The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (5 page)

A picture thus comes into focus of the ‘Anglo-Saxon invasions’ as less of a replacement and much more akin to the later Norman conquest: that of battles for dominance between various chieftains, all of ultimately Norse origin. Frisian, Jute, Angle, Saxon, Norman: each invader shared much culturally and, except in the last case, linguistically with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.

So, how far back in time can we trace the linguistic-genetic links across the North Sea? Or to put this question another way, for how long have the English been different from their Atlantic Celtic neighbours to the west in Wales, Ireland and Cornwall, and to the north in Scotland? The cultural record indicates that the continuous trade relationship between England and the nearby Continent carried on in parallel with substantial incoming gene flow back well over 5,000 years before the ‘Saxon Advent’. The line separating the English from the rest of the Isles is repeated in different expressions of the cycles of glorious artistic and funerary traditions over the same period. Examples are trade networks of various kinds, distribution of megaliths and passage graves and portal tombs, pottery beakers and their exclusive trade networks, and gold torcs.

This story of two sets of Britons has echoes back in the introduction of farming – which, incidentally, arrived first in Ireland. The spread of farming to the western British Isles by the Mediterran ean route, as mentioned above, contrasts with a parallel but separ ate spread into north-west mainland Europe up the Danube from the Black Sea, arriving in the Netherlands by 7,300 years ago. The north-westerly Neolithic cultural expansion was hallmarked by the spread of another type of pottery, known as
Linearbandkeramik
. From archaeological evidence,
northern Neolithic traditions, although not
Linearbandkeramik
, may have spread across the North Sea to Norfolk and Cambridge by 6,200 years ago (see
Chapter 5
), thus possibly taking the roots of English separate identity back over 6,000 years.

Academe is naturally conservative. Added to this, the excesses of Nazi ‘racial anthropology’ shocked scholars elsewhere into moving towards extremes of political correctness. Migrations became equated with racial ‘Aryan invasions’. As a consequence, anything that sails too close to overt ‘migrationism’ has been frowned upon in English archaeology for the past fifty years. Likewise, Colin Renfrew, in his revolutionary popular book on Indo-European origins,
Archaeology and Language
, peppers his essentially migrationist message with qualifications and caveats against such practice.

As explained above, I strongly endorse such caution about seeing migrations where there is evidence only for cultural spread. I also argue in favour of the conservative nature of prehistoric gene flow in both of my books on genetic trails (
Eden in the East
and
Out of Eden
). Again, in this book, I argue that those who arrived first on the physical landscape tend to dominate the modern genetic one. But this does not mean ignoring genetic evidence for real migrations when it is there. Three aspects are special about the British story. First, the British Isles were cleared of people after the last Ice Age, thus avoiding the complication of a Palaeolithic gene pool. Second, and uniquely for such a small region in Europe, there is a deep genetic line dividing England from the rest of the British Isles. Third, the separate genetic source regions for the English and the Atlantic
Celts are clear and distinct, and correspond to specific interpretations of the cultural evidence.

In the spirit of Caesar, I have divided this book into three parts, the first and last deal with Celts and Anglo-Saxons mainly, since they dominate modern ethic perceptions in these isles. The second part contains the genetic meat of our real origins from the Ice Age to the Iron Age. Some may wish to start there first.

Most people living in the British Isles today believe that until the ancestors of the English arrived, the aboriginal population of these isles were Celts. This concept underlies current British ethnic perceptions. Yet no Roman or Greek author ever explicitly referred to the British or Irish as Celtic or Celtic-speaking. Is the Celtic story a myth and if not, how much of it is true? Who were the Celts?

Since how we view Celtic cultures today is probably most important for how we view them in the future, we should start with current perceptions. Nearly all adults in the British Isles
will at least have heard of the terms ‘Celts’ and ‘Celtic’, and will have some opinion. Many of those living in non-English parts of the British Isles probably even recognize one another’s descriptions of the terms, but opinions on their meaning will vary.

I recall vague descriptions from my own reading: ‘A once great people, with no written history, speaking distinctive archaic tongues, now beaten back to their last strongholds in the western parts of the British Isles; brave, clannish, warlike, disunited, makers of fine jewellery and beautifully decorated weapons; poetic but illiterate creators of some of the most haunting oral European legends of magic, bravery and tragedy’ (Plates 1–3). Other random images that might spring to mind are of the French cartoon characters Asterix and Obelix (whose only fear was the sky falling on their head), of football clubs and T-shirts, or perhaps references to Ireland and faeries, as in Yeats’s
Celtic Twilight
.
¹

How has this picture been built up over the years? In its 1913 edition, Webster’s dictionary confirmed these stereotypes, defining ‘Celt’ thus:

Celt
…
n
. [L.
Celtae
, Gr.
Keltoi
…] One of an ancient race of people, who formerly inhabited a great part of Central and Western Europe, and whose descendants at the present day occupy Ireland, Wales, the Highlands of Scotland, and the northern shores of France.

This was a definite improvement in tone on the entry to the 1828 edition of Webster’s, which dismisses Celts as ‘One of the primitive inhabitants of the South of Europe.’ But note the later record contains an interesting change of European territory, reflecting a nineteenth-century move in archaeological
perception towards a Celtic homeland in Central Europe. Not everyone sees Celts that way today, and not everyone defined them so specifically in the past. The Greeks and Romans, respectively, used the terms
Keltoi
and
Celtae
, and were, after all, contemporaries of the people
they
called Celts; but they never mentioned any connection with the British Isles.

