Clarke ( 1968) was very clear that different data categories (material culture types, language, aDNA) each diverge in the scale of their reach and overlap and are not coherent signatures of “culture.” It is hard to understand how this fundamental learning on the nature of our data has been lost by some of our most senior archaeologists. Broad similarities in material culture over large geographical areas do not make those groups the same ideas travel further than people. The “spread” is an artifact of hindsight and exists only through the medium of our own study it does not in any real sense belong to the past. It is clear that these large-scale distributions represent fossilized and artificial social datasets over deep time. Here, I follow Collis ( 1996) and Feinman and Neitzel ( 2020) in explicitly rejecting notions of cultures and attempts to determine ethnicity that seek to elucidate large-scale, bounded entities in the archaeological material. The method and ethics of such work, where material culture distributions, or language, or aDNA is mapped onto ideas of ethnicity or nation-states/empire/culture is not only methodologically unsound, it is anachronistic and politically dangerous (Booth 2019 Collis 2019 Furholt 2018 Hakenbeck 2019 Heyd 2017 Saini 2019). Unfortunately, this old thinking on “cultures” has also reemerged in European Bronze Age studies, where the scientific term “population replacement”-innocent enough in research with aDNA datasets-has been applied culturally, leading to simplistic narratives of Beaker/Yamnaya invasion and intercultural violence. Despite archaeological thinking moving against this early 20th century practice, both in the 1950s–1960s and again in the 1980s (see below), mainstream scholarship continued to accept “Celt” in its early first millennium AD romantic state to fit the final linguistic spread. This historicist narrative of “the Celts” has then been linked to an equally fossilized Celtic linguistics that operates at a similar geographical scale, which has led to the retention of outdated notions of cultural diffusionism (see Karl 2012). Instead, on the basis of broad-brush similarities in material culture, a pan-European “Celtic culture” continues to be imagined across Europe, acting historically via events-in-time mentioned in the texts (e.g., Cunliffe 2019a Cunliffe and Koch 2012, 2013 Hornblower et al. The result is construction of a static, romantic notion of “Celtic society” operating independently of regional-level archaeologies. Previous narratives on the Celts (singular) see a mixing together of classical ideas on “Celts” from across 1000 years (see Stopford 1987).
![celtic warlike celtic warlike](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/b9/5c/a5/b95ca575a2dd0d142353a2d4d378f989.jpg)
Our main setback has been a reading of the historical sources that lacks temporal context.
![celtic warlike celtic warlike](https://www.grunge.com/img/gallery/queen-boudica-the-crazy-life-and-death-of-the-celtic-warrior-queen/boudica-was-great-for-filmmakers-1576699447.jpg)
For this author, however, the problem lies only in how we have approached the evidence. The origin of “the Celts” is a problem that has eluded resolution for over 150 years, as “impossible” and “lost in the mists of time” (Chadwick 1971 Duval 1997 Karl 2012 Pauli 1980). First, I must set out the inherited problem. My aim is to more closely define what was meant in those first uses of the word “Celt,” which should assist in understanding its continued use through time. To this end, I use a large dataset and new method to produce an evidence-based narrative, one that foregrounds chronology, regional archaeological traditions, and the integration of evidence from contemporary historical texts. My primary aim is to further refine our knowledge of the historical Celts (Kελτoí, Keltoi)-their origins, the nature of their society (plural), and social change (between 700 and 300 BC). I do touch briefly on “Celtic” language, where the archaeology allows it, and I hope that this work, in combining archaeology and historical texts, will assist those interested in Celtic linguistics. I do not address modern “Celtic” identity (see Collis 2017 James 1999), nor do I consider “Celts” of the early medieval period (papers in Karl and Stifter 2007)-each has relatively little to do with the task of understanding the people of Iron Age Europe.
![celtic warlike celtic warlike](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c6/65/ad/c665ad0ed2789b3ee5c68665147e54a8.jpg)
![celtic warlike celtic warlike](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8f/b6/ec/8fb6ecd9116a1ab470c562c987224ba8.jpg)
A good place to begin is to state what this paper on Iron Age “Celts” does not do.