Celtic Wales

Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Ray Howell

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786830449
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

Celtic Wales is about the beginnings of Wales and how the period from the Iron Age to medieval times helped shape and define the modern nation of Wales. Early Wales has a spectacular archaeological, literary and mythical heritage. This book uses archaeology and early historical documents to discuss all aspects of early Welsh society, from war to farming and from drinking habits to Druids.

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 Tène 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.

Romancing the Celts

The ‘myths of Celticity’ have been nourished by the early modern romanticism that has so heavily overlain the concept of ‘Celts’, with its largely spurious notions of continuity from remote antiquity to the present. Such constructions are well illustrated by the activities of Iolo Morganwg who, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, created a ‘pedigree’ of Celtic Welsh bardism stretching from his day back to pre-Roman times, and by the eighteenth-century antiquarian William Stukeley who, in his later years, saw himself as the reincarnation of a mythical ancient Gaulish druid, Chyndonax.

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 Tène) 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 own difficulties which can be seen as at least as serious. Perhaps the most obvious stumbling-block lies in finding an alternative. Opponents of ‘Celticism’ might argue that no alternative is needed, but that answer is not, to our minds, satisfactory. Certain scholars favour the term ‘barbarian Europe’ to describe communities beyond the Mediterranean littoral. We would protest that such a term is, at best, meaningless and, at worst, unacceptably pejorative. Others suggest using the term ‘La Tène’, since the Swiss Iron Age lake-shore site has given its name to a distinctive group of artefacts and art-styles found widely within temperate Europe from the fifth century BC to the Roman conquest and beyond. But this label is equally problematical, both because it is a totally artificial, modern, label and because it can only accurately describe discrete forms of metalwork and art which are by no means universally distributed. Despite its problems, the use of the term ‘Celtic’ at least has the advantage of being an ancient term used by literate peoples of antiquity to describe their contemporary neighbours. Caesar begins his De Bello Gallico by commenting of the peoples of Gallia Comata, ‘All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls, the third’. Purists would argue that – sensu stricto – the term ‘Celts’ should, therefore, only be used to identify people living in central Gaul, but Caesar is not our only literary source for the term, and other ancient writers use it much less specifically. We would argue that, as long as the Celtic nomenclature is specifically and precisely defined, it remains a convenient descriptor for certain past communities living north of the Classical world, even if it is as modern and artificial as ‘Bronze Age’ or ‘Iron Age’.

Celticity and language

It is language, above all, that has led to the construction of linkages between the Celts of antiquity and the Celtic-speaking areas of modern Europe. There is a sense in which such a claim has some validity, inasmuch as a range of scattered inscriptions written in ancient languages that are unequivocally Celtic, and dating as early as the fourth century BC, are recorded from Iberia, Gaul, North Italy and Galatia (part of modern Turkey). Such epigraphic evidence clearly demonstrates the presence of a wide range of Celtic speakers in antiquity.

It was a Welshman, Edward Lhuyd who, in his Archaeologia Britannica of 1709 and his fellow linguist Paul-Yves Pezron in 1703, in his Antiquité de la nation, et de langue des Celtes, autrement

appellés Gaulois, who put forward the notion of shared Celtic linguistic (and ethnic) identity among the non-English Britons, Irish and Bretons, and grouped what is undoubtedly a family of related languages under the ‘Celtic’ umbrella. What is problematical is any attempt at making direct and precise correlations between the material culture of Iron Age Europe, the Celtic-speaking regions of the past and the present-day Celtic countries or regions. If the term ‘Celtic’ is admissible as a label for European antiquity, then it is clearly a different ‘Celtic’ from that used to identify languages. The linguistic term ‘Celtic’ – which describes the cognate languages of Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Irish, Breton, Cornish and Manx – must, therefore, not be confused either with the archaeological evidence for shared traits in Iron Age European material culture or with the ethnic identification of ancient Celts by writers of the Classical world. One reason why the anti-Celt lobby is so vociferous is that such confusion and conflation has taken place all too regularly, in a manner which is academically unacceptable.

Finally, we have to take cognizance of present-day Celtic self-identification. Even supposing that the archaeological Celts were to be nothing more than a label imposed on the past by modern archaeo-historians, it is none the less the case that today Celtic self-identification is very real for millions of people living on the western periphery of Europe (in Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Brittany and Galicia). However spurious or mythical the foundations of ‘Celts’ and ‘Celticity’, it is necessary to be aware that latter-day Celts have a strong sense of unity, not only in terms of language but also in music, literature and independence from the powerful nation states of England, France and Spain.

