Celts in History Modern Scholar

ICONS OF THE
IRON AGE:
THE CELTS IN HISTORY
AND ARCHAEOLOGY
COURSE GUIDE
Professor Susan A. Johnston

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Icons of the Iron Age:
The Celts in History and Archaeology
George Washington University
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Course Syllabus

About Your Professor...................................................................................................4
Introduction...................................................................................................................5
Lecture 1 The Creation of the Celts ......................................................................6
Lecture 2 The Documentary Sources ..................................................................10
Lecture 3 Caesar and Posidonius .......................................................................14
Lecture 4 Archaeology and Identity .....................................................................19
Lecture 5 Celtic Art ..............................................................................................24
Lecture 6 The Celtic Core....................................................................................29
Lecture 7 The Atlantic Celts ................................................................................34
Lecture 8 Eastern and Iberian Celts ....................................................................39
Lecture 9 Celtic Gender Roles ............................................................................43
Lecture 10 Celtic Religions ....................................................................................47
Lecture 11 Celtic Warfare ......................................................................................51
Lecture 12 The Roman Invasion ...........................................................................55
Lecture 13 The Occupied Celts .............................................................................60
Lecture 14 The Modern Celts ................................................................................65
Course Materials ........................................................................................................70
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Photo courtesy of Susan A. Johnston
About Your Professor

Susan A. Johnston
Susan A. Johnston is a part-time faculty member in anthropology at the

George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She teaches a variety
of courses in anthropology and archaeology, including the archaeology
of the Celtic peoples, archaeological myths and mysteries, and the
anthropology of religion.
Professor Johnston has carried out archaeological research in Ireland since
the 1980s, when she did her Ph.D. dissertation on Irish rock art of the
Neolithic and Bronze Age. She has also done archaeological work in such
varied places as India, England, and Rhode Island.
She is currently conducting research at the site of Dún Ailinne, County
Kildare, Ireland. This site, which saw a variety of uses between 3500 BCE
and 400 CE, was one of the royal sites of the Irish Iron Age, and in that peri-
od was the ceremonial center of the rulers of the ancient kingdom of Leinster.
She has published a number of articles and research reports, but her most
recent publication, with Dr. Bernard Wailes, was on excavations carried out at
Dún Ailinne, a book entitled Dún Ailinne: Excavations at an Irish Royal Site,
1968–1975.
4
© Tom O’Brien/shutterstock.com
Introduction
Among the most famous peoples in ancient times were the Celts, who lived
in Europe during the Iron Age, from about 600 BCE into the early centuries
CE. They fascinated ancient Classical writers of Greece and Rome, who
wrote about them often. They left behind an intriguing record of physical
remains that have been recovered by archaeologists, and they have contin-
ued to hold our attention as modern populations claim a Celtic identity. This
course considers who the people known as the Celts really were, based on
history and archaeology. Some of the questions considered:
• Where does the name “Celt” come from, who does it apply to, and
what other names were used for the people of the Iron Age in
Europe, Britain, and Ireland?
• What did Greek and Roman authors say about the Celts and how far
can we trust their descriptions of the various peoples to their north?
• What do we know about the lives of these Iron Age peoples from the
physical remains they left behind, and does it confirm or refute the
historical record?
• What evidence lies behind the popular view of such exotic aspects of
their cultures as druids, Celtic women, human sacrifice, and naked,
painted Celtic warriors?
• How does our knowledge of the Celtic past affect those in modern
countries for whom Celtic ancestry is a centerpiece of ethnic identity?
Using historical, archaeological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence, we
will consider these questions and others in our discussion of the ancient
Celtic peoples of Europe, Britain, and Ireland.
5
Lecture 1:
The Creation of the Celts
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Barry Cunliffe’s The Ancient
Celts, chapter 1.
Imagine an ancient “Celt” (and yes, it’s pronounced with a

hard “C,” unless you are talking about the Boston basket-
ball team). I’m guessing that, if you’re inclined to think
about males, you thought of a warrior. Maybe Mel Gibson
in Braveheart, or one of the many versions of King Arthur.
He is probably wearing leather armor, and he has a sword.
He may have long hair, be tattooed or painted blue, he
may be in a chariot, or he may be wearing a kilt. But I’m guessing that you
probably didn’t think of a farmer, or a metalsmith. If you thought of a woman,
well, that can go either way—Alex Kingston in the BBC miniseries Boudica or
maybe Juliana Margulies in The Mists of Avalon. If she is a warrior, she looks
a lot like the men, but with somewhat smaller weapons and somewhat
greater coverage of body parts (though often not much more). If she’s more
along the lines of a priestess, then she may be wearing something white and
diaphanous, or maybe plaid, or maybe something a little more peasant-like.
But I’ll bet you she has red hair.
Where do these images come from? Do they have any basis in fact? And
who were the Celts? This course explores all of these questions using histo-
ry, archaeology, linguistics, and even a little anthropology. What we will find
out is that, while the Celts are in some ways like their modern image, in other
ways they are even more complex and interesting than the stereotype.
So who were the Celts? Well, the archaeological answer is that they were a
group of related cultures that lived in Europe (including Great Britain and
Ireland) during what archaeologists call the Iron Age. This period, when iron
became the standard metal for both tools and weapons, began about 800
BCE. It ended in most places with the Roman conquest; this happened at dif-
ferent times in different places, but it started at the end of the third century
BCE (when they invaded Iberia) and finally ended with the consolidation of
Britain in the first century CE. In Ireland and parts of Scotland, which the
Romans never incorporated into the Empire, the Iron Age ends in the fifth
century CE, with their conversion to Christianity.
But the question “Who were the Celts?” can also be asked in different ways.
Archaeology, with its focus on material objects, doesn’t preserve the name
“Celt,” so in some ways the Celts are only borrowed into archaeology and
attached to sites and artifacts of the Iron Age. The name “Celt” properly
LECTURE ONE
belongs to historical documents, and only appears beginning perhaps as

early as the sixth century BCE. We’ll talk more about those sources later. But
in a real way, the Celts as we think of them were actually created in the sev-
enteenth to eighteenth century by a linguist named Edward Lhuyd.
6
Edward Lhuyd was one of many linguists who understood that languages are
related. These relationships are identified through shared elements, including
sounds and meanings, like the fact that English “mother” is similar to Spanish
“madre” and Latin “mater.” Previous linguists had put together a number of
languages into a large group they called “Indo-European,” which includes most
of the languages of Europe and also those of northern India, parts of Iran, and
much of central Asia. Lhuyd had been inspired by the work of Paul-Yves
Pezron, who had argued that Breton, the language spoken in Brittany, was a
descendant of the language spoken by the people who had lived there during
the Roman conquest. And since those people had been identified as Celts in
Classical documents, then Breton must be a Celtic language. Lhuyd, in turn,
noted that there were many similarities between Breton and the surviving
indigenous languages of Britain and Ireland—Welsh, Irish, Scots Gaelic,
Cornish, and Manx. Lhuyd, looking for a word to apply to this language group,
also chose “Celtic,” presumably because Pezron had used it for Breton and
these languages were part of the same group.
So now we had a language family of so-called “Celtic”
languages, which was analogous to something like
Romance languages or Germanic languages. But who
were the people who had spoken these Celtic lan-
guages? While Pezron and Lhuyd were doing their work,
archaeologists had been busily excavating sites in
Europe, Britain, and Ireland. By the nineteenth century,
two sites had been discovered that would have a big
impact on the study of the Iron Age. The first was the
site of Hallstatt, in modern Austria. Hallstatt was a salt
mine that had been exploited for salt at least since the
seventh century BCE. As a means of preserving food,
salt was a precious commodity, and could be
lucrative, as evidenced by the cemetery asso-
ciated with the site. More than one thousand
graves of people from this early period,
associated with the salt mine, were exca-
vated, and the graves contained a wide
variety of metal goods, including swords,
shields, axes, jewelry, and many other
objects. These artifacts, and in particular
the metal ones, were in a style that was
later to be seen in many sites across conti-
nental Europe. In this way, the Hallstatt style
of metalwork came to define the earlier part
of the Iron Age, which became known as the
Hallstatt period.
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Bronze Razor from the Hallstatt Culture

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Likely an early razor, this bronze Hallstatt tool has two circular holes on de
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the shaft and one circular hole in the blade body that indicate the possibility it Mu
©
may also have served as a spear head.
7
The other site is on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland and is called La Tène.
This part of the lake, like Hallstatt, produced hundreds of metal objects,
including swords, jewelry, shield parts, tools, parts of chariots, and horse
gear. Later investigations showed that there had been a wooden platform,
apparently at the lake’s edge, and the artifacts had been placed, or thrown,
into the lake, presumably as part of a ritual dedication. This metalwork had
the graceful, curvilinear decoration that has become synonymous with the
Celts. As with Hallstatt, the La Tène style of metalwork began to turn up in
many sites in Europe and also in Britain and Ireland, but it was dated later
than Hallstatt. So La Tène came to define the second part of the Iron Age,
as the La Tène Period.
It only remained to connect the linguistic dots with the archaeological ones.
Although the correlation wasn’t perfect, it seemed that the distribution of La
Tène metalwork corresponded roughly with the distribution of what had been
identified as the Celtic languages. In addition, what was known of life in the
Iron Age, their living sites, their artifacts, their religious behavior, their society,
suggested that they were similar in many ways from Spain to Ireland, and
from Italy to France. And so the term “Celtic” began to be associated, not just
with a group of related languages, but also with the La Tène part of the Iron
Age, which began about 450 BCE.
And so the Celts were born. We will talk more about the historical docu-
ments next time. But it’s worth noting now that, properly, the term Celt should
be understood to mean a group of related cultures and languages, not a sin-
gle culture. This is the basis of a current debate in archaeology, which at
times has become surprisingly heated. We’ll talk about that later on, too. But
for now, “Celt” should be thought of as analogous to “European” or “African.”
There are times when it’s appropriate to talk about “the
Celts,” just like there are times when it’s appropriate to
talk about Europeans. But you should always keep in
mind that the people in, say, Wales, two thousand
years ago, would have been very surprised to hear
that, today, there are some who seem to think that
they were the same culture as people in Italy,
Portugal, France, and even parts of Turkey. Instead,
we should probably think more about Celtic cultures
rather than a single Celtic culture. And for me, given
the fact that the people in the Iron Age were also
quite handy with a sword, I’d want to be careful
what I called them.
© Myra Sheffield/shutterstock.com
LECTURE ONE
The Battersea Shield

Discovered in the River Thames at Battersea Bridge in London in
1857, the bronze Battersea Shield dates from 350 to 50 BCE and
was probably used for ceremonial purposes rather than as actual
protection. It features designs that have been found in several La Tène
Period sites on various pieces of metalwork.
8

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. How did Edward Lhuyd “create” the Celts?

2. Why does it make more sense to think of Celtic cultures rather than a sin-
gle Celtic culture?
Suggested Reading
Cunliffe, Barry. The Ancient Celts. New York: Penguin, 2000.
Other Books of Interest
Chapman, Malcolm. The Celts: The Construction of a Myth. London:

Palgrave Macmillan, 1992.
Collis, John. The Celts: Origins, Myths, and Inventions. London: Tempus
Publishing, Limited, 2003.
9
Lecture 2:
The Documentary Sources
Celts, chapter 1.
If the creation of the Celts as we know them is a product

of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, our knowl-
edge of the Celts is at the same time rooted in ancient his-
torical documents. It is in these written works that we get
the name “Celt,” and it is here that we need to look if we
have any hope of fleshing out what we know from archae-
ological remains. However, in order to understand how to
evaluate the information that documents provide, we need to think of when
they were written, who wrote them, and what their intention in writing might
have been. In the same way that we think differently about information we get
from TV news, Internet blogs, daily newspapers, and things our friends tell
us, we also have to consider the source when we read what has been written
by and about the Celts.
There are three sources of written information that might relate to Celtic
society. One of them is the epic stories, mythology, and legal tracts written by
the ancient Irish. This includes things like the Táin Bo Cuailgne, or the Cattle
Raid of Cooley, and the Dindshenchas, a collection of place-name lore. The
very earliest of these may date to the sixth century CE, although the copies
we have are much later in time. There has been considerable debate about
whether these are transcriptions of oral histories and stories or whether they
were composed much later about the past. They clearly are about a pre-
Christian society (Christianity having come to Ireland in the fifth century), but
many of the elements of the stories, such as the types of objects people use,
date to later periods. Current scholarly opinion, on the whole, is that while
they may incorporate some early elements, they mostly belong to the sixth
century CE and later, and don’t reliably describe life in the Iron Age, the time
of the Celts in the ancient sense of the term.
The second source for written evidence is inscrip-
tions that the Celtic cultures themselves left behind.
There were many Celtic languages in the Iron Age—
Gaulish in modern France, Celtiberian in modern
Spain, Lepontic in the Alps, and the ancestors of
modern Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, and others. We
don’t really know whether speakers of these differ-
ent languages would have been able to understand
LECTURE TWO
each other or whether they were different enough to

prevent easy communication. But a few of them
Cúchulainn in Battle
© Clipart.com
An illustration from T.W. Rolleston’s Myths and Legends of the

