well, go off-line for a couple of months, and what do you find when you
catch up with the archives but a whole series of threads about 'celts'.
but blimey, i though this one had died a death decades ago:
>and the people that we can identify confidently as Celts rode westward
>during the late Hallstatt. (john hooker, 10 may)
even when i was writing my dphil 20 years ago (on aspects of late hallstatt
and early la tene in central and western europe) the concept of westward
riding horsemen bringing 'celts' to central europe was under severe
criticism by many, 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...).
it would take a long and no doubt boring email to deconstruct this short
assertion, so i'll try to confine my comments to a few questions:
how would you 'identify' a celt - what do you mean by 'celt' in this
context? someone who spoke a 'celtic' language? absolutely no evidence for
this in the 8-7th centuries bc
a bearer of 'celtic culture'? what would this mean? where is this in the
archaeology? how do you explain continuity in the archaeological record
both during the late hallstatt period and through into la tene? (these
period/'culture' divisions are, of course, earlier archaeological constructs
and are only used as shorthand in this context)
a bearer of items decorated with 'celtic art'? where from? and more
crucially, when?
where are these 'celtic' horseriders in the archaeological record? how many
of them are there? where do you think they came from? does the archaeology
of where you think they came from relate at all to the archaeology of
hallstatt europe? you cannot surely be thinking that the so-called
'thraco-cimmerian' horse-bits found in a proportionately very small number
of graves in restricted areas of central europe represent a 'people' who are
to be identified confidently as 'celts'?
even those of our colleagues in central & western europe who have been loth
to give up westward-riding horsemen as an agent and/or explanation of a
'culture change' which is at best sporadic and limited to one or two
specific types (and even here the area of 'origin' is either unidentified or
is very different for different items - there are far better explanations
for changes in these items than horsemen riding westward), have recognised
that there is a serious problem about this explanation when faced with
undoubted continuity of populations and material culture in much of europe
as revealed by the archaeological record (viz the comments of both kruta and
frey in their contributions to the 'i celti' catalogue/book - they recognise
it but duck out of addressing it).
of course the idea of some mythical land in the east whence 'celts' came
riding and bringing 'celtic civilisation' to europe may be attractive to
those who are still wedded to 'ex oriente lux'; but it's 1999, we are
dealing with archaeological data not origin myths (except as an interesting
topic for debate!), and the least we can do is to build our interpretations
on a close understanding of the nature of those data. we will all have
different interpretations depending on the theoretical paradigms within
which we construct them, but it is hard to sustain interpretations which
ignore or distort the archaeological record.
apologies - it was long and probably boring after all!
sara
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