a unifying past shared by the countries of the emerging European Union. In the former socialist republics of central and eastern Europe, Iron Age archaeology gave archaeologists a route to pursue that gave them the opportunity of meeting other Europeans rather than concentrating on local, possibly nationalist, archaeology.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Slavs replaced Celts as the center of state-sponsored research activities, and with the break-up of the Russian-dominated eastern bloc and with the European Union becoming larger and more integrated, the Celts were increasingly seen as symbols of a transnational identity. The Council of Europe even appointed a committee to establish a “pan-European Celtic heritage trail,” and a huge exhibition, I Celti, held at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1991, had as its subtitle, The Origins of Europe. The introduction to the exhibition’s massive catalog states: “This exhibition is a tribute both to the new Europe which cannot come to fruition without a comprehensive awareness of its unity, and to the fact that, in addition to its Roman and Christian sources, today’s Europe traces its roots from the Celtic heritage, which is there for all to see” (Moscati 1991, 11). Since a historic Celtic presence and a La Tène material culture have been recorded in modern nations from turkey to Great Britain and from Egypt to denmark, the catalog’s claim was intended to be comprehensive rather than exclusive. The impulse behind the European Union was basically both idealistic and practical—to prevent national rivalries causing a third world war by creating such close social and economic ties across the Continent that such a war would become impossible.

But while Continental Europeans were seeing Celts as a symbol of unity in the early 1990s, some British writers were beginning to denounce the concept of a Celtic past as divisive, even dangerously racist, and modern Celticism as fake. In 1983, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm had already written of “the invention of tradition” in post-1745 Scotland, and ten years later, the English writer Malcolm Chapman argued that Celts as such had never existed and Celts was merely a generic term that denoted “the other.” A number of English archaeologists leaped on this idea to argue that, because archaeology as a means of constructing culture history has been used to bolster unacceptable theories of nationhood and superior identity, the construct of an ancient Celtic society is essentially racist and dangerous. They argued that ethnic nomenclatures should not be used to denote past peoples known mainly on the basis of their material remains. But the same charge might be laid against the use of such labels as “Scythians,” “ancient Egyptians,” and even “Romans.” Ultimately, the argument rests upon ideas of how ethnicity is formed, and it seems paradoxical that the hypothesis of an ancient Celtic society—whether in the British Isles or on the Continent—should be regarded as racist.

The counterargument has been that the ancient sources should not be dismissed as though Herodotus, Polybius, Livy, and Caesar were totally ignorant of their own world. It seems preferable to adopt a model of ethnicity that is not genetically determined but composed of a number of intersecting factors in which ethnicity is multiple, depending on situation and changes over time. Finally, support for the retention of the terms Celt and Celtic may be found in another quotation, this time from an English-born professor of Celtic studies working in Wales: “We have Celtic language and Celtic ethnicity, which… often go together, and also Celtic archaeology and Celtic art, which must be placed further off. All those uses of ‘Celtic’ have some historic validity and are far too useful to abandon” (Sims-Williams 1998, 33).

Vincent Megaw and Ruth Megaw

References

Birkhan, Helmut. 1999. Kelten/Celts: Bilder ihrer Kultur/Images of their Culture. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Chapman, Malcolm. 1992. The Celts: The Construction of a Myth. London: St. Martin’s Press.

Cunliffe, Barry. 1997. The Ancient Celts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Green, Miranda, ed. 1995. The Celtic World. London: Routledge.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jacobsthal, Paul. 1944. Early Celtic Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.