Celtic Race, 1911 (illustrator unknown).
10
have left scattered remnants of written versions of their languages. Most of
these are very short, not more than a few lines, and they generally don’t pro-
vide much detail useful for understanding Celtic life. For example, the
Lepontic inscription on a stone slab from Italy reads: “Deu built this tomb and
raised this monument to Belgos.” Another, from the site of Botorrita in Spain,
written in Celtiberian, appears to be a series of land regulations, though it
hasn’t been fully translated. I’ll talk about the Coligny Calendar later on, but it
is a calendar written in Gaulish, and it is designed to help keep track of the
seasons, days, and times. While these do give a voice to the otherwise silent
Celtic peoples, what they have to tell us doesn’t really help us understand
much about their lives.
So that leaves us with Classical sources. From at least the sixth century
BCE, people referred to as Celts are mentioned, often in passing, in docu-
ments written by Greeks and later by Romans. Before we look at what they
say, though, we need to think a little bit about the context in which these docu-
ments were written. Probably most important is that the idea of objective histo-
ry, of trying to record events in an unbiased way, was not part of their mindset.
Reporting things secondhand without worrying about whether it was true or
not, borrowing information from other authors without saying you had done so,
and flat out making things up was all part of the literary traditions of the time.
So in some ways, calling this “history” is kind of misleading, because it implies
for us something that simply wasn’t typical for them. In addition, most of what
we have are copies of copies of copies, sometimes decades or even centuries
after the originals were written. There was no printing press back then, so if
you had a copy, it had been written by hand, perhaps from the original but
perhaps from a second- or third-order copy. Remember the game “whisper
down the lane” and what often happened by the end? That’s probably relevant
in some cases here. And finally, it’s worth mentioning that, while we know
Greek and Latin well, these are still translations. Even under the best of cir-
cumstances, translations are not always exact, and can affect what might
have been the original meaning of a document.
Some of the earliest mentions of the Celts illustrate what I’ve been saying. For
example, Stephanus of Byzantium, writing in the later fifth century CE, says
that Hecataeus, who wrote in the sixth century BCE, wrote that the Celts lived
inland from Massalia, modern Marseilles, in south or central France. We don’t
have the original writings of Hecataeus, but we know about when he lived, and
if he really said this, it makes it one of the earliest references to people called
Celts. Similarly, a poet named Avienus, writing in the fourth century CE, quotes
a Carthaginian named Himilco, again in the sixth century BCE, as saying that
the Celts lived somewhere on the Atlantic coast. Again, we don’t have Himilco’s
work, so we can only assume that this quote is accurate.
The situation gets somewhat better with time, as we have greater numbers
of original documents to look at (though remember, they are still copies of
copies). But there is still a certain amount of confusion about the exact loca-
tion of the Celts, and you might want to get a decent map of Europe before
going on. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, says that the ancient
city of Pyrene lies near the source of the Danube, which he notes in passing
is “in the territory of the Celts.” But he later also says that the Celts are the
11
most westerly people in Europe, and they live outside the Pillars of Hercules,
the ancient name for the Straits of Gibraltar. This puts them on the Atlantic
coast again, perhaps in Iberia, but nowhere near the Danube.
For Britain, the earliest description of people there probably comes from
Pytheas, a Greek who sailed from southern Gaul along the Atlantic coast in
the fourth century BCE. He actually visited Britain, and may have gone as far
north as Iceland before returning to Gaul. Again, we don’t have his original
book, but it was quoted extensively in ancient times as part of an ongoing
debate about whether he had really done the extraordinary things he claimed
to have done (in a wonderful book by Barry Cunliffe, called The Extraordinary
Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, Cunliffe argues convincingly that he did indeed
sail at least as far as Britain). Pytheas describes the people of what were
then known as the “Pretannic Isles,” which he locates just north of the land of
the Celts. As such, he is probably the earliest person to write about the peo-
ples to the north who had actually met them in person.
Ireland was even more remote from the Classical world, and there are few
references to it before Julius Caesar’s in the second century BCE. Avienus,
the fourth-century CE poet, who I just noted as using many early sources,
mentions an island populated by the “Hierni,” which may be Ireland. But he
says nothing further about it. Similarly, other early authors who talk about the
“Pretannic Isles” may have been including Ireland by implication. But there is
no description of any of the peoples who might have lived there.
By the second century BCE, we get what are the most important written
sources on Iron Age peoples, the books of Posidonius and of Julius Caesar.
These are important enough to warrant their own section, so I won’t say more
about them here, except to note that they had, like Pythias, actually met
Celtic people, and wrote about them extensively. After these two, in the first
few centuries CE, those historical sources that write about the Celts and
other Iron Age peoples are now mostly writing about cultures severely
impacted by the Roman occupation. It isn’t that they are no longer Celts, but
rather that their culture has changed in important ways from its Iron Age
roots. And since we have to draw the line somewhere, we’ll draw it there.
After the sixth century CE, the term “Celt” pretty much disappears from the
written record, not to be discovered again until another one thousand years
have gone by.
So do these earliest sources from the sixth to the fourth century BCE tell us
anything interesting? Obviously they are very general, but there are several
points worth noting. First, when the Celts make their historical debut, they
appear to be a people only dimly known. They live in the north, maybe in
central France, or maybe on the Atlantic coast, or maybe at the mouth of the
Danube—but somewhere, vaguely, “up there” relative to the Classical world.
Second, it is probably significant that they are not described in any detail, but
only mentioned in passing. This suggests that, however dimly, they were
LECTURE TWO
known, so there was no need to add any further commentary as to who they
were. Finally, it is clear that the Celts, whoever they were, were not in Britain
or Ireland. Whatever their exact location, the Classical consensus is that they
belonged on the European continent, and no ancient source places them on
the islands to the north. It is only our modern usage that calls the Welsh,
British, Scots, and Irish “Celts.” But that is a subject we will return to later.
12

Questions
1. Why is it important to take into consideration the idea of objective history

when examining classical sources?
2. What is notable about the writings of Pytheas?
Suggested Reading
Collis, John. The Celts: Origins, Myths, and Inventions. London: Tempus
Publishing, Limited, 2003.
Cunliffe, Barry. The Extraordinary Voyages of Pytheas the Greek: The Man
Who Discovered Britain. Rev. ed. New York: Walker & Company, 2002.
Freeman, Philip. Ireland and the Classical World. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2008.
———. War, Women, and Druids: Eyewitness Reports and Early Accounts of
the Ancient Celts. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
13
Lecture 3:
Caesar and Posidonius
Celts, chapters 5 and 12.
As we noted last time, the vast majority of people who

wrote about the Celts in ancient times fall into one of two
categories. The first group is those who had never laid
eyes on a Celt, and were mostly reporting what their
friends, neighbors, and others generally “knew” about
them. They represented this information as though it was
fact, but it wasn’t. It was gossip, rumor, and travelers’
tales. The other group is those who wrote after, and sometimes long after, all
the places where the Celts and other Iron Age people lived had been incorpo-
rated into the Roman Empire. The subject of exactly how much these groups
had been changed by that is hotly debated (we’ll talk about this a bit later on).
But at the very least it would be misleading to use their information to say
anything about Iron Age cultures in the centuries before contact with the
Romans. It would be like using what we know about Americans now to talk
about people during the Revolutionary War.
Two major exceptions to this, however, are Julius Caesar, the famous
Roman general, and Posidonius, a writer of the first century BCE. While there
are lots of issues that have to be kept in mind when using what they wrote to
talk about the Celts, at the very least they can claim to have met living Celts.
And while they may also have added stuff that was part of the general
Classical rumor mill of the time, they at least had the option of comparing it
with what they knew about these peoples and hopefully weeding out the
more bizarre stuff.
Of the two, Caesar is the more famous, but Posidonius is probably the more
important, so we’ll start with him. Posidonius, who lived from 135 to 51 BCE,
was Greek, but was born in Syria. He was educated in Athens and followed
the Stoic philosophy, which emphasized reason and self-control as a way to
overcome what they saw as the destructive power of emotions. Posidonius
wrote extensively on a wide variety of subjects and is said to have produced
a history of the world that ran to fifty-two volumes. Within this history was his
account of his travels in Gaul, the homeland of the Celtic people. He wrote
vividly about what he observed of their culture and also what he heard and
what people told him about it. He also often noted when he had actually seen
something and when he had only been told about it, something other writers
LECTURE THREE
rarely, if ever, did.

Because of his interest in describing the life of the Celts, Posidonius is often
described as an “ethnographer,” the term now used for those anthropologists
who do research on other cultures. However, it is important to remember that
Posidonius was not an ethnographer, at least in the way we now use the
14
term. Ethnographers are interested in trying to maintain what is known as
“cultural relativism,” which means being sympathetic enough to try and under-
stand another culture in its own terms. But this idea wasn’t even remotely
conceived in the last few centuries BCE. A better term for Posidonius would
be a travel writer, someone who had been to exotic places and wrote about
them for the entertainment of others. That doesn’t mean what he wrote was
wrong, but it almost certainly means that he tended to emphasize what was
different and interesting about the Celts; no one wants to read a travel piece
that says, “Well, I went to this exotic place and guess what—they were pretty
much ordinary, just like us!”
It’s also possible that his Stoic philosophy played a part. One thing that
Posidonius notes frequently is how emotional the Celts were. Now, they may
well have been, but I wonder when I read his descriptions how much is his
own dismay at people who seemed totally controlled by emotions, and how
much is also an object lesson to his readers—“see what happens when you
give in to your emotions, you drink too much, give away all your stuff, and
end up committing suicide.” I didn’t make that up; it’s one of Posidonius’s
more famous stories about a Celtic feast he witnessed. Now, no one says
that this didn’t happen. But was it typical? Had it ever happened before? Did
all the other Celts condemn it privately, amongst themselves, afterwards? We
don’t know, because Posidonius wasn’t an ethnographer; he was a travel
writer, and that was just too good a story to pass up.
The other thing to keep in mind about Posidonius is that none of his original
writings survive today. What we have are a variety of people who wrote in the
first century BCE, the most important of which is Diodorus Siculus. He used
Posidonius extensively, and often attributed information to him, as in
“Posidonius says that the Celts are very warlike.” However, just because
Diodorus used Posidonius sometimes, it doesn’t necessarily mean that every-
thing he said about the Celts was from Posidonius. Sometimes he may have
been reporting rumor or things that were generally believed to be true. By
piecing together what is directly attributed to Posidonius, however, and com-
paring it to other things that were written about the Celts, we also believe that
many other writers used Posidonius, but without saying they got it from his
writings. It has been suggested that Julius Caesar may be in this group, but
that is a hotly debated topic. In any case, the point to remember is that what
we now have in terms of Posidonius’s information about the Celts can be
thought of as a series of nested boxes, each one holding less than the one
before. In the largest is Celtic culture in Gaul, whatever that was, indepen-
dent of anyone who wrote about them. Within this is what Posidonius
observed and what he chose to write about, both of which are only a subset
of the first box. Within this is what others chose to quote from Posidonius,
again only part of the box before it. And finally, there is what has survived
today, because of course we don’t have everything that people like Strabo
wrote either, what with some two thousand years having gone by. So while
Posidonius is an important source on the Celts, there are limitations to how
we should apply the information we have from him.
Julius Caesar is another story altogether. His information about the Celts,
like Posidonius’s, is mostly about the inhabitants of Gaul, though he does
15
mention others like the Britons and even makes a passing reference to
Ireland. Before he became an emperor, Caesar was a general, and as part
of being a general he did a considerable amount of conquering. One of the
groups he conquered was the Gauls, between 58 and 51 BCE; he also
fought the Britons, and while he didn’t conquer them, he did fight some bat-
tles and make some treaties, at least enough to feel that he’d shown the
locals a thing or two about Romans. Like Posidonius, he then wrote about
his exploits in a book called Commentarii de Bello Gallico, usually referred
to as The Gallic Wars. Unlike Posidonius, we have Caesar’s full text, in
which he talks about Celtic life, culture, society, and religion, as well as mili-
tary aspects and battle tactics.
On the plus side, as I noted, Caesar had extensive contact with Celtic peo-
ples, over much of Europe and in Britain. It is Caesar who says that one of
the three groups of people who lived in Gaul called themselves Celts, sug-
gesting that this was their own preferred name. However, it’s important to
remember the context of that contact—he had spent some nine years fighting
them. On the one hand, it is hardly surprising that he emphasized things like
weapons and battle tactics, and said things like “they are very warlike.” I’d be
warlike too if someone was attacking my home, but it doesn’t mean that I am
generally a warlike person. On the other hand, war is generally not conducive
to the observation of everyday society. It’s hard to imagine Caesar approach-
ing a Celtic farmer and saying, “I know I just burned your village, killed your
men, and took your women and children to sell as slaves, but would you
have time to tell me about your customs and rituals?” That’s one of the rea-
sons some have argued that he borrowed much of this kind of information
LECTURE THREE
© Clipart.com
Vercingetorix Surrenders to Caesar

by Lionel-Noël Royer, 1899
16
from Posidonius. Yes, he probably had intelligence reports, but these were
about people who had been under military pressure from Roman expansion
for many decades. So while Caesar may well have accurately described the
various peoples he was conquering, it’s important to remember that his infor-
mation may not be relevant to the Celtic cultures of previous centuries.
We also know that Caesar reported things that are simply wrong. For exam-
ple, he says that the people living in the interior of Britain knew nothing of agri-
culture, but lived on meat and milk and dressed in skins. However, ample
archaeological evidence of domestic grains, plowed fields, and equipment for
spinning and weaving shows us that this is incorrect, and it seems that Caesar
should have known this. So it should make you wonder what else he might
have got wrong, despite his direct contact with Iron Age peoples. One of his
observations that has come under such scrutiny is that the Rhine River formed
a significant boundary between the people he called Celts and the people he
called Germani, the basis of our modern “Germans.” There is little archaeolog-
ical evidence that the cultures on either side of the river were significantly dif-
ferent, and while there are linguistic differences between the two areas, lan-
guage and culture aren’t the same thing. We don’t know if Iron Age peoples
saw the Rhine as a significant boundary, but based on archaeology, it’s unlike-
ly that we would see it that way if not for Caesar. So why would he say it was
important when it wasn’t? Well, Caesar had a tough time making any headway
in the territories on the east side of the river, and it has been argued that the
reason he said it was a boundary was that, having conquered the groups on
the west side, he could claim to have achieved his goal of conquering all of
Gaul. The next nation over, east of the Rhine, could be left to others.
In the end, we don’t really know what’s accurate in the descriptions of
Posidonius and Caesar, but since their documents are all we have that’s writ-
ten down about the Celtic peoples, it seems too severe to ignore them alto-
gether because they might not always be right. So I will use information from
both sources, as well as other sources, but I want you to remember what I’ve
said about them when I do. Because there’s no way to know if the piece of
information I’m describing at that moment might be the one thing that neither
really knew to be true, but was just too good a story not to pass on.
17

Questions
1. Why is “travel writer” a more accurate description of Posidonius

than “ethnographer”?
2. What factors might have influenced Posidonius’s view of the Celts?
Suggested Reading
Caesar, Julius. The Conquest of Gaul. Ed. Jane F. Gardner. Trans. S.A.
Handford. New York: Penguin, 1983.
Freeman, Philip. The Philosopher and the Druids: A Journey Among the
Ancient Celts. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
LECTURE THREE
18
Lecture 4:
Archaeology and Identity
Celts, chapter 1.
In a fundamental way, it is likely that archaeology, in the

literal sense, will never recover direct evidence of the
Celts. That’s because, unlike history, which deals with writ-
ten sources, archaeology is the reconstruction of ancient
cultures through physical remains, what we sometimes call
“material culture.” It’s not that archaeology can’t contribute
significantly to the understanding of the Iron Age, in ways
we will be discussing through most of the future lectures. But archaeology
can only recover names and such if they are recorded on objects recovered
from archaeological deposits. And for the Celts, who had very little in the way
of written language, there are very few potential places where the name
“Celt” could appear. So in a direct way, we are unlikely to find “the Celts” in
an archaeological sense.
That said, archaeology provides an invaluable source of evidence for the
Iron Age, when the Celts would have lived. On the one hand, it provides
direct evidence of the things people used, the kinds of places where they
lived, what sorts of work they did, what they left behind in their rituals, how
they buried their dead, and anything that potentially leaves behind physical
traces in the earth. Also, archaeology, when combined with history, allows us
to cross-check each with the other. Remember how I said that Caesar
claimed that some of the Britons didn’t know anything about agriculture and
only wore skins? Archaeology provides us with lots of evidence showing this
was wrong. We have preserved domestic grain and surviving artifacts in the
form of tools used for agriculture and for both spinning and weaving. At the
same time, archaeology alone wouldn’t tell us that the name “Celt” even
existed, much less the
other group names that
Caesar and others give
us for the various peo-
ples of Iron Age Europe.
© South Somerset District Council/Somerset County Museum
Iron Age Artifacts

An iron sickle, neck torc, and
adze found in a burial site on
Ham Hill, an Iron Age hill fort
near Taunton in Somerset
County, in southwestern
England. The site was later
used by a Roman garrison.
19
So in studying the Iron Age, we are fortunate in having both sources of evi-
dence to give us a fuller picture of what life was like in this ancient time.
As with history, however, we need to talk about the various ways in which
archaeology can be biased, and how we need to think about the ways
archaeological evidence can and can’t be interpreted. One of the hardest
things to explain to people who don’t do archaeology for a living is the idea
that there are lots of potential ways to explain material culture. But I’ll do my
best, and we’ll see if I can convince you. The most important idea that I need
to convey is that what may seem “obvious” to someone looking at archaeo-
logical evidence was not necessarily true for the people who did the deposit-
ing. As an example, suppose I find two burials. The soil they are in is very
acidic and there are only very tiny fragments of the skeleton surviving.
However, one burial has earrings and bracelets, while the other has swords
and a dagger. I’ll bet the first thing you thought of was that the first one was
female and the second one was male, right? Now that’s not wrong, but
anthropology, which studies living people in other cultures, tells us that this
kind of pattern, women with jewelry and men with weapons, is nowhere near
universal, and people can display gender in all kinds of ways. Also, Caesar
and Posidonius both tell us that Celtic women could be very fierce and some-
times fought alongside the men, and that both genders were very fond of jew-
elry. So now how do we think about our two burials? As archaeologists, we’d
have to say that it is possible that we have two different genders represented
here, but we aren’t sure which is which, and we can’t even be sure that they
aren’t both male or both female.
Turning to the idea of the Celts gets us into even trickier areas. What people
call themselves has a lot to do with context, identity, and personal choice.
When I’m in Ireland, I call myself an American, but when I travel to other parts
of the United States, I say I’m from Maryland. When I’m at work in Washing-
ton, I might say I’m from Prince Georges County, and when I’m at home I’m in
Belair Greens. It depends on who I’m talking to and what level of identification
is relevant. In the same way, we don’t really know how the various Iron Age
people thought of themselves in all these various contexts. Caesar says that
“Celt” was a term used by one of three groups of people who inhabited Gaul.
He also says that it is a term the people called themselves (and he notes that
they are the same people the Romans called Gauls). But he’s the only one
who says this. He and other writers also note a variety of other names for
groups of people (sometimes called “tribes” in modern translations). These
include the Iceni, the Catuvellauni, the Belgae, and the Helvetii. Now we know
that Caesar and others can be wrong, but at the same time it’s unlikely that
they made these names up just for kicks. So from history we know that there
were various names that people might call themselves, though we really don’t
know when, in what context, people might have used these various names.
We also have to consider the fact that there might have been reasons to delib-
erately confuse the Romans about names, particularly Caesar. Don’t forget
LECTURE FOUR
that whole “burning village” thing I mentioned before.

