john

while such a personally offensive mailing perhaps doesn't merit a reply, i
would like to comment on some of your statements and to continue the
archaeological side of this debate in the spirit of academic enquiry.  so
here goes:

>
>Perhaps you are less informed than you thought.

well, i hope not...teaching, researching, reading, writing about this period
(the early iron age in europe) is my job.  i would hope that i am as
informed as most in this particular field - otherwise i wouldn't have a leg
to stand on in this debate.  it's my specialist area, just as yours is
numismatics, and i wouldn't presume to question your work on the basis of my
imperfect knowledge of your field.  

>I'm not surprised -- it was the horses that brought the Celts.
>Seriously, twenty years ago there was far less attention paid to
>collaborative disciplines such as mythology, iconography, careful
>art historical analysis, literature, lore, psychology and more. There
>were fewer artifacts and coins, as metal detectors were scarcer and
>private collector/scholars were almost non-existent in this subject.

this assumes that i (and others) have done nothing in 20 years - a rather
provocative assumption.  the point i made was that 20 years ago the idea
that 'celtic riders' from the east were the agents of change in some parts
of the archaeological record, ie that this was an *explanation* of culture
change was *already* under debate - and the debate has intensified in the 20
intervening years, not stopped dead in its tracks.  there are of course no
indigenous coins in hallstatt europe, but there has never been a shortage of
other artefacts  (certainly in their millions from the whole of europe -
statistically a significant database).  since the 19th century there has
also been no shortage of private collectors in europe, and many scholars of
the early iron age were certainly private, in the sense that they were not
employed in academic or public institutions.  i will admit that the
relevance of psychology to the hallstatt period has passed me by, however -
i've clearly missed something major here.  please let me have refs.   

 but I soon realized that they had been diminished by a number
>of British archaeologists who felt the need to define their culture
>and heritage. 

i don't understand this - do you mean english?  british and english are
different - and british *nationality* in its post-union form would *include*
a number of different ethnic identities - from afro-caribbean and
bangladeshi to those of modern celtic peoples and the english.  as a person
of scottish/irish ancestry i certainly don't 'feel the need' to define a
'british' culture and 'heritage' for myself, though the construction of
'britishness' as an idea is, of course, also academically interesting. 

>This
>negates those people who identify themselves as being Celtic and is
>contra to the UN charter on genocide. Britain has a very long history
>of genocide when it comes to Celtic peoples, and to condone this
>odious statement would also violate that UN charter.

this implies that i'm a genocidal racist by my questioning of the definition
of the word 'celtic' in the hallstatt period, which i find extremely
offensive.  because i now live in england, you should not make the
assumption that i'm 'english' or identify myself as 'british'.  in fact (see
above) i identify with a scottish/irish - a 'celtic', if you like, in modern
parlance - ethnicity; however, this doesn't stop me having an intellectual
interest in understanding *how* ideas of 'celtic' identity have come about
and developed in the last two centuries, and how archaeology has been used
in the construction of those identities. this is not racist or genocidal,
just as it is not racist for english or french scholars to trace the history
and development of notions of english or french identity.  


>When I examined some of the evidence, especially the selective
>citations from classical writers, I realized that I was seeing a
>rather typical (and unimaginative) attempt at disinformation.

a touch of the conspiracy theory here?  none of the scholars currently
writing about classical sources for celts can i think be *fairly* accused of
this.  

>
>> and the archaeological data available then and collected
>> since simply doesn't support an influx of a new 'people' at this time, let
>> alone a single person who could be "confidently identified" as a 'celt'
>> (whatever that means...).
>
>This is why I mentioned my previous experience. I hope that you are
>parroting something that you heard, 

parroting things one has heard is hardly the way most scholars do research,
and certainly not the way i work


because there are two rather
>disturbing signals in that statement. The first is the use of the "no
>evidence to support" chestnut. We used this thirty years ago, but a
>few yellow journalists of the tabloid variety still try it out once in
>a while. No scientist would ever use a fact of no evidence to
>establish anything. It is not only reprehensible, but it is a logical
>fallacy. Its only use today (that I am aware of) is for
>disinformation, but better techniques are more commonly used. 

this is a distortion or misunderstanding of the nature of evidence and of
scientific enquiry.  of course one of the first lessons one teaches
archaeology students is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
however, you can see the logical problems which ensue if a scientist of any
type tries to construct a theory based on no evidence at all.  if there is
no evidence to support a theory, then how can you proceed to elaborate it
let alone evaluate it?  if a scientist were to submit a paper to 'nature'
saying that humans were descended from ostriches, but that s/he had no
evidence to support this theory, s/he would quite rightly be considered a
complete nutter. similarly, the guy who once wrote to stuart piggott
outlining his theory that salisbury plain had been one giant elephant stable
in the bronze age, that the sarsens were cut out of the compacted floor of
that stable, and that the dagger carving was in fact not a carving but was
the actual impression of a dagger trampled into the stable floor by an
elephant, did have something of a hole blown in his theory by not being able
to produce any evidence to support the presence of large herds of elephants
in wiltshire in 1600 bc. 

in the case of my message, i simply said that there was no evidence of
riders from the east speaking a 'celtic' language in hallstatt europe.   i
was not seeking to establish anything but an understanding of your
definition of 'celts' and 'celtic' in the context of early iron age europe.
this is also the point of my comment:
> "celt" (whatever that means...).

i'm trying to establish what you mean by celts - how do you identify people
'confidently' as celtic in the hallstatt period?  if it's not by their
language, then it must be by something else.  what is this something else?

i also said that there was no evidence to support the theory of an influx of
new people from the east in hallstatt europe, though the few graves which i
assume you are using to give presence to these riders might show the
movement of a few individuals - we can say no more than that, and this
particular evidence could be (and has been) just as easily interpreted in
other ways.  future dna work might well help us to define individual,
small-scale or large-scale movements, which would be very interesting,
especially as it would imply, if on any scale, the immediate adoption of
indigenous european material culture.  but until we have such evidence, we
have to work with such data as we have.   despite your assertion that
archaeology is not a science, archaeologists do/should operate in a
scientific manner (though if you think that archaeology is not a science,
then accusing me of being 'unscientific' is in itself illogical within the
context of your argument...).  

 I know of more than
>fifty thousand Celtic coins from the region, though. So the "no
>evidence" nonsense is exploded.

not so, because you stated:

>people that we can identify confidently as Celts rode westward during the
late Hallstatt

and it's the *evidence* for this that i'm trying to get at - not 50,000
coins in brittany several hundred years later, which of course is not
evidence which  supports the above statement.  but if you are implying that
there is archaeological evidence for a connection between riders from the
east in hallstatt europe and breton celtic coinage, then i'd be very
interested to see your data.

sara 


 




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