Geography, chronology and culture

In attempting to identify a remote ‘Celtic’ past, it is necessary to consider the evidence from archaeology, linguistics and contemporary literature. Even when combined, these three sources of information can do no more than produce a fragmentary, elusive and distorted picture and one which has to be regarded with a degree of scepticism.

In terms of the archaeological evidence, the emergence of a Celtic material culture in temperate Europe coincides – broadly speaking – with the introduction of iron technology and the use of iron for functional objects (particularly those requiring a hard edge), such as swords, spears and knives. The Continental Iron Age has been divided by archaeologists into two main phases, each named after a ‘type-site’ (a findspot for a large assemblage of diagnostically distinctive material). The first phase, the Hallstatt Iron Age (c. 750–500 BC), derives its title from a small lakeside village in Austria, which was the centre of a thriving salt-mining industry during the first millennium BC. Here, at Hallstatt, a huge cemetery has been excavated, containing a wide variety of grave-goods, including pottery, weapons and jewellery. The archaeological classificatory labels for the Hallstatt period follow the chronology of the cemetery, which spans the later Bronze Age (Hallstatt A and B) and the earlier Iron Age (Hallstatt C and D). Although very little true Continental Hallstatt material has been found in Britain, the Welsh site of Llyn Fawr, with its Hallstatt C-type iron sword together with other exotic metalwork (see chapter 2) of the period from the eighth-seventh century BC, has produced some of the earliest Iron Age artefacts from Britain.

We know most about the Hallstatt Iron Age from the Continental graves of the wealthy elite, who made their fortunes from salt-trading and the control of other mineral resources such as copper and tin. Some tombs, particularly in Baden-Württemberg, southern Germany, comprised great mounds covering wooden mortuary enclosures containing the inhumed bodies of the deceased. Tomb-furniture might include a four-wheeled wagon or hearse on which the body was conveyed to the grave, together with all the paraphernalia the dead person might require in the afterlife.

The tombs of the wealthy demonstrate that the elite were essentially a warrior-aristocracy, for whom trading, riding, fighting and feasting were favoured occupations. The contents of these graves are also testimony to close trading (or gift-exchange) links with the Classical world. That women, as well as men, could enjoy high rank is shown, for instance, by the grave-mound at Hohmichele in Germany, where a couple were interred side by side, each furnished with rich grave-goods, including Chinese silk. Another rich Hallstatt burial, at Vix in Burgundy, has long been accepted as that of a woman, although some scholars are now questioning the gender-identity of the body entombed there. If it is a female grave, it is of particular interest because the Vix burial may be that of the chief who ruled at the nearby stronghold of Mont Lassois. A number of fortified high-status centres, or hillforts, of this period are known, perhaps the best documented being the Heuneberg in Germany. But knowledge of the settlements inhabited by ordinary people is sadly deficient, although the well-preserved organic remains of wood-built ‘lake-villages’ are recorded, for example at the Federsee in Germany.

The golden chieftain

One especially lavish burial, from Hochdorf, near Stuttgart (dated to. 530 BC) contained the body of a ‘chieftain’, about forty years old, lying on a splendidly ornamental bronze couch, and equipped with archery and fishing equipment, a gold-decorated dagger, gold jewellery and even gold-embellished shoes. At his feet was a large sheet-bronze cauldron, imported from the Greek world, that had been filled with 400 litres of a honey-based liquor; hanging on the walls of the tomb-chamber were nine drinking-horns and on the wheeled bier was a nine-piece dinner service.

La Tène metalwork has been identified over a very broad sweep of Europe: from Ireland to the Carpathians and from Scotland to Italy. Apart from specific weapon-types, the most striking characteristic is an idiosyncratic, highly distinctive art, decorating functional and ornamental objects (primarily but by no means solely of metal) which, although derived ultimately from vegetal, faunal and anthropomorphic themes, and despite undoubted inspiration from the Classical world, was driven by an individualistic and innovative delight in schematism, abstraction, ambiguity and fantasy. Thus, horned, bulbous-eyed human faces peer from sinuously ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Map of Wales
• Prelude
• 1: Celtic Wales in its European Context
• 2: The First Welsh Celts: Iron Age Wales
• 3: Celts and Romans
• 4: The First Christians in Wales
• 5: The Early Medieval Period
• 6: Celtic Myths of Wales
• Further Reading
• Glossary