Does archaeology help at all with this problem? Well, yes and no. On the
one hand, ideas of group membership, or “ethnicity,” are complicated. Think
again of an example. Let’s say future archaeologists find a burial where the
20
body is draped in the flag of the Irish Republic, the one with the green, white,
and orange stripes. Now that flag can mean many things to many people. In
the Republic of Ireland, it might be a simple declaration of national pride. If
the person was from Northern Ireland, however, it might symbolize a
Catholic, someone who wanted to unite Northern Ireland with the Republic,
and perhaps worked against the Northern Irish government. It could also
mean the person was American, but had ancestors who were from Ireland
and who were important to his or her identity. Or it might mean someone who
didn’t really have any Irish roots, but saw themselves as generally Celtic,
which is now typically associated with Ireland. Pity the poor archaeologist—
would she have any idea which of these related to her burial?
Or think of another example. Imagine a band of musicians who play what we
now think of as Celtic music and who generally see themselves as Celtic, but
who are from a variety of different backgrounds and mostly see themselves
as American. Our future archaeologist finds their remains. One is wrapped in
a fragment of plaid tartan, one wears a pendant that shows the red Welsh
dragon, and the third lies in a casket decorated with complex interlace
designs. We know that these are all symbols of a general Celtic identity, and
in that sense all represent the same thing. But what about our archaeologist?
Is there anything useful she can say, or should she give up, go back to
school, and become a lawyer?
Don’t give up yet. While we might not know the exact meaning of these vari-
ous examples, it doesn’t mean we can’t say anything. For one thing, we do
have evidence, and while we can’t choose one particular interpretation, we
can offer several possibilities. For example, for our burial wrapped in the Irish
flag, we might note that there are a number of potential interpretations of the
flag’s specific meaning, but obviously the person found the Irish flag signifi-
cant enough to be buried with it. That would be noteworthy if the burial was
found in the United States, or Guatemala, or Ethiopia. We can also argue that
the person, or the culture they came from, had some kind of contact with
Ireland, since they were familiar with the flag, indicating that they weren’t
isolated, and perhaps had an international worldview. And since burials are
often not alone, but instead occur in cemeteries, we might be able to com-
pare this burial with others found in future research. Was everyone buried
with an Irish flag? That might suggest a community of immigrants, or people
of Irish ancestry, or people with a Celtic identity. Or was everyone buried with
a flag, but each one was different? Or was this the only person buried with a
flag? Our interpretations would then change accordingly as we recovered
new evidence.
Now this might seem annoying for those of you with a low tolerance for
uncertainty, but I would argue that it’s actually something interesting. We
were able to say some things fairly surely about the burial that we didn’t know
before, and we were able to offer some other possibilities that might be test-
ed against future evidence. And if, let’s say, some historian had a document
suggesting that, during this time period, Ireland had stopped all international
contact and was largely unknown in the outside world, we would have evi-
dence to prove that document wrong.
21
Archaeology is the only discipline that analyzes the actual physical remains
of people and their material culture, and uses these to understand ancient
cultures. When combined with history, we can say a lot about those cultures
that either alone might miss. When we are talking about something flexible,
like who might have considered themselves a Celt, when they might have
used that identification, and how it might have been expressed through mate-
rial remains, we have to be cautious. But being uncertain doesn’t mean we
have to be silent, and as long as we keep in mind the complexities of human
identity, we can say a great deal about the Iron Age peoples in the time of
the Celts.
LECTURE FOUR
22

Questions
1. What are the limitations of archaeology when studying the Celts?

2. In relation to a study of the Celts, what are the complexities of names and
what people choose to call themselves?
Suggested Reading
Jones, Sian. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past

and Present. London: Routledge, 1997.
Wells, Peter S. Beyond Celts, Germans and Scythians: Archaeology and
Identity in Iron Age Europe. London: Duckworth, 2001.
23
Lecture 5:
Celtic Art
Celts, chapter 6.
In one sense, as we have already noted, the Celts can be

thought of as a series of cultures who spoke related lan-
guages. In another way, particularly in terms of archaeolo-
gy, it was the distinctive style of art that suggested a rela-
tionship between otherwise scattered groups in the
European Iron Age. This is one characteristic that many
people think of when they think of the Celts—call it inter-
lace, knot work, or curvilinear, it’s one of the most recognizable aspects of
the Celtic cultures that still survives today.
The exact origins of this art style are a matter of debate, but most agree that
it was ultimately inspired by motifs in Greek and Etruscan art. Wherever it
came from, though, it emerged as a uniquely Iron Age European style in the
early fifth century BCE. The style is based on plants, which curve and inter-
twine over the surface of whatever object is being decorated. Typically, there
is very little empty space, something art historians call the horror vacui, liter-
ally “horror of the vacuum,” or basically that they don’t like empty space. It is
usually asymmetrical, though it looks balanced nonetheless, and it is most
commonly aniconic, meaning that it uses nonrepresentational decorative ele-
ments rather than human and animal figures. The style is named after La
Tène, the ritual site that I talked about earlier. Although we now know that
this isn’t the earliest place it appeared, this is the first place it was recognized
archaeologically, so it is usually called the La Tène art style. © Sean Donnelly/shutterstock.com
LECTURE FIVE
Detail of a typical “Celtic knot” design from a grave marker in Ireland.
24
By far the most common place this style is seen is on metalwork, and it
seems that it also typically occurs on objects owned by elites, people with
enough wealth to commission finely made things. In Europe, copper was the
first metal to be used to create objects, and it was first developed in the
fourth millennium. It was followed by bronze (a combination of copper and tin)
in the third millennium. Other metals, in particular gold, which is very soft and
easily worked, appear in tandem with these. To the modern eye, metal
seems a superior material for making tools and weapons, but in the early
stages, people had not yet developed the means to make metal really hard,
and so many of the earliest metal objects were for display rather than for
work. So the earliest metal objects are actual display items, like flashy jewel-
ry, bronze shields, and copper daggers that can be shined to look much like
gold. Eventually smiths worked out ways to make bronze hard enough for
efficient tools, and metal became the preferred material for these and for
weapons. By the time iron came along in the eighth century BCE, this new
material replaced bronze without much fanfare. But the tradition of shiny
metal objects used for display carried on unabated.
There is some evidence to suggest that craftspeople were held in relatively
high esteem. Both Caesar and Posidonius group them with druids, the reli-
gious specialists of the Iron Age. We’ll talk more about them later, but for now
it can be said that they seem to have held relatively high status in Celtic soci-
ety, and if craftspeople are ranked with them, then the same can be said for
those who made La Tène metalwork. It can also be argued by inference,
though this is less certain, that the skill and knowledge required to produce
these objects would have provided a basis for higher status in any society,
the Iron Age included.
La Tène metalwork takes a large number of forms. You can find pho-
tographs of many of them by using Google Images and searching for objects
like the Battersea Shield, the Loughnashade Trumpet, the Snettisham Hoard,
and the helmet from Agris (Charente, France). All of these are typical of items
that carry La Tène motifs. The Battersea Shield was dredged from the
Thames in the nineteenth century. It is made of sheet bronze, not very useful
as a shield because it would have torn quite easily if struck with a weapon,
and at 77 centimeters in length it wouldn’t have protected much of its user
anyway. But it is a very pretty thing, with its curvilinear designs and its red
glass inlay, and it would have been very impressive to look at. Somewhat
more robust and therefore more directly functional is the helmet from Agris. It
is made of iron and bronze, and is covered with gold and inset with coral. It
seems perhaps too elaborate for ordinary warfare, but at least it would have
withstood a heavy blow.
The Loughnashade trumpet, made of bronze with the bell covered in La Tène
decoration, represents an interesting class of object, relatively rare in the Iron
Age but nonetheless known. It was apparently one of four (three of which
are now lost) found in 1798 in the lake now called Loughnashade, in County
Armagh, Northern Ireland. It was said to have been found with human skulls
and other bones, but this can’t be verified. While the original shape of the
trumpet is uncertain, depictions of similar instruments and also several experi-
mental attempts to play replicas suggest that it was originally S-shaped. The
25
trumpet is large, well over a meter in length if straightened, and again, would
have made an impressive sight. As to its function, it may have been used in a
ritual context, or it may have been part of warfare. We’ll talk more about these
possibilities later.
One of the more interesting examples of Celtic metalwork is what is known
as a torc, represented abundantly in the Snettisham Hoard from Norfolk,
England. A torc is a necklace, or perhaps more descriptively a neck ring,
which was worn by some individuals in Iron Age society. They are circular
with a gap along the circumference to allow the wearer to put it on. Torcs
range from relatively wide examples with elaborate decoration (such as the
one from Broighter, County Derry, in Northern Ireland) to simpler and lighter
versions made from a delicately twisted, thin ribbon of metal. The Snettisham
Hoard was recovered from at least eleven small pits that contained a large
amount of jewelry, including one hundred fifty torcs, about seventy of them
complete. Most were made from gold and silver. Torcs are mentioned in
many Classical sources as being worn by Celtic elites, and they are shown
on statues of Celtic peoples, both those made by Iron Age artists themselves
and by Classical artists. An example of the former is the life-sized statue of
a man from Glauberg, in Germany, while a more famous example is the
Roman copy of the Hellenistic statue from Pergamon known as The Dying
Gaul. Both of these figures are shown wearing torcs around their necks. One
of my personal favorites, however, is the torc from Trichtingen, Germany. On
each terminal end of the torc is an animal head, and each of these animals is
wearing a torc. Three torcs for the price of one!
A somewhat unusual example of Celtic art is the Gundestrup Cauldron. It
is a large bowl, about 70 centimeters in diameter and 42 centimeters high,
made of a series of silver plates that, unusually, carry images of humans,
animals, and some figures that probably represent deities. It was recovered
from a bog in Denmark and was probably a ritual deposit. The techniques
involved in making it are not typically Celtic, but the motifs clearly belong
with the European Iron Age, and most people think it was commissioned by
someone from a Celtic culture. We will talk more about the Cauldron and
about bog deposits when we talk about religion.
You may have noticed a pattern in the find spots of the objects I’ve been
talking about. While we assume from documentary sources and general
human patterns that these La Tène objects were owned and used by elites in
Iron Age Celtic society, the fact is that they are never found in the remains of
settlement sites. Unlike many other cultures, where the residences of the
wealthy in society are marked archaeologically by the presence of expensive
things, we rarely find such objects in what are otherwise arguably the resi-
dences of elites. Instead, we typically find them deposited in water, like lakes,
rivers, and bogs, or buried in the ground. Such deposits are arguably reli-
gious in nature (and we will talk about religion later, I promise!), which could
mean any number of things. It may be that we are wrong altogether, and La
LECTURE FIVE
Tène objects were only produced to give to the deities. Or it may be (and I
think it’s probably more likely) that this was the most appropriate way to dis-
pose of expensive items when they were no longer needed or wanted. Or
perhaps this was simply a good way to impress the deities, by giving them
26
your most expensive possessions, when asking them for a favor or thanking
them for help.
Regardless of what the ultimate fate of these objects meant to those who left
them there, they can tell us a number of interesting things now. First, the sim-
ilarity of the style of La Tène art indicates that, at least among the elites who
bought these things, there was a shared idea of the best way to display their
high status. Jewelry, weapons, shields, and ritual objects, all made of gold,
silver, and bronze and decorated with curving lines and sinuous plants and
animals, seem to have been the yachts and designer clothes of the Iron Age.
It also shows that the elites, at least, were in close contact through trade,
such that people knew what others were buying and sought to “keep up with
the Joneses.” While, at the local level, there were differences in house types,
pottery, burial customs, and language, at the level of the wealthy, there was a
certain similarity among the patterns of material culture. It is this similarity
that allows us, in some sense, to talk about “the Celts,” and it is in many
ways this shared distinction in art that has survived to the modern era.
27

Questions
1. What are the characteristics of the La Tène art style?

2. What is somewhat surprising about the find spots for the La Tène objects
discussed in this lecture?
Suggested Reading
Green, Miranda, ed. The Celtic World. London: Routledge, 1996.