Language is regarded as extremely important in modern perceptions of Celtic identity and ethnicity. One linguist, Myles Dillon, even insisted that language is
the
test;
²
and that the only agreed definition of Celts should be people who spoke Celtic dialects. By ‘Celtic’ he presumably meant the branch of Indo-European languages called Celtic by modern linguists. This view is at odds with classical descriptions of Celts, which were not primarily based on language, so it does not seem helpful. After all, the ancients, not linguists, introduced the term ‘Celt’.

Classical commentators, following the excellent example of the first known historian, Herodotus, generally gave quite detailed and broad-based accounts of regional populations, many of which are still of great interest. Unfortunately for the preoccupations of modern archaeologists, they paid rather little attention to language. Also, as we shall see, Herodotus and those who followed him were less than specific or consistent about whom they meant by ‘the Celts’, let alone what language they spoke. This means that there is potential for doubt as to whether the modern Celtic languages have any connection at all with classical Celts, let alone the sort of identity that is claimed today. So it is rather important to be sure that there is no confusion about what is meant by the term ‘Celtic’. Needless to say, confusion is just what has happened.

The only parts of Europe that now speak what modern linguists call ‘Celtic languages’ are the British Isles and Brittany. This creates difficulties in linking those languages with the putative origins of Celtic culture in Austria and southern Germany, an area of Central Europe that is German-speaking today. As we shall see, there is clear evidence for the presence of Celtic tongues in ancient times in parts of France, northern Italy and Spain (i.e. in south and south-west Europe), but during Roman times they were largely replaced by local hybrid Romance languages – French, Italian and Spanish. There is no such evidence for Celtic languages ever having been spoken in a ‘Celtic homeland’ in Central Europe, and therefore no reason to argue that Romance languages replaced them there. So if prehistorians and linguists of the last 150 years wanted to find a convincing homeland for Celtic languages, why on earth were they looking in Central rather than south-west Europe? The short answer is that Herodotus, in his identification of the geographical location of the
Keltoi
, mistakenly thought that the Danube rose somewhere near the Pyrenees rather than in Germany (but more of that below).

Some archaeologists have, over the last couple of decades, become quite red-faced about the whole issue of Celts. They warn against the dangers of
racial migrationism
and point to the lack of archaeological evidence for mass migrations into the British Isles during the Iron Age. They further question the relevance and meaning of Celtic ethnicity. Their reasoning is that whatever the term ‘Celt’ may have meant to the ancients, it was not based on a clearly defined language group and thus does not amount to an adequate ethnic description.
³
Furthermore, they
argue that classical Celts bear little relation to the modern imagined picture of the origins of Atlantic coastal Celts. Following this argument through, they give the modern construct of the romantic Celtic story the mantle of a myth with the apparent intention, in one case, of invalidating any use of the word.
⁴

There are two problems with this attack on the commonly used words ‘Celt’ and ‘Celtic’. First, such sceptic arguments will not make the words go away or stop being used. Classical authors used the terms for a thousand years. Second, the term ‘ethnicity’ has no better claim than ‘Celtic’ to a clearly defined usage. While dictionaries still conservatively define ‘ethnicity’ with reference to ‘race’ and language, anthropologists have driven current usage much more towards softer concepts of perception, affiliation and self-identification. A common mother-tongue is not a prerequisite for this.

Debunking the myth of the Central European Celtic linguistic and cultural homeland is a long overdue task, but we should not lose the baby with the bathwater, and it is important to separate the fallacy of the ‘Celtic homeland’ from the possibility that the ‘Celtic’ language story may still have something to tell us. To make that differentiation, we have to look at the evidence for the origins of Celtic culture and of modern Celtic languages in rather more depth.
^*

In their debunking of the modern Celtic story, archaeologists such as Simon James (in
The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention
) seem to blame early linguists for the persistence of logical errors in the Celtic myth.
⁵
I think this is unfair: they should really be blaming recent generations of their own profession for constructing the myth of a Celtic Iron Age homeland in Central Europe.

The person whose name features most prominently in these Celto-sceptic polemics died a long time ago and was neither a trained linguist nor an archaeologist. He belonged to a breed of general scholar that has all but died out in the last hundred years. He was an antiquarian named Edward Lhuyd who lived in Oxford in the early eighteenth century, and was keeper of one of the oldest museums of all, the Ashmolean. Lhuyd could also be called other names, although such labels were yet to be coined. He has been called a Welsh nationalist,
⁶
and also a philologist, on the basis that he was one of those who founded the discipline. But above all he was a persistent, innovative, hard-working and self-motivated scholar. (Historical linguists, or philologists as they used to be called, were an early product of the Enlightenment, preceding archaeologists. Antiquarians became self-aware as professional ‘archaeologists’ only towards the end of the nineteenth century.)

The accessibility of written and spoken European texts, both ancient and modern, combined with the rational clarity of thought and enquiry encouraged by founding Enlightenment philosophers, provided Lhuyd with a powerful cultural microscope, a time machine requiring no equipment save pen and
paper, access to a library and hard work. But one does not have to be a scholar to see that some languages, such as English and German, show systematic and measurable links as soon as one looks at them. For Lhuyd and other philologists, the excitement was electrifying. It must have seemed as if the dusty craft of words was providing a new window into the past that required only a little cleaning to remove all opacities.