Celtic Wales - Softcover

Aldhouse-Green, Miranda; Howell, Ray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1786830426 ISBN 13: 9781786830425

Verlag: University of Wales Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

This pocket guidebook tells the story of the very earliest days of Wales, tracing the development of its Celtic culture and peoples from the Iron Age through to its arrival as an independent nation in medieval times. Written to be accessible and interesting to the nonspecialist, the book draws on archaeology, literature, and history to explore a wide range of aspect of Celtic life in ancient Wales, including Druidism, war, farming, and even drinking habits. This new edition brings the book’s scholarship fully up to date and makes it available to a new generation of readers.
 

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Miranda Aldhouse-Green is emeritus professor of archaeology at Cardiff University. Ray Howell was professor of Welsh antiquity at University of Wales Newport and is currently a director of the Glamorgan Gwent Archaeological Trust.
 

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Celtic Wales

By Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Ray Howell

University of Wales Press

Copyright © 2017 Miranda Aldhouse-Green and Ray Howell
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78683-042-5

Contents

Acknowledgements, ix, 
List of illustrations, xi, 
Preface, xiii, 
Map of Wales, xiv, 
Prelude, 1, 
1 Celtic Wales in its European Context, 7, 
2 The First Welsh Celts: Iron Age Wales, 23, 
3 Celts and Romans, 51, 
4 The First Christians in Wales, 85, 
5 The Early Medieval Period, 105, 
6 Celtic Myths of Wales, 127, 
Further Reading, 151, 
Glossary, 159, 
Index, 163, 

CHAPTER 1

Celtic Wales in its European Context

Questions of 'Celticity'

It is inevitable that a book entitled Celtic Wales has to engage with the question of whether or not it is justifiable to use the term 'Celts' to describe certain ancient European communities. This problem is the subject of much lively current debate in academia, particularly among scholars of European Iron Age archaeology. Some prehistorians argue that it is invalid to conflate evidence for material culture, the comments of Classical observers on their 'barbarian' neighbours and early linguistic evidence to create a 'Celtic' past. However, it is occasionally possible to bring together language and material culture: a prime example of how this can happen is the discovery of a 'typical' La Tene sword from Port in Switzerland, which bears its maker's Celtic name KORISIOS stamped on it.

The polarization of current opinion on Celticity is exemplified by the views of John Collis and Simon James, on the one hand, who vigorously challenge the validity of the term 'Celtic' as a means of labelling the later prehistoric European past, and of Vincent and Ruth Megaw and Barry Cunliffe, on the other, who argue in favour of 'Celts' and 'Celtic' as useful descriptors for a loosely knit but, in some ways, coherent group of ancient communities. Those opposed to this use of 'Celtic' argue their case on several fronts. They claim that the concept of Celticity is largely a construct of the early modern period in western Europe; they also protest that, as an ethnic label, the term 'Celtic' has the potential to be hijacked as a means of exclusive, separatist and, ultimately, dangerously nationalistic political determination. They also see it as imposing a misleading homogeneity on a diverse range of Iron Age cultures, and, moreover, they correctly point out that the use of the 'Celtic' label for ancient Britain is particularly problematical since it was never so used in antiquity. Caesar, for example, spoke of Britanni, not Galli or Celtae for the inhabitants of Britain in the mid-first century BC, although he also admits to the close connections between Gaul and at least the south-east of Britain.

Those in favour of using 'Celtic' for the classification of material culture argue that it is a term employed widely by ancient writers (such as Herodotus, Caesar, Polybius, Pausanias and Strabo) to describe the peoples of Gaul and Central Europe. In addition, pro-Celticists perceive the presence of sufficient commonality in aspects of Iron Age European material culture – art is perhaps the best example – to justify the use of a single identifier for this final phase of European prehistory. Furthermore, these recurrent elements in material culture seem to correlate geographically – to an extent – with evidence (from place-names, for instance) for the distribution of Celtic languages. The pro-Celtic scholars would not, for one moment, attempt to equate the Celtic labelling of archaeological communities with acknowledgements of ethnicity: such an equation would, indeed, be totally unjustifiable; ethnicity is a special problem which it is, arguably, impossible to verify by archaeological means. Followers of Celtic studies are acutely aware that groups of disparate evidence – language, material culture and the testimony of Classical writers – are not coterminous and must never be treated as though they are.

The position of the present authors on Celticity is somewhat of a middle way between two extremes. We fully accept that there are dangers is using a single term to label a chronologically and culturally diverse set of communities living in Europe at the time of the Roman conquest, and for half a millennium beforehand. Huge diversities between regions were clearly present: within Britain alone, during the first millennium BC, considerable differences in material culture between – say – Wales and south-eastern England and, indeed, between north, west and south Wales can be discerned. On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore or deny the existence of recurrent idiosyncracies of material culture that present themselves over huge areas of temperate Iron Age Europe. These 'markers' of commonality include coins, torcs (neckrings), the prominence given to the human head (in terms of both ritual treatment and imagery), the aquatic deposition of prestigious – frequently martial – objects and, above all, motifs in (La Tene) art, mainly on metalwork, including such elements – repeated over time and space – as leaf-crowns, triskeles, yin-yangs, fantastic animals and human heads. Such common features of material culture must be explicable in terms of close relationships, of whatever kind, between large tracts of Europe. Moreover, many of these 'markers' continue to feature during and after the Roman occupation, suggesting that the links survived this cultural disruption imposed by Roman imperial colonialism.

One crucial issue which, as mentioned briefly above, it is impossible to resolve is the question of self-determination. How far, if at all, did 'Celts' recognize themselves as part of a wide network of cognate communities and who, if anybody, identified themselves as Celts in the ancient world? Since the Iron Age communities in question were, to all intents and purposes, non-literate, we cannot gain insight into their self-identification. All we have is the literature of contemporary observers from the Mediterranean world, who identified certain peoples living to their north and west as Keltoi, Celtae, Galli or Galatae and – in Britain – as Britanni. So we cannot know to what extent these labels were simply external impositions or were meaningful to these people themselves. We do not encounter the same problem with the Greeks and Romans since authors belonging to Greece and Rome clearly so identify themselves and their fellow citizens. However, in voicing difficulties about using such a blanket term as 'Celtic' to describe divergent communities, it should be remembered that Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, used the term 'Greek' (as do Classicists today) to describe vigorously independent city-states whose citizens (despite a common language) thought of themselves primarily as Athenians, Spartans or Corinthians rather than as Greeks. Similarly, there seems no difficulty about using the cultural label 'Roman' to identify peoples living in regions as widely separated as Spain and the Rhineland, Britain and North Africa, despite obvious cultural differences. The generic term 'Celtic' might be equally valid to describe divergent groups with certain characteristics in common, particularly if they shared sufficient cultural features to cause their Mediterranean neighbours to bestow on them a common identifier.

Avoidance of the term 'Celtic' to describe Iron Age European communities – despite the problems of its use – causes its...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Wales Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1786830426
• ISBN 13: 9781786830425
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 174
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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