Kruta, Venceslas, ed. Celts. London: Hachette Illustrated UK, 2005.
LECTURE FIVE
28
Lecture 6:
The Celtic Core
Celts, chapters 1, 2, and 14.
While we can debate whether it is technically correct to

call the Iron Age peoples of Britain and Ireland “Celts,”
there is no dispute that Celts is a legitimate term in some
sense for the peoples of central and western Europe. This
was the area known to the Classical world as Gaul, which
comprised France and Belgium, and also parts of
Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, and probably
northern Italy. Caesar and Posidonius place them squarely here, and this is
where the earliest appearance of La Tène art occurs. Archaeologically, there
are some regional differences within this area, but the cultures here do form a
relatively coherent group in terms of sites and artifacts, and so in this sense
they can be considered the “Celtic core.” This is the location of your garden
variety Celt, the baseline against which we can compare other places that
have been called Celtic.
It is impossible to know when exactly the Celts as such emerged in this
area. Our knowledge of the name is dependent on documents, as we’ve
already discussed, and Classical sources place Celts perhaps as early as the
sixth century BCE. Archaeologically, this puts them in what I earlier called the
Hallstatt period, the early part of the Iron Age, which is about 800 to 450
BCE. However, using material culture as a guide, archaeologists typically
equate the appearance of La Tène art with the appearance of the Celts,
which means they put them in the La Tène period, beginning around 450
BCE. But whether they appeared in the sixth century or the fifth, there proba-
bly wasn’t a distinct “origin” for these groups. Instead, they emerge gradually
out of earlier peoples, retaining some things and adding new ones, until they
finally are distinct enough for archaeologists to call them a new culture.
There are any number of ways to think about this Celtic core, and indeed
whole books have been written about it. And it also depends on when we are
talking about. A hundred years before Roman expansion began, their culture
would be different than it would be in the middle of the conquest itself, or
after it had been completed. Here, I’m going to try and give you a picture of
what the Celtic core might have looked like, say, on the former end of this
span of time. Later on, we’ll talk about the conquest itself, and how it might
have affected the Celtic cultures that survived it.
Probably the first thing a modern person would notice, if we could go back in
time, was the general emptiness of the landscape, at least in terms of people.
Our evidence for settlements is not very good. This is partly because much of
the attention has been focused on larger sites, and partly because all that is
left of settlements are the remains of the postholes that held up the buildings
29
in which people lived and worked. But although they are hard to find, they are
not unknown. Archaeology tells us that most people in the Celtic core lived in
small farmsteads or scattered villages. They raised crops like wheat and rye
(despite what Caesar said) and kept domestic animals, and they used iron to
make tools and weapons. The weapons tell us they engaged in warfare, not
surprisingly since all ancient peoples worldwide seem to have done so, but
they also lived ordinary, everyday lives.
In some cases, they lived in much larger settlements. Most of these are
called hill forts because they were defended with formidable walls and ditch-
es, and because they were typically located on hilltops. That’s another reason
we know that warfare was a way of life. The largest of these were called opp-
ida by Caesar. We’re not sure exactly what he meant by this, but he distin-
guished them from villages and farmsteads, and also from a few very large
settlements that he called urbs, that is, cities (I’ll mention one of these, the
site of Alesia, when I talk about the Roman conquest). One of the oppida,
Bibracte, was located in Gaul; its 5 kilometers of walls defended an area 135
hectares in extent. Caesar says that this was a place where the tribal council
met, and leaders received envoys. Another one, Manching, in Germany, was
Source: “Celts in Europe”/Wikipedia

LECTURE SIX
A diachronic map (overlaying a modern map of Europe) showing the distribution of Celtic-speaking
people. (Diachronic pertains to the changes in a linguistic system between successive points in time.)
30
surrounded by a massive timber rampart 7 kilometers in extent surrounding
380 hectares. The nails alone for the ramparts would have required sixty tons
of iron. Inside, buildings were laid out along streets and around the edges
was an open area, presumably for livestock. Excavations revealed evidence
for manufacture in iron, bronze, pottery, glass, and coins. The site of
Kelheim, also in Germany, extended over a whopping 630 hectares. It had a
massive gate and walls on three sides; the fourth side was defended by the
Danube and Altmühl rivers. Evidence for glass, iron, bronze, and coin manu-
facturing was also found there.
There has been considerable debate about whether the oppida can be con-
sidered cities. Certainly they were centers of economic activity, with manufac-
turing evident at all of them. There is some evidence, as in Caesar’s descrip-
tion of Bibracte, that they also had a political function. And they were certainly
large. Estimating past population numbers is difficult, since we don’t know
how many people might have lived in an average house, and we can’t always
tell how many houses were occupied at the same time. However, estimates
for the populations of the oppida range anywhere from five thousand to twen-
ty thousand people. Even at the lower end of the range, these were very
large settlements, and if they weren’t technically cities, they would seem to
have fulfilled a similar function.
At the same time, one of the interesting things about these large sites is that
there is no obvious evidence that they provided residence for the elites. We
know there were elites, because of the La Tène objects I mentioned before,
and because we have a number of wealthy burials from this area. For exam-
ple, the burial under a large mound at Reinheim, Germany, contained consid-
erable amounts of jewelry and other personal possessions, including gold
torcs, bracelets, and rings; glass beads; and a bronze mirror and drinking
flagon. Nothing of the skeleton survived, but since mirrors are often associat-
ed with female skeletons, the burial is usually argued to be a woman. Not far
away, the burial at Glauberg, also in Germany and also under a large mound,
contained swords and other weapons, a gold torc, and a bronze jug. Just out-
side the mound was the life-sized statue of a man (he appears to have a
beard) I mentioned before as an example of someone wearing a torc. The
statue was recovered lying down, but it may have stood with several others in
a nearby enclosure.
We also know we have elites from documentary sources. Both Caesar and
Posidonius describe people generally thought of as chieftains, who were the
leaders of their people. They were sometimes described as “kings,” but this is
probably the wrong image to have. Their power was based on alliances and
other social relationships like marriage, and these in turn were based partly
on kinship and partly on personal abilities. Sources talk about a variety of
named groups that people belonged to—the Brigantes, the Aeudui, the
Veneti. These groups were presumably based on kinship, divided in various
ways into various clans and lineages, and some of these were arranged hier-
archically. If you were in the right lineage, you had a leg up on claiming a
leadership position. But that wasn’t enough. You also had to demonstrate that
you made good decisions, were a good fighter, and were generous to your
followers, all the things that people looked for in a leader. If you had these
31
things going for you, then people would want to be connected to you. But if
you lost them, there were others who could legitimately claim your loyalty, so
nothing was set in stone. It was a flexible system, designed for a society that
was not hardened into hierarchies, at least not the kind where it didn’t matter
what kind of person you were; if your father was king then you were king
when he died, period. Instead, leadership was a negotiated thing, and you
had to keep active in maintaining it.
So we know we have elites, but what we lack is anything analogous to a
palace, a residence for high-status people, the leaders of society. There are
some apparent wealth items in the oppida, but they aren’t concentrated any-
where in particular, which might suggest the location for a high-status resi-
dence. Since they mostly built in wood, we have little knowledge of what
buildings looked like above ground; maybe they were far more elaborate than
others, painted in elaborate colors and covered with intricate carving. Or per-
haps elites lived elsewhere, in places we haven’t found yet, and only came to
the hustle and bustle of the oppida for special occasions. We simply don’t
know. All we know is that, whatever the exact nature of society in the Celtic
core, it seems to have lasted for centuries in various forms, only becoming
strained to the limits under the force of the Roman invasion.
LECTURE SIX
32

Questions
1. Where did most people in the Celtic core live?

2. What were the requirements of leadership and the nature of hierarchy
among the Celts?
Suggested Reading

33
Lecture 7:
The Atlantic Celts
Celts, chapter 8.
One of the most interesting aspects of the whole Celtic

story is that the people now most associated with the
name, the inhabitants of the Atlantic islands, Britain and
Ireland, were never referred to as Celts by any ancient
author. Indeed, it is probably Ireland that is now most com-
monly considered Celtic, and yet there is virtually no pre-
Christian historical information about the people who lived
on that island and what they might have called themselves. Archaeologically,
however, it is clear that the ancient British and Irish shared certain cultural
similarities with the other peoples of the European Iron Age, that they were in
contact with them through trade and other means, and that they spoke sever-
al of the Celtic languages that survive in modern Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic,
Cornish, and Manx. However, it is also clear from documentary sources that
the term “Celt” was never applied to them in ancient times.
As the cultures farthest from the Classical world, the peoples of Britain do
not appear frequently in ancient documents, and the Irish even less so. For
example, I noted Avienus before, who wrote in the fourth century CE but may
have used material from the sixth century BCE. He notes in passing a people
called “Hierni,” the ancient form of “Ireland,” as living on “the Sacred Isle”
somewhere to the north. Most of the early mentions of Ireland are along
these lines, or more obviously exotic stories about how they were all canni-
bals. For Britain, there is of course Caesar, keeping in mind all the caveats
about the context in which he wrote. His information on Britain is mostly
about military things, but at least we assume it was based on some kind of
direct knowledge. There is also Diodorus Siculus, who wrote a fair bit about
the “Pretani,” the ancient form of “Britons.” Diodorus himself had never been
anywhere near Britain, but based on what he wrote, it is thought he may have
used information from Pytheas, whose northern voyage in the fourth century
BCE I described earlier. For example, Diodorus describes the busy tin trade
that was carried on in southern England. He goes into considerable detail
about how the tin was extracted, processed, and sold, noting that the inhabi-
tants of Britain were “especially friendly to strangers” who came to trade. If
this is from Pytheas, then it may be a reasonably accurate portrayal of this
aspect of Iron Age life.
LECTURE SEVEN
Caesar is also the person who started the idea that the ancient British paint-
ed themselves blue. In his Gallic Wars, there is a passing comment that
translates roughly as “all the Britons color themselves with ‘vitro,’ which pro-
duces a blue color.” We don’t know what the term “vitro” actually refers to,
though the consensus is that it refers to a type of blue-green glass that was
popular in Roman culture. Obviously this is not entirely accurate, since glass
34
isn’t a coloring agent, and some people have suggested that the British used
woad, a blue dye derived from the plant of the same name. There is evidence
from seed remains that woad was cultivated in Europe in the Iron Age, and
so it may have been available to the Britons. However, there is some doubt
that woad would leave a permanent blue color on human skin, and the pre-
vailing view is that it probably wasn’t woad that Caesar was referring to. If his
description is accurate, however, then perhaps there were other dying agents
that they could have used to tattoo or simply paint their bodies.
From archaeology, we have evidence similar to that in the Celtic core about
daily life. Compared to that region, the Atlantic groups were more likely to live
in individual homesteads rather than villages, and their houses were often,
though not always, round. The walls were made of branches and twigs,
called “wattles,” woven around the posts that formed the base, with clay, or
“daub,” worked in to make the house waterproof. The roofs were thatched.
Experimental re-creations of Iron Age houses, like that at Pimperne, in
England, show how snug they could be. There are also hill forts in this area,
such as the site at Danebury in southern England, and a few oppida, though
these are far less numerous than in the Celtic core. Also like the core, there
is little direct evidence of elites at these sites. There is evidence for an eco-
nomic purpose, with sites like Danebury showing evidence of grain storage,
metalworking, and textile production. Large fortified sites like Dún Aengus, in
Ireland, or the Scottish “brochs,” which are fortified houses, suggest the need
for defense as well, but they are not obviously elite residences.
Many of the La Tène objects I mentioned in the discussion of art were from
the Atlantic region, so elites were clearly around. Some of the most spectacu-
lar gold pieces, such as the Broighter torc from Ireland and the Snettisham
Hoard from England, show the presence of elites and their desire for rich
goods. But unlike the Celtic core, there are no wealthy burials known from the
Irish Iron Age and few from Britain. One exception is in Yorkshire, where
there is a group of burials that includes whole chariots as well as swords,
scabbards, shield fittings, and personal items such as an iron mirror and a
bronze case. Many were decorated in the La Tène style and enhanced with
red enamel, coral, and gold. But though their position in society was likely
similar to that described on the Continent, the role of elites is, if anything,
even more elusive on the Atlantic coast.
This discussion raises an obvious question—why do Atlantic cultures look
similar to those on the Continent? One of the common answers in archaeolo-
gy, up until perhaps fifty years ago, and one that I still hear a lot in popular
accounts, is migration. There are a number of reasons this is so. First, it
makes logical sense. If cultures change, one possibility is that a new group of
people arrived and had some influence on the existing societies in the area.
The second reason is more complicated, and is rooted in the history of
archaeology and of history itself. Although we should know better, there is a
tendency to assume that what is written down is likely to be true. In the study
of the ancient European past, this is seen particularly in the idea that whatev-
er Classical authors wrote about (except maybe for the stuff that sounds just
too outlandish to be true) is accurate. You can see this in a lot of books about
the Celts in particular. Authors make all the standard statements that I made
35
in the beginning of the course about not assuming that ancient writers are
right. They then proceed to blatantly ignore what they just said and use those
writers willy-nilly to describe those cultures, without any consideration of
when they wrote, why they wrote, and why we should believe what those
ancient writers said.
Now, one of the things that ancient authors wrote about the Celts was that
they moved around a lot. One of the most commonly cited is Livy, who
described the migration of the Bituriges, a group of Celts he identified as liv-
ing in Gaul. As Livy tells it, their leader, Ambigatus, wanted to relieve the
overpopulation of his region, and so he sent his nephews out with as many
people as they wanted (another writer numbers them at three hundred thou-
sand) to find new lands. They ended up in northern Italy, attracted by the rich
resources available, and settled there. Livy gives us no word on the reaction
of those who already lived there to the arrival of several hundred thousand
foreigners asking for a new place to live.
Classical sources are full of such stories, and it is likely that there is a grain
of truth in them. That’s why archaeologists and others often assume migra-
tion was common, widespread, and large-scale in the past. But there are a
few things that should make us pause in taking them at face value. First, Livy
was writing at the end of the first century BCE about an event he believed to
have occurred around 600 BCE, some five hundred years before he lived. It’s
easy to get lost in numbers, but think about it—that’s like someone now
describing events in North America in the 1400s. And what was Livy’s story
based on? He says nothing about where he got the information, so we
assume that he was simply passing on something that was commonly
believed. Now that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but personally, I’m skepti-
cal of the details.
More recent understandings of the complexities of migration in living people,
the possibilities for different ways for groups to move, and the application of
these ideas to the past have suggested other ways to think about the Celtic
migrations. This is also necessary because the archaeological evidence sim-
ply doesn’t support the idea of new influxes of large numbers of people
everywhere so that we can talk about “Celtic cultures.” While there are new
things, such as La Tène artifacts, in most of these places, Iron Age material
culture looks a lot more like the previous indigenous culture than it does any-
where else in the “Celtic” world. Migration certainly happened, but it was
often piecemeal, a few families here, a warrior band there, and perhaps the
occasional party of colonists. But the idea that there was a single Celtic cul-
ture, formed in central Europe, that expanded and migrated out, replacing the
population in places as far flung as Ireland and Italy, Spain and Turkey, sim-
ply doesn’t hold water.
So why do these cultures look similar? It’s probably a complex combination
of reasons. We know they look similar partly because elites all had those La
LECTURE SEVEN
Tène artifacts that were just the thing for showing how important and well-
connected you were. So trade was happening, probably on many levels—
remember the tin trade described by Diodorus. And that’s one way that
objects, styles, and even ideas can move through space, not to mention the
occasional person. Such contact is also a way that languages can become
36
more similar, hence the shared Celtic languages. Iron Age cultures were far
from isolated, and it would actually be more surprising if they weren’t at least
somewhat similar. But we should also keep in mind that similarity is in the
eye of the beholder. I could easily choose a group of everyday things from
Britain and Ireland that don’t look anything like those on the Continent, like
pottery or pins or forms of burial. If we had focused on those things instead of
what is shared, then we might not be here talking about Celtic cultures at all.
So perspective is everything, in archaeology, in history, and especially in the
Celtic Iron Age.
37

Questions
1. What were the living arrangements like for Atlantic group Celts?
2. Why might Livy’s writings on the Celts be called into question?
Suggested Reading

