Thomson’s 1952 demonstration that Macpherson’s Ossian indeed echoes authentic Gaelic verse, 2 a group of critics has undertaken to “rehabilitate” Macpherson, not least through a new critical edition of Ossian’s poems and related texts. 3 The edition makes it easier than before to encounter Ossian directly: Morna, thou fairest of women, daughter of Cormac-Carbre? [sic] why in the circle of stones, in the cave of the rock, alone? The stream murmureth hoarsely. The blast groaneth in the aged tree. The lake is troubled before thee.... But thou art like snow on the heath. Thy hair like a thin cloud of gold on the top of Cromleach.... Thy arms, as two white pillars in the hall of Fingal. 4 The authentic source of this passage seems to be the eighteenth-century commonplace that the savage and uneducated delight in figurative language, especially similes and metaphors—a commonplace enunciated often in the writings [End Page 309] of Hugh Blair, a literary critic deeply interested in Macpherson’s Ossianic productions. 5 As Harold Weinbrot and others suggest, the Ossian poems were celebrated largely because they confirmed readers’ most picturesque preconceptions about the “infancy of mankind.” 6 There was room for disagreement. Many influential litterati were convinced of the poems’ antiquity, among them Goethe, Herder, Cesarotti, and a host of Scottish intellectuals. 7 But there were also detractors, mainly English—for example, Dr. Johnson and Edward Gibbon—although David Hume soon joined the skeptics, and the Scotsman Malcolm Laing issued the most crushing attack in the exchange several decades after Ossian’s first appearance in 1760. 8 The Ossian poems served a potent mixture of scholarly and political concerns, of which some were new but some were venerable. With a subtle but important shift in balance, the same mixture underlay the willingness of the most prominent eighteenth-century critics to discredit problematic texts and textual myths, even at the cost of an apparent reduction in historical knowledge. 9 For all parties Macpherson’s Ossian invited not only aesthetic delectation, but sustained thought about the relationship between early poetry and history and the value of early texts for reconstructing the past. [End Page 310] The question of British origins had preoccupied seventeenth-century antiquaries for a number of reasons, including Polydore Vergil’s unflattering Anglica Historia (first published 1546). 10 In the campaign to establish respectable national roots the Celtic druids had quickly become a kind of favorite example; they were presented early and often as heroes of British culture. The druids and their associates the bards had been described in their French setting by classical authors; William Camden, John Selden, and others transferred them easily to Celtic Britain. It was then straightforward to suggest further that the British Celts were the first discoverers of writing and philosophy, or at least discoverers concurrent with the ancient Hebrews, or both, this theory having been elaborated for the French Celts through Annius of Viterbo’s historical forgeries of 1498 and Annius’s French partisans. 11 In fact this theory placed England at a disadvantage as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales had the more convincing joint claim to Celtic ancestry. Individual claims for Scotland and Ireland were frequently heard as well. The text most relevant to Ossian was the deist John Toland’s 1726 history of the druids, in which Toland both satirized the eighteenth-century clergy and argued that the ancient Celts of France and Scotland were colonists from Ireland—the original home of druidism, learning, and Toland. 12 In Toland’s version the theory made much of certain unpublished Irish manuscripts, supposedly dating from Cicero’s day and written in the “native” Irish alphabet. St. Patrick had burned hundreds of druidical religious books when he arrived in Ireland—proof that the Celts had a written language—but the bardic histories, couched in rugged verse, had escaped the evangelist’s flames. 13 Clearly, any respectable reply would need to draw on ancient manuscripts too. Even for readers unfamiliar with Toland, Macpherson’s texts...

Colutnbanus: Studies on the Latin Writings. Studies in Celtic History. Edited by Michael Lapidge. Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 1997. x + 315 pp. $89.00 cloth.

Colutnbanus: Studies on the Latin Writings. Studies in Celtic History. Edited by Michael Lapidge. Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 1997. x + 315 pp. $89.00 cloth.

Una dedicación a Júpiter en la Beturia: los yacimientos de las Casas del Sejo (Segura de León, Badajoz)

In theses pages we try to develop some approaches to Religion and Ethnicity between the Celtic peoples of Southwest Iberia in the early Roman period (1st century B.C. / 1st century A.D.), according to new epigraphic and archaeological evidence. On this line, we will try to define a new sacred place, in an open air site, dedicated to a deity, Anca[...]is , linked with Jupiter, and a possible new dedication to Ataecina.

Celtic myths

In ANTIQUITY a year ago, Vincent & Ruth Megaw found a useful parallel between the multiple definitions of the ancient Celts, as it can be seen from varied sources, and the several ways an individual's ethnic identity is seen and defined in the contemporary world. Here the other view is stated: that the methodology and interpretations advocated by the Megaws are both false and dangerous.

Les Celtibères : archéologie et culture

Celtiberians : archeology and culture The Celtiberians are one of the most important Celtic peoples of the Iberian Peninsula. The archeological record, the historical sources and the linguistic evidence enable the Celtiberians to be located in the highlands of the Eastern Meseta, the Iberian System and the lands of the right bank of the Middle Ebro Valley. An analysis of the settlements, the cemeteries, the weapons and other elements of the material culture, has made possible to establish for the first time a cultural sequence of the Celtiberian world, from the 8th-7th century B.C. to the Roman Conquest.

Ancient Celts and modern ethnicity

In September 1994 the European Association of Archaeologists held its inaugural meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia, a sovereign nation formerly part of Yugoslavia. As was to be expected in such a place and at such a time, questions of ethnicity and identity were much in evidence. Here a classic case-study in defining an ancient European entity is explored from a fresh starting-point in contemporary Australia; it was first developed in the Ljubljana session on ‘Contemporary myth of the past’.

The earliest Greek sources on the Celts

The Greek writers of the late sixth century to the late fourth century BC provide the earliest documentary evidence concerning the ancient Celts. These sources are often short and occasionally fragmentary, but they are the first to discuss such topics as Celtic tribal movements, banqueting and drinking habits, and military activities. The following paper is a complete collection of these early Greek sources, including original language texts, translations, and commentaries on each passage.

¿Volcas en Hispania? A propósito de Livio, 21, 19, 6

Volcae in Spain ? About Livy 21,19, 6. This paper proposes the identification of the Volciani mentioned by Livius in the context of the Second Punic War in some area south of the Pyrenees with the Celtic people of the Volcae Tectosages who had their centre in Tolosa (Toulouse). Their refusal of the Roman alliance in 218 fits well with the anti-Roman attitudes for the Volcae and contrasts with the general philo-Romanism of the neighbouring Bargusii and of the Iberian peoples in general (among which they had been traditionally included : e.g. Tovar, Volciani=Bolsciani of Bolsean). Diverse evidences concerning the presence of Gauls between the Pyrenees and the Ebro river are also considered.

Towns, Villages and Countryside of Celtic Europe

Towns, Villages and Countryside of Celtic Europe