‘A Wave of Barbarians …’

Abstract

I have suggested that there is no necessary relationship between the name given to a people, the archaeological or cultural evidence, the linguistic evidence, and the flesh and blood. It is often argued that the spread of the archaeologically defined culture styles across Europe is accompanied by a spread of place-name elements of a Celtic kind. There is a serious danger of circularity here, however, in that an archaeological feature found in a place with a Celtic name will be called Celtic on that account; its presence elsewhere can then be used as evidence of the ‘Celtic’ nature of the local place-names, and so on. Much argument of this kind has gone on, and there is, of course, no ultimate tribunal. Let it be, however, that a new language — a Celtic language — and a new culture — a Celtic culture — spread across large parts of Europe together during the first millennium bc. What can we then say about the people?