LECTURE SEVEN
38
Lecture 8:
Eastern and Iberian Celts
While the people most often identified now as Celts, the

inhabitants of Britain and Ireland, were never called by that
name in antiquity, there are others who are not often
thought of as Celts who were. Ptolemy was a general
under Alexander the Great, and he wrote about
Alexander’s campaigns in the third century BCE. As report-
ed by Strabo in the first century BCE, Ptolemy notes that a
party of Celts living near the Adriatic Sea came to see Alexander to seek a
treaty of friendship with him. They shared a drink, and during the conversa-
tion Alexander asked them what they feared most. While Alexander wasn’t
yet known as “the Great” at this point, he was pretty successful in his con-
quests, and he assumed that they would say they feared him. Instead, they
answered that though they valued his friendship, they were afraid of nothing
except the sky falling down on them.
We don’t know enough from this story to say where along the Adriatic Sea
they lived, but there is good evidence that people known as Celts lived in
the eastern Mediterranean region. In contrast to the situation in the Atlantic,
where archaeology suggests that Iron Age cultures there were similar to the
Celts in Europe, the archaeology of the eastern Celts is significantly differ-
ent. Here, it is the documents that allow us to group these cultures with the
Celts. Unlike most of the Celtic areas, archaeology does support the likeli-
hood of a Celtic migration into Thrace, on the Black Sea, which followed
their attack on Delphi in 279 BCE (we’ll talk about that later). There is a
scatter of La Tène–style artifacts in the eastern Mediterranean, which could
indicate that Celtic peoples brought their unique style with them; of course,
they could also have come via trade, theft, or gift giving, so it isn’t certain.
Overall, the peoples of Thrace look more like the indigenous people in the
area; they don’t have hilltop settlements, or chariot burials, or any of the
other things we found in the Celtic core that define the Celtic cultures. But
there are hints in the archaeology. For example, there is a tomb at Mezek, in
Bulgaria. It contains two burials, and the earlier one is likely to be a local
Thracian prince. The tomb itself is in a Mycenean style and contains the typ-
ical artifacts of the region. But there is a second, more recent burial, and
included among the grave goods of this burial is a set of bronze chariot fit-
tings that are clearly Celtic in style. It is uncertain if this means there was
originally a whole chariot in the tomb or not, but the presence of the fittings
suggests the possibility that the occupant was of Celtic ethnicity.
The other notable group of Celts in the eastern Mediterranean are the
Galatians. This name, derived from “Gauls,” provides the only indication of
Celts in the Bible. As in Thrace, the Galatians were said to be an offshoot of
39
the force that attacked Delphi in 279 BCE, but they had left the main group
before the attack. This group ended up in Anatolia, largely modern day
Turkey. As reported some two hundred years later by Livy, the Galatians
were used as mercenaries by various cultures in the region, and also raided
the surrounding territories. They were mostly controlled by being bought off,
but in 233 BCE, Attalus I, the ruler at Pergamum, decided to fight instead. He
won the day, and his victory was commemorated in the famous frieze that
includes the sculpture known as “The Dying Gaul,” which I mentioned before.
This shows a dying Celtic warrior, naked but with a torc around his neck. He
has a mustache and his hair appears to be stiffened with lime, something that
Classical authors commented was common among Celtic warriors. A second
statue also shows a Celtic warrior, this time accompanied by a woman. She
appears to be dead or dying, but is being propped up by the warrior, who is
looking fearfully over his shoulder, apparently preparing to commit suicide.
These figures are clearly Celts, or at least reflect the image that the Classical
world had of the Celts.
The last that we hear of the Galatians in the context of the Celts is from St.
Jerome. He wrote, in 387 CE, that the language spoken by some of the
Galatians was very similar to that spoken by groups in Trier, Germany. Trier
is west of the Rhine, near the Luxembourg border. Since the language spo-
ken in this area was probably descended from pre-Roman Gaulish, it is likely
that the Galatians described by St. Jerome were also speaking a Celtic lan-
guage, at least in some sense of the term.
The other place identified by several authors as inhabited by Celts is in
Iberia, the peninsula comprising modern Spain and Portugal. While the
archaeological connections between the Celtic core and Iberia are much clos-
er, the latter is not identical in terms of sites, artifacts, and styles. For exam-
ple, torcs are found in Iberia, such as the two in the British Museum that were
found on the Spanish-Portuguese border, but they are somewhat different in
style from those I talked about with La Tène art, and the characteristic curvi-
linear decoration is not typically found. Also, there are rich graves with short
swords, spears, and round shields in Iberia, but unlike the chariot burials of
the Celtic core, the bodies are cremated and placed in urns. There are also
The Dying Gaul

Detail (below) clearly showing the neck
torc and stiffened hair, and a more com-
plete view (right) of the sculpture.
© Giuseppe Verondi/shutterstock.com
LECTURE EIGHT
40
hilltop settlements here, commonly called “castros,” though some are large
enough to be considered oppida. Several are well-known from excavation,
including Los Cogotas and Citañia de Sanfins. Both sites have the typical
round, stone-built houses, organized streets, and evidence that at least some
residents lived there year-round. Castros are well-defended with complex
earth and stone walls, which may also suggest that people went there when
the countryside was under attack.
The archaeology of Iberia, therefore, shows some affinities with the Celtic
cultures of Europe, though it is not identical. However, the linguistic evidence
places their language squarely in the larger Celtic family. While other lan-
guages were spoken in Iberia, there is a broad zone in which something
known today as “Celtiberian” was spoken. This is indicated by a few inscrip-
tions, such as the bronze plaque from Botorrita, Spain. The language can’t be
read fully, but it seems to be a contract of some kind relating to land owner-
ship. There are also place names, particularly in the central and northwestern
parts of the peninsula, which incorporate Celtic elements.
This Celtic linguistic presence may be part of the reason that ancient authors
also consistently described the people of Iberia as Celtic. As I noted in talking
about the classical sources, Herodatus, writing in the fifth century BCE,
described the Celts as being the westernmost people in Europe, living
beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Since he also said they lived at the source of
the Danube, which would be in central Europe, he obviously wasn’t paying
attention to the details and so this may be wrong. But if the first part of his
description is right, then he could have been referring to Iberia, which does
extend to the west, beyond the Straits of Gibraltar.
Other writers imply that the Celts arrived in Iberia as the result of migration
and combined with existing peoples there to create a group they referred to
as “Celtiberi,” usually translated as Celtiberians. Diodorus Siculus, who some-
times used Posidonius, a writer of the first and second centuries BCE who
had traveled in Gaul, as a source, describes the Celtiberians as a fusion of
two groups of people that was only achieved after a period of violent warfare.
Diodorus doesn’t say he got this from Posidonius, and other writers at the
time also expressed a similar notion of cultural fusion. So Diodorus may have
been passing on the general opinion of the Classical world, or he may have
been drawing his own conclusions based on his assessment of the nature of
Celtiberian culture. Or he may have had access to Posidonius, who in turn
may have had direct knowledge of some indigenous history of the
Celtiberians themselves. Certainly, writers from much later periods, such as
Martial, who wrote in the first century CE and was himself born in the
Celtiberian territory, reflected this idea of fusion; Martial described himself
and his people as descended from Celts and Iberians.
So this idea of cultural fusion may have been accurate, or it may have
reflected some kind of local origin story, or it may have been a later explana-
tion for a culture that was perceived as having mixed elements. Or it may
have been some combination of all three. But whichever is the case, it is
clear from both archaeology and history that, like the Galatians and the group
in Thrace, these people were seen as Celts, and so anchor the western and
eastern boundaries of what might be seen as the Celtic world.
41

Questions
1. How are the Celtic graves in Iberia different than those of the Celtic core?
2. How did Diodorus Siculus describe the Celtiberians?
Suggested Reading

LECTURE EIGHT
42
Lecture 9:
Celtic Gender Roles
Celts, chapter 5.
One of the aspects of Iron Age society that Classical writ-

ers commented on was the roles of men and women. Much
has been made of the idea that Celtic women, in particular,
had greater social power than was typical in Classical soci-
eties, and this isn’t entirely wrong. But there are both con-
flicting accounts and complexities that show these societies
to be far from the model of gender equality that they are
often described to be by modern commentators.
For this kind of discussion, archaeology isn’t suffi-
ciently precise to be of much help. We know that
there are burials, for example, from early in the Iron
Age (the Hallstatt period, which precedes the Celtic
period proper), in which both men and women are
accompanied by rich grave goods. One of the best
of the latter is the Vix burial, from France, in which
a woman about thirty-five years old was buried in a
wooden chamber under a mound. Her body had
been placed in the compartment of a wagon whose
wheels had been taken off and stacked to one side.
© Clipart.com/Mittelrheinisches Landesmuseum
She was accompanied by many items of jewelry,
including a gold torc, a bronze torc, and bracelets and
pins of bronze, slate, and amber. There were also a
number of artifacts that had been imported from the
Classical world, including a large bronze vessel called
a krater. This is a vessel designed for mixing wine
with water, a common practice in Greece and Rome.
The Vix krater, however, unlike the table-top ves-
sels it is modeled after, stood over five feet high, A Gallo-Roman bronze bust of
making it the largest example of its type. a Celtic woman, from Finthen
(near Mainz), Germany.
This pattern of rich burials continued into the
Celtic period, as noted for the burial at Reinheim,
and may mean that women enjoyed high status in life, including the ability to
accumulate wealth. However, as we talked about in the discussion of archae-
ology and identity, burials can be tricky to interpret. All we really can say for
sure about wealthy female burials is that the people who buried those women
included expensive objects in the tomb. We don’t know whether the occu-
pants actually owned these objects, or even had access to such goods in life.
Wealthy men, for example, typically have wives who use expensive things,
but that doesn’t mean that they owned those things and it doesn’t mean that
they had any particular power in society. The queens of England who were
43
married to kings had many expensive things, but in most cases they didn’t
rule the country.
So we are left with documents to try and understand the roles of men and
women in Iron Age society, and it’s important to keep in mind all the ideas of
context and intention that we’ve talked about. For example, Classical writers
thought that Celtic women had a lot of social power, but that was in comparison
to Greek and Roman women, who typically had relatively little. If we were able
to observe Iron Age society ourselves, we might not be impressed with the
social position of women at all given our own. So it’s all about interpretation.
A good example of some of the difficulties in this endeavor is the idea of
homosexuality. Diodorus Siculus, possibly using information from Posidonius,
says that men in Gaul slept with other men, and in fact preferred them over
women. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when people were less tol-
erant of homosexuality, this was usually dismissed by historians as an
attempt to slander the Gauls by showing them engaging in barbaric behavior.
Now, with a more tolerant attitude to this role, such information is given more
serious consideration, and many people think that homosexuality might have
been a normal part of life in Gaul, at least for some men for some part of their
lives. Nothing in the documents or the evidence has changed—what has
changed is our attitudes. You can see the danger, then, of deciding that
some things are too outlandish to be true simply because we don’t like them.
The same ideas should be applied to other ideas about Iron Age life. While
there are ways to think about some of the things described, some of it may
as easily be hearsay, intended to make Celtic cultures seem more exotic and
barbarous, and therefore more interesting and also more legitimately given
over to the “civilizing” influence of the Classical world.
In general, Iron Age men are portrayed as aggressive and violent, but loyal
and concerned with honor. Diodorus Siculus, perhaps using Posidonius, says
that both men and women wore a lot of jewelry, including the torcs we’ve dis-
cussed before. Caesar says that Gaulish men won’t be seen in public with
their sons until they are of an age to fight, and that they have the power of life
and death over their wives. Diodorus Siculus, again, says that men were very
concerned about establishing paternity, and that they carried out rituals to be
sure that they were the fathers of their children.
Women are also described as strong and beautiful, and sometimes aggres-
sive. They fought alongside their men when asked; Ammianus, who wrote in
the fourth century CE, several centuries after the Roman conquest, says that
“not even a whole troop of foreigners” could stand up to the women who
fought. However, there are no reports of women warriors per se in the usual
Iron Age fighting force, and the impression is that women only fought when
pressed or when directly threatened. Diodorus Siculus also wrote that women
in Gaul gave up their virginity early and easily, and Caesar says that wives in
Britain were shared among several men, particularly fathers and brothers.
LECTURE NINE
How we should understand this last observation isn’t certain, but it’s worth
pointing out that there are societies known in the world (though none from
Europe) in which more than one man (sometimes brothers) marry one
woman. It’s called “polyandry” in anthropology, and has been documented
for cultures in Tibet, Mongolia, Nepal, and India, among others. It is also
44
possible that there were different rules for sexual behavior for single versus
married people, which Caesar wouldn’t have been in a position to determine.
Single people may have been given greater latitude, which was only cur-
tailed when there was the potential for children who needed to be legitimate
for social reproduction.
Some of this information seems contradictory, and so it may represent rumor
rather than fact. It is hard to imagine, for example, women who could stand up
to any warrior submitting to a husband who had the power of life and death
over her. Similarly, if some women were married to more than one man, then
paternity shouldn’t have been an issue; it isn’t a concern in the societies I
mentioned that practiced polyandry because it’s usually impossible to deter-
mine. It may also be, however, that Classical sources were conflating different
societies into a single “Celtic” culture. It is quite possible that these observa-
tions actually pertain to different societies in different parts of the Celtic world,
and so while they are accurate, they don’t all describe the same society.
We also have some evidence that women could be leaders. They are not
common, but a few are mentioned in what appear to be more fictional tales,
while others are historically documented. Boudica of the Iceni is famous for
leading a rebellion against the Romans in Britain, while Cartimandua of the
Brigantes drew the Romans into her internal political troubles. We will talk
about their particular stories later, but it is worth noting here that both women
led their respective groups, and the Classical sources make no observations
that would suggest that it was considered unusual for a woman to do so. We
don’t know the basis on which either claimed leadership; Cartimandua seems
to have held it in her own right, while Boudica claimed it after her husband,
the leader of the Iceni before her, died. Interestingly, both women were
Britons, and no historical sources reliably describe female rulers on the
Continent. So it’s possible that it was something typical of Britain rather than
the Celtic world as a whole. It’s also important to emphasize that this does
not appear to have been common, even in Britain, and it says nothing inher-
ently about the status of women in general. Female leaders occur, such as
Elizabeth I of England, in societies where women otherwise have little social
power, without changing the position of women in the larger society.
Finally, there also seems to be a religious role that women could occupy.
There are no sources that say directly that women could be druids, the reli-
gious specialists of the Iron Age. In 60 CE, Tacitus, for example, describes
the British forces before the battle for Anglesey as being encouraged by
druids and women, but he clearly distinguishes these as two separate
groups. However, there are sources, albeit late ones, that describe women as
seers and oracles. There are several stories from the third and fourth cen-
turies CE in which women foretell the future, and these women are referred
to as dryas. This word may be connected to druid, but it isn’t a direct transla-
tion of the term in female form.
So while there is a range of ideas reflected in Classical sources about the
roles of men and women in Iron Age society, one thing was certain—both
women and men behaved in ways the Greeks and Romans found surprising.
45

Questions
1. What are the factors that make burials so hard to interpret?

2. How did the roles of men and women in Celtic society contrast with their
respective roles in Greek and Roman society?
Suggested Reading
Freeman, Philip. War, Women, and Druids: Eyewitness Reports and Early
Accounts of the Ancient Celts. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
Hingley, Richard, and Christina Unwin. Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen.
London: Hambledon & London, 2006.
LECTURE NINE
46
Lecture 10:
Celtic Religions
Celts, chapter 10.
Ancient religions are one of the more difficult areas to

understand in the past. If we think about religion as having
an ideological component and a material one, we can use
historical documents, if we have them, to examine the for-
mer and archaeology to examine the latter. However, it’s
never that simple. For one thing, historical documents are
often written by foreigners, who usually have particular
agendas with regard to indigenous beliefs. They either see them as somehow
getting in the way, and so portray them negatively, or find them exotic, and so
romanticize them beyond recognition. And even if they are trying to be objec-
tive, they often don’t understand them, or worse, think they do and don’t both-
er to verify their impressions. For material aspects, the usual archaeological
problems apply—we have to be able to distinguish what is ritual from what
isn’t, and then try to understand the meaning of something for which we only
have physical remains.
All of these difficulties apply to understanding religion in Iron Age Europe. All
of the descriptions we have were written by Classical authors, and we’ve
already talked about the issues involved in interpreting these. We also have
some inscriptions, which include things like the names of deities, and since
some of them are clearly Celtic in terms of language, we can argue that these
are indigenous in character. But we also have to keep in mind that virtually all
of these inscriptions were written down in the post-conquest period. It doesn’t
mean that they aren’t legitimately Celtic, but there should be some question in
your mind about exactly how the conquest affected religious ideas, and so
how far back we can push these names in terms of pre-conquest cultures. As
for archaeology, I’ll talk more about the specific issues when we get there. But
in general, the problem is one of interpretation—apart from the more obvious
things like burials, how do we identify religious or ritual sites?
Let’s start with the easier aspects. One thing that we can always assume
reflects religion and ritual is burial of the dead. Our knowledge of burial ritual
from the Iron Age is somewhat patchy, but there are some things that can be
said. In general, we can say that funerary practices were varied. In some
areas, people were buried intact, while in others they were cremated. Elite
burials, which I’ve already talked about, sometimes were accompanied by
rich goods, including gold and bronze jewelry and weapons, chariots and
wagons, and imported goods from the Classical world. We have less knowl-
edge of how ordinary people were treated in death, though there are burials
whose weapons and jewelry are made of less opulent materials and are less
numerous overall. In some places, like Ireland, we have virtually no burials,
and we can only assume that funerary practice was of the kind that doesn’t
survive, such as scattered cremation or the exposure of bodies in the open.
47
For non-funerary ritual, we have evidence in the form of temples and also
other less structured kinds of sites. Although several Classical sources say
that people worshiped in natural places without any buildings, we know of a
number of temples from the Continent and from Britain. The sites of Roque-
pertuse and Entremont, both in France, give us some idea of the kinds of
activities that happened in temples. Roquepertuse produced a statue of a
seated figure, which may be a deity, since it is human in every way but its
feet, which end in hooves. Interestingly, the figure also wears a torc, the neck
ring that we talked about before. Both this site and Entremont also had pillars
that were fitted with niches. The oval shape of the niche and the fact that
traces of human skulls were found at both sites suggest the niches were
intended to hold human skulls. In Britain, Iron Age temples are often found
under Romanized versions. These are typically relatively small and are some-
times rectangular, in contrast to the typically round houses. By contrast to the
smaller temples in Britain and Europe, ritual sites in Ireland can be quite
large, for example at Dún Ailinne and Emhain Macha. These sites were prob-
ably used for large-scale ritual gatherings, rather than the more individual ritu-
als suggested by the smaller British and European temples. So they may
have met in groves and other wooded settings, but they also did so in more
conventional buildings.
Other types of sites are more difficult to interpret, but seem to indicate that
various objects were sometimes offered to deities. Collections of artifacts,
sometimes large, have been recovered from the earth, in pits or in deliberate-
ly constructed shafts, and from rivers, lakes, and bogs throughout Europe,
Britain, and Ireland. What has survived is often expensive, such as the rings,
bracelets, torcs, weapons, and shields found at sites like Llyn Cerrig Bach in
Wales, Snettisham in England, and La Tène in Switzerland. But we can’t rule
out that other, more perishable things might also have been there, such as
food, milk, or wooden items. Where these were deposited in watery places it
seems fair to assume that they were intended to stay there, perhaps as offer-
ings to deities. When they are in pits, however, we can’t say for sure—are
these offerings too, or were they being hidden, and their recovery was pre-
vented by unforeseen circumstances? Posidonius is quoted by Strabo (first
century CE) as saying the Gauls made deposits of “treasure” in lakes and in
temples, but he too seems unclear whether these are for storage or ritual.
One thing that fascinated Classical writers was the idea of human sacrifice.
There are many descriptions of rituals in which people were sacrificed for var-
ious reasons, as offerings to deities or in order to read omens in their death
throes. There is considerable gruesome detail provided about how these peo-
ple were tortured and killed, showing that prurient interest isn’t a modern
invention. The most famous is the report from Caesar, in which a large figure
was built and filled with living people. This was then burned, killing those
inside; the occupants were preferably criminals, but if these were in short
supply, then innocent victims were obtained. While it is clear that no one who
LECTURE TEN
reported human sacrifice for Iron Age peoples had actually witnessed it, we
do have some evidence that it may have occurred. There are a number of
bodies (for example, Lindow Man from England and Clonycavan from Ireland)
that have been recovered from bogs. These people were deliberately killed
and sometimes tortured, and then deposited in the bog. There is some room
48
for debate, however—are these just human versions of the swords and jewel-
ry offered to deities, or were they criminals, perhaps executed for some par-
ticularly heinous crime? Archaeology doesn’t allow certainty, though I favor
the former overall.
The identities of the deities who received such offerings are equally problem-
atic. Again, we have a variety of names that are from Celtic languages—
Taranis, Sequana, Epona, Lugh—and these names may predate the typically
Latin inscriptions in which they are found. Since there are many names and
many representations to match, it’s obvious that the Celtic religions were poly-
theistic. Using general ideas about the types of deities typical of such reli-
gions, it seems fair to assume that these represented a variety of aspects—
the natural world, domestic concerns, healing, fertility, and success in warfare.
The Romans often paired their deities with indigenous ones that they thought
had similar functions, or simply used Roman names for them. How accurate
they were is anyone’s guess, but since we know they could be wrong, there’s
no reason to assume they got this right.
The most famous practitioners of Iron Age religions were, of course,
the druids. Several sources, including Caesar and Posidonius, talk about
them, naming them as one of several kinds of religious specialists. Others
were seers and readers of omens, as well as those who did things not
typically considered religious in modern culture, such as bards. Druids
were responsible for keeping track of the calendar and also for reading
omens, something which might not have been as simple as it sounds. A
copper calendar, found at Coligny in France, is a complex table that was
designed to distinguish auspicious from inauspicious days. They also acted
as judges (particularly in murder cases), and taught the young. They were
exempt from taxes and military service, and could excommunicate anyone
who didn’t abide by their rulings. It was said to take twenty years to master
all of the knowledge required of a druid, which was made more complicated
by their being forbidden to write anything down. Diviciacus, a leader of the
Aedui in Gaul, claimed to be a druid, and was personally known by Caesar
and by Cicero, the Roman statesman.
So overall, Celtic religions were pretty much like others in the ancient world.
Classical writers often seemed to think that they were fascinatingly exotic, but
stripped down to their basics, they are not all that different from what others
at the time believed. The belief in reincarnation is described by several
authors, and Diodorus (possible using Posidonius) says that the Gauls some-
times threw letters to the previously dead onto funeral pyres. In this regard,
they are described as sharing this belief with Pythagoras. Also described fre-
quently is the idea that omens could foretell the future, something shared by
most of the ancient world, including Rome. Deities pervaded both the natural
and cultural worlds, and could be approached for help in dealing with the ups
and downs of life, a ubiquitous notion in all religions. Illness and injury were
some of the most common problems for which deities were invoked, though a
few written curses suggest that curing them wasn’t always the main concern.
So while the Celts had some aspects of their ritual life that were unique to
them, they also shared the same hopes, fears, worries, and joys that have
always prompted humans to seek help in the supernatural world.
49

Questions
1. What is known about burial rituals in the Iron Age?

2. What were the roles of the various practitioners of Iron Age religions?
Suggested Reading
Brunaux, Jean-Louis. The Celtic Gauls: Gods, Rites, and Sanctuaries.

London: Seaby Numismatic Publications, 1987.
Chadwick, Nora K. The Druids. Rev. ed. Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 2000.
Piggott, Stuart. The Druids. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985.
Webster, Jane. “Sanctuaries and Sacred Places.” The Celtic World. Ed.
Miranda Green. London: Routledge, 1996.
Articles of Interest
Webster, Jane. Interpretatio: Roman Word Power and the Celtic Gods.
Britannia 26:153–61, 1995a.
LECTURE TEN
50
Lecture 11:
Celtic Warfare
Celts, chapter 5.
One of the aspects of the Celtic image that has survived

the longest is the ferocity of Celtic warriors. Caesar, who
wrote extensively about military tactics, weapons, and
equipment in Gaul and Britain, comments that their belief
in reincarnation prompted them to be especially fierce in
battle. Strabo, more bluntly, says that all of the Gauls are
“absolutely mad about war,” tempered somewhat by also
observing that they are sincere, and not malicious. This idea that the Celts
were unusually warlike has become iconic in modern culture, appearing in
movies like Braveheart and in the Kevin Costner movie Robin Hood (where
they are portrayed as barely human in their desire to kill). By now, however,
you should be wondering—is this accurate? Were they unusually warlike?
Was this always typical of Iron Age culture? And what is our evidence for the
warlike Celts?
First, let’s dispense with the idea that they were in any sense pacifists. For
all ancient cultures, pretty much everywhere, conflict was a way of life, and all
adult men (and sometimes women) were warriors. So even if there wasn’t
any evidence, it would be safe to assume that Iron Age people in Europe
were also engaged at times in armed conflict with their neighbors. That said,
we do have direct evidence of this. Burials, of both men and women, contain
varying numbers of weapons, including daggers, spears, swords, and shields,
and this suggests that, at least in the context of burial, the idea of going to
your grave armed was important. Also, some of these weapons, as well as
those found in ritual deposits, show nicks and breaks indicating that they
had been used. Sites such as hill forts and the oppida, while perhaps situated
to be impressive, are also clearly structured for defense. So the archaeologi-
cal evidence indicates that the potential for conflict was a way of life in Iron
Age Europe.
This is supported by the documentary evidence, where it features prominent-
ly in Classical descriptions. As I noted, the majority of Caesar’s writings are
on the subject of warfare, hardly surprising given that’s why he was there to
observe them in the first place. His comments are too extensive to detail
here, but he describes their tactics, their weaponry, their armor, and their
merits as soldiers, providing what appears to be a relatively balanced view.
The Romans generally are presented as superior; for example, Caesar notes
with surprise that the Britons were still using chariots in warfare, something
no longer done in the Classical world, and typically the Roman forces are
able to scatter the Gauls without too much difficulty. But Caesar does give
the various Iron Age groups their due when they merit it, noting their bravery
overall and how tenacious they could be in battle. Diodorus Siculus (who
51
often used information from Posidonius) emphasizes how quickly and easily
the Gauls were tempted to fighting amongst themselves. One particularly
famous story is related from Posidonius by Athenaeus, writing at the end of
the second century CE, in which competing claims for the best portion of
meat at a Gaulish feast sometimes ended up in a fight to the death.
Some of the more exotic aspects of Iron Age culture are also wrapped up in
warfare. Diodorus says that head hunting was a standard part of warfare in
Gaul, and that the heads of enemies were preserved and kept, shown to
guests, and passed down to descendants. Polybius, writing about one hun-
dred years after the Battle of Telemon (where the Gauls were defeated by the
Romans in 225 BCE), reports that the Gauls on the front lines were naked,
wearing nothing but gold torcs and bands on their arms. This was said to
have been a gesture of contempt to their enemies, who weren’t threatening
enough for these warriors to wear armor. Those who were wearing armor are
sometimes described as having elaborate gear; Diodorus reports that their
helmets had large figures on top, sometimes birds or four-footed beasts, and
horns projecting from them, which made them look taller and more fearsome.
The sacrifice of enemies captured in battle is also reported by a number of
authors, some of whom give gruesome details.
That the skills of Iron Age warriors were widely known and valued is also
attested by the presence of Celtic mercenaries in many Classical armies.
They are reported frequently, fighting alongside Spartans, Greeks, and even
Romans, and evidence for them is found as far afield as Egypt, where they
served several of the Ptolemaic kings. A wooden shield of Celtic type was
recovered from the Fayuum region there, preserved by the desert environ-
ment, and probably originated with a group of Celtic mercenaries who were
given land there as payment for services rendered. A small terracotta figurine
in the British Museum, which clearly represents a Celtic warrior, was also
recovered from Egypt; whether this was a mercenary’s personal portrait or a
souvenir of a respected (but dead) enemy is unknown.
So the Celts were warriors, mostly feared by Classical writers. But to think
about the significance of this, we need to consider the context in which these
various documents were written. Of primary importance in the Classical view
of the Celts was the sack of Rome and the attack on Delphi. These both
loomed large in the minds of people who had never met a living Celt, but nev-
ertheless talked and wrote about Celtic culture. In 391 BCE, negotiations
between the Iron Age Senones and the Romans broke down when the latter’s
negotiators were seen by the former participating in a battle against them
while they were in negotiations. Their envoy complaining of the betrayal was
rebuffed in Rome, and so they attacked, defeating the Romans outside Rome
itself in 388 BCE. The Romans retreated to the Capitoline Hill, leaving the rest
of the city open for plunder. The Senones obliged, and after several days of
pillaging attempted an assault on the Hill. They were repelled several times,
LECTURE ELEVEN
once apparently because the defenders were warned by the honking of geese,
and eventually the two sides agreed to negotiate. The Senones accepted a
ransom and left. The attack on Delphi was the end of the larger migration I
mentioned before, which began in 278 BCE. Again, the Celts won some early
battles against the Romans and then attacked Delphi, the site of the famous
52
oracle. During the battle, as described by much later writers, there were sever-
al mystical appearances, including phantoms, snow, and earthquakes. The
Celts, whose leader was killed, eventually gave up and retreated.
The fact that these two revered locations, Rome and Delphi, could be threat-
ened, left a lasting impression on the Classical psyche in terms of the Celts.
From then on, the idea of ferocious Celtic warriors was a stock Classical
theme, appearing again and again in various authors’ works. But were the
Celts really any more ferocious than anyone else, and was this an intrinsic
part of their culture? This is a complicated question, and I only have time here
to raise a few things to think about. But the first is that all of the descriptions
we have of the Celts, including those from Caesar and Posidonius, were writ-
ten after the effects of Roman expansion were already being felt. From its very
beginnings as a Republic in the fifth century BCE, Rome was characterized by
continuous and inexorable conquest. As it grew larger, it both gained a reputa-
tion for its military goals and put pressure on the inhabitants who stood in its
way. It is likely that the Iron Age groups who migrated were responding to this
pressure in part, and obviously those described by Caesar and Posidonius
were feeling the direct effects of Roman territorial aggression. So it is hardly
surprising that the Celts behaved in warlike fashion. I’m not saying that this
was outside their usual behavior, but given the presence of a warrior capabili-
ty, it’s to be expected that they would react aggressively.
Also, the idea that Iron Age peoples were mindlessly violent and delighted in
war is not supported by even a cursory glance at Classical sources. I men-
tioned the British tin miners described by Diodorus as especially friendly to
strangers, and trade contacts are attested by large numbers of imported and
exported goods. This could hardly have taken place with people who would
rather fight than talk. There are also numerous descriptions of Iron Age peo-
ples negotiating with Classical groups. In the attack on Delphi, described by
Classical writers, the Celtic forces were said to have tried to negotiate, but
were rebuffed by the Romans. So it seems that warfare was only one of sev-
eral options for the average Celt, and in many cases it was one that was not
their primary choice.
In comparison, the Romans were just as warlike, if not more so, and yet
history overall is far kinder to them. This is the culture that invaded others
without cause and invented gladiatorial games and crucifixion, both offered
in part as entertainment for the masses. While this is rarely discussed by
modern historians with approval, it is often minimized as less important
than the fact that Rome imposed urbanism, writing, roads, and the state,
all things that are valued by modern cultures. Roman violence is typically
portrayed as the unfortunate price that the conquered had to pay to become,
and I use the word with some irony, “civilized.” But I often wonder—what
would we think of that era of history if we had documents written by the
Celts, describing their own culture, how they felt about being “civilized” by
Rome? Would we now be discussing the Romans as “absolutely mad about
war”? Remember—history is always written by the winners, and in this case
they became winners by the sword.
53

Questions
1. What archaeological evidence is there to support the idea that conflict was
a way of life in Iron Age Europe?
2. Why might history view the Romans as “civilized” and the Celts as “mad
about war”?
Suggested Reading
Freeman, Philip. War, Women, and Druids: Eyewitness Reports and Early
Accounts of the Ancient Celts. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
Wells, Peter S. The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius,
and the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoburg Forest. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2004.
LECTURE ELEVEN
54
Lecture 12:
The Roman Invasion
Celts, chapter 12.
In the fifth century BCE, what had been a small and rela-
tively insignificant village on the Tiber River began to see a
different future for itself. The expansion, which ultimately
produced the Roman Empire, is one of the most remark-
able processes in European history, both in itself and in
the impact it had on its neighbors around the Mediter-
ranean. There are many books that detail the ways in
which Rome negotiated with, cajoled, and conquered its way to empire
status, including that written by Caesar of his own wars of conquest. There
are equal numbers that discuss the various reasons why such expansion
happened. These range from fears of attack from those on its borders to
large-scale territorial aggression resulting from simple greed for land and
resources. But whatever the reasons, the impact on the Iron Age world of the
Celtic cultures was significant and lasting. Starting in the third century BCE
with incursions into Iberia and ending in the first century CE when Britain was
finally brought under control, the Romans forced the Celtic world to become
part of its empire. While this didn’t erase the Celtic cultures, they were forever
changed in deeply meaningful ways.
Given the number of books that tell the story of the Roman conquest, I only
want to give a brief outline here. As I noted, the beginning of the story is in
Iberia. Given their geographic proximity to the Straits of Gibraltar, the Iberian
Celts typically allied themselves with the Carthaginians, whose state was cen-
tered in modern Tunisia on the north African coast. There had been numerous
conflicts between the various Mediterranean and Aegean states over control of
the shipping lanes in the western Mediterranean, resulting in a number of
colonies being established to control trade in the region. Gades (modern
Cadíz) in southern Spain was a Phoenician colony, and it became absorbed
into the Carthaginian empire as the empire expanded north. Rome was
unhappy with the state of affairs, and in 206 BCE it captured Gades. This is
the formal start of the annexation of Iberia. Rome moved into the peninsula
and established provinces over the next decade, which was followed by more
than sixty years of constant warfare, some of it notably violent even for the
time. For example, a Roman commander in 179 BCE reported that he had
destroyed three hundred Celtiberian hill towns. The end of the Iberian con-
quest is usually marked by the siege of the oppidum at Numantia, which
ended in 134 BCE; all of those who survived the siege were sold into slavery.
The conquest of Gaul is, of course, the best-documented series of military
campaigns because of Caesar’s book detailing his accomplishments there. In
59 BCE, Caesar, who at that time was only a general, was given command of
the province of Cisalpine Gaul (that is, Gaul on the Roman side of the Alps).
55
The next year, he launched an invasion into Transalpine Gaul, supposedly
because he had been asked by the Celtic Aedui (who were Roman allies) to
help defend them against attack by several other groups. His subsequent
campaign lasted some seven years, and was a combination of negotiation,
the manipulation of internal conflict, and outright military conquest. Caesar
also attempted to move into Britain. In 55 BCE he attempted to land on the
southern coast, but was rebuffed by bad weather and an unexpectedly
aggressive defense by the inhabitants. In the following year, his landing was
successful, but when the defenders again proved difficult to defeat, he negoti-
ated a treaty with them and left. The conquest of Britain was ultimately
accomplished under the emperor Claudius, beginning in 43 CE and ending
finally some forty years later.
It is a source of some national pride that Ireland never came under Roman
domination. There are a number of Roman artifacts known from several dozen
sites, and there is the site of Drumanagh, which may be a Roman trading
emporium located not far from Dublin. These all suggest that the Romans
were in contact with Ireland, probably through trade and perhaps through
some Roman expatriates living on the island. Tacitus, who wrote about
Roman Britain in the first century CE, and whose father-in-law was Agricola,
Source: Celtnet.org/© Dyfed Lloyd Evans, 2005

LECTURE TWELVE
This map is based primarily on Roman records from approximately 60 BCE. It includes
some historical information for highly mobile tribes such as the Boii, who also had territory
in Cisalpine Gaul (Italy) before they were subdued by Rome. Many of the Gaulish tribes
were a confederation rather than a single group. There were numerous other smaller tribes
whose existence was known and who were isolated geographically from the larger tribes,
but are not shown here.
56
the general responsible for most of the conquest of Britain, says that he often
heard Agricola say that he could take Ireland with a single legion and a few
auxiliaries. But it never appears to have happened. There may have been
some Roman presence in Ireland, but there is no evidence to suggest a signif-
icant occupation or that it was ever considered part of the empire.
Thus, by the first century CE, most of what had once been the Celtic world
had become the occupied Celtic world, part of the Roman adventure in
empire building. While the popular impression seems to be that the Roman
conquest was somehow inevitable, it is worth considering why it happened.
Why weren’t the Iron Age cultures of Europe able to fight off the Roman
incursion? Neither side had inherently superior weapons, and there were
probably more of the indigenous people than Roman forces. So what tipped
the balance?
Probably most importantly, the overall goals of warfare in these two groups
were quite different. Certainly the Celtic groups fought, and apparently they
fought hard and often. But they fought for different reasons. For the Iron Age
cultures, there doesn’t seem to have been any notion of territorial acquisition,
no aim to amass ever greater lands under the control of a single center.
Instead, war was fought largely on an individual basis, for what could be
gained. Of course, people also fought to defend their homes and families
from those attacking for other reasons. But personal gain was an important
motivation that could mean a number of things. First, there was a straightfor-
ward goal of getting stuff. Booty appears to have been a primary aim of the
attacks on Delphi and Rome, described earlier, and there is reason to think
that this was a common goal. Also, personal status was important. Proving
your ability to best someone in combat was a means to acquiring followers,
and this was significant both for personal status and political power. Diodorus
Siculus, possibly using Posidonius, describes battles in which an individual
warrior stepped out and taunted the other side. If someone came out to con-
front him, they would fight. This might happen again, and the battle might
then proceed as a series of single engagements. Eventually there might be
all-out combat, but sometimes these individual encounters proved enough.
By contrast, the Romans were building an empire, and toward that end,
Rome had a professional standing army. While this didn’t necessarily ensure
their dedication to battle, there were severe penalties for not standing their
ground. They were trained to fight in groups, and to adjust to changing battle
conditions by obeying orders. Even their weapons reflected these differences.
While the Celts had longer swords designed for a wide, sweeping, slashing
motion, lethal in individual combat, the Romans had shorter swords, better for
maneuvering in crowds of armed combatants. When the Romans had the
ability to choose their place for battle, and the time to set up their forces, they
had a clear advantage over their Iron Age enemies. This is most clearly seen
in those notable occasions when the Romans lost, such as the Teutoberg
Forest in 9 CE. In this battle, the Romans were caught unaware in heavily
forested, swampy terrain by forces under the command of Arminius, leader of
an alliance of Germanic groups. The Romans were never able to effectively
regroup after the initial onslaught, and in the end, three legions, three detach-
ments of cavalry, and six cohorts of auxiliaries, perhaps twenty thousand men
in all, died.
57
It is also the case that, while we now think of the Romans as being in oppo-
sition to a single group, the “Celts,” in fact the latter saw themselves as dis-
tinct cultural entities. This is evidenced in many different ways—by the variety
of group names, by differences in the details of artifacts and styles, and by
documentary sources that describe the variations on their cultures. It’s also
evidenced by the frequency with which sources report various Iron Age
groups inviting the Romans to support their side of an otherwise indigenous
conflict. Caesar said he moved into Transalpine Gaul at the invitation of the
Aedui, who were fighting a coalition of the Suebi and the Sequani, and
Claudius invaded Britain at the request of the Atrebates for aid. While it would
be an exaggeration to say that they sometimes saw little difference between
the Romans and their Celtic enemies in the neighboring region, it does
appear to be the case that they didn’t anticipate the consequences of involv-
ing the Romans in internal warfare. We can look back now and observe that
this was a really bad idea, but at the time, it is likely that the various Celtic
groups had no basis on which to assess the extent or the avariciousness of
the Roman Empire.
This is also why they didn’t band together to confront the invading armies of
Rome. Iron Age people did sometimes band together for the purpose of war-
fare. Arminius led a coalition; so did Vercingetorix and Boudica, whom we’ll
talk about later. And it was often the case that the Romans were invited in
because neighboring groups had joined together and so presented a more-
than-usually formidable foe. But these coalitions didn’t last long, and fell apart
when individual goals conflicted with those of the group. So the idea of every-
one, all of the Celtic peoples, banding together to repel the Romans probably
wouldn’t have been workable, even had someone conceived it. It probably
would have worked. But hindsight is always 20/20, and if they knew then
what we know now, things might have been different.
LECTURE TWELVE
58

Questions
1. Why weren’t the Iron Age cultures of Europe able to fight off the
Roman incursion?
2. How did the Romans and Celts differ in terms of their overall goals
of warfare?
Suggested Reading
Wells, Peter S. The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped
Roman Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
———. The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and
the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoburg Forest. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2004.
59
Lecture 13:
The Occupied Celts
The Roman invasion of Europe and Britain was one of the

most significant things to happen in the Iron Age European
world, perhaps the most significant thing. On the one
hand, it led to the documentation of the Celtic cultures
(albeit filtered through foreign eyes) in ways that had not
happened before, and so paradoxically may have con-
tributed to its survival, in a sense. However, the overall
impact on the indigenous cultures has to be seen as negative. This viewpoint
may find some detractors in modern times. The Romans had writing, urban-
ism, a state bureaucracy, and many other things that are now valued in our
culture, and those things were imposed on the indigenous cultures that they
conquered. Thus we may see the changes experienced by groups like the
Celts as ultimately beneficial. However, the fact that the Romans had to
impose their culture mostly through military conquest suggests that most of
the indigenous cultures didn’t particularly want those things, and as an
anthropologist as well as an archaeologist, I have to side with them.
That said, however, since there was no single Iron Age central government in
Europe, and no single Celtic culture, there was also no single Celtic response
to the Roman conquest. Responses instead crossed the board, from apparent
enthusiasm for all things Roman, to fighting to the death against Roman domi-
nation. Some of the evidence we have for these various reactions comes from
documentary sources, which always must be treated with care. Other evi-
dence comes from archaeology, though there are typically multiple ways to
read this record. On the whole, however, it seems clear that there were as
many ways of reacting to the Roman arrival as there were people to react to it.
On one end of the continuum, there is the obvious and undeniable evidence
of indigenous military resistance to Roman occupation. One of the most mem-
orable visual images of this is from Maiden Castle, an oppidum in southern
England that was attacked sometime after 43 CE. In addition to some fifty-
thousand sling stones hurled in defense of the site and recovered in the exca-
vations, one individual whose skeleton was excavated had a Roman ballista
bolt still embedded in his spine. Similarly, I already mentioned the battle at
Teutoberg Forest, where excavations again turned up hundreds of weapons,
LECTURE THIRTEEN
whole and fragments, in one of the battles that Rome famously lost.
In addition to considerable archaeological evidence, various Classical
accounts describe the military conquest of Europe and Britain. For example,
Caesar himself is said to have had four legions, each with three- to four-thou-
sand troops plus auxiliaries, in his initial campaign in Gaul, and this force was
met by any number of indigenous defenders. One of the more famous is
Vercingetorix, a leader of the Arverni of Gaul, whose story is told by Caesar.
60
In 52 BCE, Vercingetorix began a campaign against Caesar and won several
of the initial engagements, including a major battle in that year at Gergovia.
However, intensified Roman assaults resulted in his retreating to the oppidum
at Mandubii, now known as Alesia, where he was besieged by Roman forces.
Despite calls for reinforcements, no effective help arrived, and Vercingetorix
was forced to surrender. After being held in prison for six years, he was pub-
licly executed as part of Caesar’s triumphal ceremonies in 46 BCE.
Another famous resistor was Caratacus, who fought against the forces of
Claudius, who invaded Britain in 43 CE. Caratacus was a son of the leader of
the Catuvellauni. Although they were unsuccessful in defeating the invading
forces, Caratacus fled to Wales and mounted a guerilla war against the
Romans. In the end, however, he was captured and sent to Rome, presum-
ably intended for execution. But as the story was told several decades later
by Tacitus, the speech he was allowed to give before his execution was so
moving that he was pardoned and allowed to live in Rome.
Probably the most famous of those who rebelled against Rome is Boudica
(popularly, but incorrectly, also known as Boadicea). According to accounts,
again by Tacitus, Boudica was the wife of Prasutagus, the leader of the Iceni,
in eastern Britain. Although Prasutagus was friendly to Rome, after his death
around 60 CE, the Romans invaded the Icenian territory and took it over. In
the process, Tacitus says, Boudica was flogged and her daughters were
raped. This was the culmination of a number of grievances the local popula-
tion had against Rome, and Boudica was able to bring together several Iron
Age groups, including the Iceni and the Trinovantes. Her forces
destroyed Camulodunum (modern Colchester) and Londinium
(modern London), and inflicted serious damage on the town of
Verulamium (modern St. Albans). In her final battle, however,
where the Romans were able to choose the time and place,
Boudica’s forces were defeated by Roman forces under
Suetonius Paulinus. Boudica’s fate is not known for certain,
but one source says she died from illness while the other
suggests she took poison to avoid being taken to Rome
and publicly executed.
Other indications that there was resistance, though in
a less direct fashion, against Roman government is
seen in archaeological evidence from burials and other
kinds of evidence. There are several cemeteries, for
French Memorial to Vercingetorix

In 1865, French Emperor Napoleon III erected a seven meter tall
statue of Vercingetorix (right), who is considered by many in France
to be a folk hero. The sculptor Aimé Millet erected the memorial on
the purported site of the Battle of Alesia.
stock.com
The inscription (translated into English) on the base of the

statue reads:
ley/shutter
United Gaul
Forming a single nation
© Robert Bai
Animated by the same spirit,

Can defy the Universe.
61
example, that show a combination of indigenous and Roman elements in the
associated grave goods. In one Iron Age cemetery in Luxembourg, there are
several burials that have typically Roman goods, several that have no Roman
goods at all, and some that have a mix of the two. Does this reflect differ-
ences in the degree to which that particular individual (or at least the people
who did the burying) embraced the presence of Roman culture? That’s cer-
tainly one interpretation. Similarly, there was a resurgence of metal objects
made in the La Tène style of the pre-conquest years that became popular
again in the centuries following the conquest. Is this an attempt to reclaim an
indigenous identity, and thereby resist Roman domination? Perhaps these
are ways that people could rebel against Rome in a way that was not overtly
confrontational, but nevertheless clear.
So it seems that many of the Celtic groups were unhappy at the arrival of the
Romans and expressed this both during and after the conquest with different
degrees of intensity. Yet at the same time, there is equally clear evidence that
© Darren Evans/shutterstock.com
Statue of Boudica
In 1782, English poet William Cowper wrote a popular poem entitled Boadicea, An Ode. It was in
the Victorian era, however, that Boudica’s fame took on legendary proportions, as Queen Victoria
was seen as Boudica’s “namesake.” Victoria’s Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, also wrote a
poem, Boadicea, and several ships were named after her. The bronze statue of Boudica (above)
with her daughters in a war chariot (furnished with scythes after the Persian fashion) was commis-
LECTURE THIRTEEN
sioned by Prince Albert and executed by Thomas Thornycroft. It was completed in 1905 and stands
next to Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, with the following lines from Cowper’s
poem, which refer to the British Empire:
Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway.
It was noted by some at the time of the statue’s dedication that the great anti-imperialist rebel
Boudica had been identified with the head of the British Empire and stood guard over the city
she razed.
62
some tolerated the Romans and even welcomed them. Classical writers report
any number of situations in which the Romans were asked to support one
indigenous group against another. Caesar was ostensibly invited to support
the Aedui against a coalition of their enemies, and this was his reason for
invading Gaul. A century later, a similar invitation from Verica of the Atrebates
resulted in Claudius’s invasion of Britain. And the leader of the Atrebates ulti-
mately changed his name to Tiberius Claudius, presumably signaling his
approval of all things Roman.
Other rulers, while perhaps not inviting the Romans in per se, nevertheless
accepted what they saw as reality and allied themselves with Rome, becom-
ing what are known as client rulers. Prasutagus, the husband of Boudica,
was one such client ruler. Another was Cartimandua, the leader of the
Brigantes in northern England. She and her husband Venutius were initially
friendly to Rome, and in 51 CE it was Cartimandua, according to Tacitus,
who turned Caratacus over to the Romans after he had sought sanctuary
with her people. But domestic troubles resulted in her divorce from Venutius,
and in 57 CE their differences broke out in war, Venutius attacking first
Cartimandua’s forces and then those of her Roman allies. Additional Roman
support kept Cartimandua on the throne for some years after that, but even-
tually Venutius prevailed and defeated her. After this, Cartimandua no longer
appears in historical records.
So the evidence suggests a complex and nuanced response to the Roman
conquest. Some rebelled and some resisted the occupation, while others tol-
erated and even welcomed it. I suspect it depended on a combination of fac-
tors—was there any real possibility of choice, was there some perception that
at least stability and perhaps even greater power would come from accepting
Roman ways, or was the injury too great to forget who had caused the
deaths of thousands and the breakdown of traditional culture? Whatever the
particular situation, the Romans occupied most of the Celtic lands for cen-
turies, and while their cultures weren’t eradicated, they were changed in fun-
damental and long-lasting ways. By the time the western half of the Roman
empire began to collapse, beginning in perhaps the fourth to fifth centuries
CE, the Iron Age cultures were no more. It is perhaps telling that King Arthur,
the semi-legendary figure who is often seen as synonymous with all things
Celtic, may have borne a Roman name.
63

Questions
1. What was the range of Celtic response to the Roman conquest?

2. What archaeological evidence exists to support Celtic resistance against
Roman government?
Suggested Reading
Hingley, Richard, and Christina Unwin. Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen.
London: Hambledon & London, 2006.
Websites to Visit
Historia, a commercial website, provides an article and images of the Maiden

Castle (Dorset, England) hill fort, including an image of the skeleton with the
Roman ballista arrow bolt embedded in the spine —
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/historia/sites/maiden/maiden.htm
LECTURE THIRTEEN
64
Lecture 14:
The Modern Celts
There are any number of places to note the beginning of

the end for the Roman Empire. In the early centuries CE, it
was plagued by attacks on its borders and corruption at its
center, and in 395 CE it was permanently split into two
halves, the Eastern Empire and the Western Empire. In
410 CE, the peoples of Britain were told to “look to their
own defenses,” a not-so-subtle indication that Rome was
no longer going to be protecting them. After that, there was a gradual disinte-
gration in Britain and Europe, followed by the formation of the kingdoms of
the early Middle Ages.
As we noted in Lecture 13, the peoples of what came to be called the Celtic
world had taken on or rejected Roman ways to varying degrees. In the literal
sense, they no longer existed, but certainly aspects of their cultures remained.
For later historians, the most notable aspect was their languages, many of
which survived into modern times. We have already talked about the realiza-
tion of Edward Lhuyd and others that various languages spoken in the seven-
teenth century were related, and the subsequent use of the term “Celtic” to
describe these languages. The connection of these languages with earlier cul-
tures that had existed on the edges of the Roman Empire was the final piece
that allowed various cultures to be labeled as “Celtic.”
Since these languages were also being spoken by modern peoples, it then
became possible to label these modern cultures as descendants of the Celtic
peoples. While there is some debate about exactly who among living people
qualifies as Celtic, the most widely accepted list seems to be those where
Celtic languages survived into modern times. This would include the people
© Clipart.com
65
of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man. Cornish
is largely a revived language; there is some dispute as to who the last official
native speaker was, but the latest candidates died in the nineteenth century.
Manx, the Celtic language of the Isle of Man, is also to some extent a revived
language, though the last native speaker there only died in 1974. Breton, the
Celtic language of Brittany, was officially suppressed at various points by the
French government, and now has few native speakers (probably less than 1
percent). Though supported by local governments to varying degrees, Scots
Gaelic also survives in relatively low rates, with estimated numbers of speak-
ers ranging from 1 to 2 percent of the Scottish population. Irish and Welsh
have the most robust numbers, with competence reported in 22 percent in
Wales and 37 percent in Ireland. Ireland is also an officially bilingual country,
with both English and Irish being recognized languages. Although there are
relatively few monolingual Irish speakers, everything that comes from the
national government must be bilingual, including road signs, museum story
boards, and government offices and documents.
However, language is not the only marker of Celtic identity. There is also a
more nebulous notion of a culturally Celtic identity. People who participate in
Celtic music festivals, take language classes, and participate in Celtic cultural
events may also consider themselves descendants of the Iron Age cultures.
This group may be somewhat larger, and include all those who were con-
quered by the Romans and/or remained in its geographic fringes in Europe.
Indeed, if archaeology and history are considered in the definition, we would
also have to include the Spanish and Portuguese (descendants of the
Celtiberians) and perhaps even some peoples in northern Italy, various parts
of northern Europe, and even some groups in modern Bulgaria and Turkey
(any descendants of the Galatians). As far as I know, the latter don’t typically
claim Celtic ancestry, but the former, particular those from Iberia, often do.
LECTURE FOURTEEN
© Clipart.com
A thatched-roof house in a modern neighborhood in Dublin, Ireland.
66
So as an ethnic identity, the modern Celtic one is a complicated phenome-
non. There really is no single way to determine actual Celtic ancestry, and
even having deep roots in Ireland or Wales isn’t automatically valid from a lit-
erally historical point of view. There are, for example, many Irish people
whose ancestors derive from the various groups who have invaded Ireland in
the past—the Vikings, the English—but who would be considered by most to
be solidly Irish. Yet in some sense they aren’t really, or even mostly,
descended from Iron Age, “Celtic” peoples. At the same time, I could also
imagine people in England whose ancestors didn’t intermarry with the
Romans and who managed to stay separate from the Anglo-Saxons and
Normans, and so in some sense are more directly descended from Iron Age
cultures than some people in Wales or Scotland. And yet the English are not
traditionally seen as Celtic. And this doesn’t even begin to factor in the com-
plexities of the archaeological and historical situation that we’ve talked about.
Technically speaking, no one outside of an ill-defined area in central and/or
western Europe was really a Celt. In this relatively narrow sense, both our
use of the term Celt for all Iron Age peoples and, by extension, all modern
claims of Celtic descent, are problematic at best.
This latter point was made in the 1990s in several books, most famously by
archaeologists Simon James and John Collis, and anthropologist Malcolm
Chapman. The argument made by them and others is basically the one that
has been made in this course—that, in ancient terms, the Celts as we think of
them never really existed. There was no unified, single culture that character-
ized all of the peoples of the Iron Age, and to that extent it is inaccurate to
use a single term, Celts, for them. At the same time, as long as we are very
careful to remind ourselves that we are never talking about a single culture,
occasionally substituting “Celtic” for “Iron Age” is perfectly reasonable. This
point seems relatively benign, and yet the firestorm that was ignited when
these books came out was truly remarkable. James, in particular, was in
essence accused of racism, and it was implied that his desire to “erase” the
Celts from history stemmed from his English nationality. At its most extreme,
their work was equated with modern genocide. Even some more recent
books that seek either to go back to the old ideas of ethnic homogeneity or
perhaps simply to make money on the popular image of the Celts, ridicule the
more nuanced and sophisticated approach to history and archaeology of the
Iron Age. It should be obvious that I think this is well over the top. It’s clear to
me that the people who actually lived in the Iron Age would have been totally
confused by our modern usage of “Celt,” and as an archaeologist, I see it as
my job to represent them in the most accurate way that I can.
But in some ways, this is irrelevant to modern identity. As an anthropological
concept, the idea of ethnicity is always somewhat fluid, open to interpretation,
and to some extent self-defined. It is sometimes difficult to reconcile our mod-
ern identifications of ourselves, which are very much based on the recent his-
tory of bounded nation-states, with what were certainly far more flexible
notions of identity in the past. And indeed, the idea that there is some kind of
“pure” ancestry for modern people is belied by pretty much every category of
evidence you can name. Humans simply don’t stay put for very long, and, to
paraphrase my physical anthropology professor from years ago: where peo-
ple go, genes flow. The same thing is true of culture, which never stays the
67
same for very long, changing because of outside influence, internal flux, and
the simple passage of time. This is true now, and it was true before, during,
and after the Iron Age as well.
Equally universal is the desire of human cultures to root themselves in their
past. And since the past is no longer directly accessible, there is always an
element of interpretation in our stories of the past. Is it valid for some of us
now to take these stories from the past and use them to fashion a modern
identity that is labeled “Celt”? Absolutely. Life, culture, these are constructed
through processes of selection from a vast array of possibilities. And the past,
as analyzed and reconstructed by archaeology and history, is one source of
such possibilities. As an archaeologist, I can’t ignore my understanding of the
evidence, and so my selection process requires that I take account of it. But
in the end, everyone fashions the identity that they find most satisfying.
Yes, there were people who called themselves Celts, a group of people who
lived in the Iron Age. We know something about the various cultures of that
period, we know something about how they interacted with the other cultures
to the south, we have some ideas about what other things they might have
called themselves, and we can loosely identify how far we can push all of
these observations. The Iron Age was a fascinating period of time, in which
many of the patterns of life that have survived into modern times originated.
While our knowledge of the peoples of that time grows greater with time,
there is also a lot we don’t know, and probably will never know. Call them
Iron Age cultures or Celtic cultures, they had a significant impact on the histo-
ry of Europe, Britain, and Ireland, and for that matter Greece and Rome.
Whatever we call them, I would argue that the important point is that we keep
looking for evidence so that we can continue to understand them to the best
of our abilities.
LECTURE FOURTEEN
68

Questions
1. How did similarities of language allow various cultures to be

labeled “Celtic”?
2. Other than language, what are the markers of Celtic identity?
Suggested Reading
Ball, Martin, ed. The Celtic Languages. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Chapman, Malcolm. The Celts: The Construction of a Myth. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1992.
James, Simon. Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
Articles of Interest
James, Simon. “Celts, Politics, and Motivation in Archaeology.” Antiquity,

72: 200–209, 1998.
Megaw, J.V.S., and M.R. Megaw. “Ancient Celts and Modern Ethnicity.”
Antiquity, 70: 175–81, 1996.
69
COURSE MATERIALS
Suggested Readings for This Course:
Other Books of Interest:
Ball, Martin, ed. The Celtic Languages. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Brunaux, Jean-Louis. The Celtic Gauls: Gods, Rites, and Sanctuaries. London: Seaby
Numismatic Publications, 1987.
Caesar, Julius. The Conquest of Gaul. Ed. Jane F. Gardner. Trans. S.A. Handford.
New York: Penguin, 1983.
Chadwick, Nora K. The Druids. Rev. ed. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000.
Chapman, Malcolm. The Celts: The Construction of a Myth. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1992.
Collis, John. The Celts: Origins, Myths, and Inventions. London: Tempus Publishing,
Limited, 2003.
Cunliffe, Barry. The Extraordinary Voyages of Pytheas the Greek: The Man Who
Discovered Britain. Rev. ed. New York: Walker & Company, 2002.
Freeman, Philip. Ireland and the Classical World. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2008.
———. The Philosopher and the Druids: A Journey Among the Ancient Celts. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
———. War, Women, and Druids: Eyewitness Reports and Early Accounts of the
Ancient Celts. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
Hingley, Richard, and Christina Unwin. Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen. London:
Hambledon & London, 2006.
James, Simon. Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
Jones, Sian. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and
Present. London: Routledge, 1997.
Piggott, Stuart. The Druids. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985.
Webster, Jane. “Sanctuaries and Sacred Places.” The Celtic World. Ed. Miranda
Green. London: Routledge, 1996.
———. The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and the
COURSE MATERIALS
Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoburg Forest. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2004.
———. Beyond Celts, Germans and Scythians: Archaeology and Identity in
Iron Age Europe. London: Duckworth, 2001.
These books are available online through www.modernscholar.com

or by calling Recorded Books at 1-800-636-3399.
70

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What is the overall topic of the course?

What is the overall topic of the course?

What are some of the major lectures covered in the course?

What are some of the major lectures covered in the course?

ICONS OF THE

Professor Susan A. Johnston

Recorded Books™ is a trademark of

Lecture content ©2008 by Susan A. Johnston

72008 by Recorded Books, LLC

Icons of the Iron Age:

About Your Professor...................................................................................................4

Lecture 1 The Creation of the Celts ......................................................................6

Lecture 2 The Documentary Sources ..................................................................10

Lecture 3 Caesar and Posidonius .......................................................................14

Lecture 4 Archaeology and Identity .....................................................................19

Lecture 5 Celtic Art ..............................................................................................24

Lecture 6 The Celtic Core....................................................................................29

Lecture 7 The Atlantic Celts ................................................................................34

Lecture 8 Eastern and Iberian Celts ....................................................................39

Lecture 9 Celtic Gender Roles ............................................................................43

Lecture 10 Celtic Religions ....................................................................................47

Lecture 11 Celtic Warfare ......................................................................................51

Lecture 12 The Roman Invasion ...........................................................................55

Lecture 13 The Occupied Celts .............................................................................60

Lecture 14 The Modern Celts ................................................................................65

Course Materials ........................................................................................................70

About Your Professor

Susan A. Johnston is a part-time faculty member in anthropology at the

Imagine an ancient “Celt” (and yes, it’s pronounced with a

belongs to historical documents, and only appears beginning perhaps as

Bronze Razor from the Hallstatt Culture

The Battersea Shield

1. How did Edward Lhuyd “create” the Celts?

Cunliffe, Barry. The Ancient Celts. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Other Books of Interest

Chapman, Malcolm. The Celts: The Construction of a Myth. London:

If the creation of the Celts as we know them is a product

each other or whether they were different enough to

An illustration from T.W. Rolleston’s Myths and Legends of the

1. Why is it important to take into consideration the idea of objective history

Cunliffe, Barry. The Ancient Celts. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Other Books of Interest

As we noted last time, the vast majority of people who

rarely, if ever, did.

Vercingetorix Surrenders to Caesar

1. Why is “travel writer” a more accurate description of Posidonius

Cunliffe, Barry. The Ancient Celts. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Other Books of Interest

In a fundamental way, it is likely that archaeology, in the

Iron Age Artifacts

that whole “burning village” thing I mentioned before.

1. What are the limitations of archaeology when studying the Celts?

Cunliffe, Barry. The Ancient Celts. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Other Books of Interest

Jones, Sian. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past

In one sense, as we have already noted, the Celts can be

Detail of a typical “Celtic knot” design from a grave marker in Ireland.

1. What are the characteristics of the La Tène art style?

Cunliffe, Barry. The Ancient Celts. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Other Books of Interest