The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention

Folklore, April, 2000 by Amy Hale

The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention. By Simon James. London: British Museum Press, 1999. 160 pp. 16.99. [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 7141 2165 7

In just having finished Simon James's controversial The Atlantic Celts, I feel almost overwhelmed by ambivalence, if such a thing is possible. I both strongly agree and disagree with his conclusions.

Like social anthropologist Malcolm Chapman before him (1992), James sets about the task of shattering the popular "grand narrative" of the Celts, specifically the notion of Iron Age Celtic invasions of Britain and Ireland. His primary argument is that the Iron Age peoples of Britain and Ireland cannot legitimately be called "Celts" on the grounds that there is no evidence that they ever self-identified as such, Greek and Roman writers never called the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland "Celts," and that the settlement patterns do not indicate any sort of "Celtic" invasion--in fact the material remains suggest indigenous cultural progressions from the Bronze Age. Thus, the archaeological record reveals not a unified "Celtic" culture which spreads throughout "these islands" as is popularly believed, but many individual tribes with highly localised behaviours. He concludes that, rather than erroneously referring to these peoples as "Celts," it would be more appropriate to refer to them as "Iron Age peoples of Britain and Ireland" (though this would be unwieldy and anachronistic in itself).

James continues by exploring various constructions of identity in Britain and Ireland from the Iron Age onwards. In general, this is quite a revealing exercise. He explains that the use of "Celtic" as a self-designating ethnonym is quite recent; no one in these islands was calling her- or himself a Celt any earlier than the eighteenth century. Throughout this account James makes the crucial point that identities are multiple and fluid, and that an innate ethnic allegiance which is a biological given and which extends back into time immemorial simply does not exist. In fact, throughout the history of Ireland and Britain, it is religion, not ethnicity, that has been the primary determinant for identity and conflict. It is possible that the concept of "ethnicity" had no real relevance to the bulk of the population until during or after the eighteenth century.

I have very little quarrel with the content of much of what James is arguing; perhaps it is just the manner in which it is delivered that troubles me. It is important for the reader to keep in mind that this book is written primarily for a popular audience. It therefore lacks much of the careful referencing and nuanced argument that those of us who have been following this debate for the past ten or more years are accustomed to. James seems to want his audience to believe that his work is the definitive account of the Iron Age Celts. But it is not (for a recent articulation of the argument for Irish and British "Celts," see Patrick Sims-Williams. "Celtomania or Celtoscepticism?" Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 36 (1998):1-35).

Any discussion of "the Celts" can begin from a vantage point of either continuity or discontinuity. In this case, James attempts to do both, and sometimes he defies his own logic. For instance, he argues that the presence of La Tene style artefacts in Iron Age British grave sites does not imply a physical invasion of Celtic peoples from the continent. Instead, he believes that these artefacts are indicative of the rise of a warrior-aristocratic fashion which signified the elite throughout western Europe as a Rolex watch might do today. James admits that the presence of these goods indicates a continental cultural influence on some sections of the insular population, but that "it was mainly ideas and ideologies--religious, socio-political, and martial--that were moving, rather than people" (p. 92). However, he has already stated that "ethnicity is a set of beliefs and practices which must be learned, expressed and reproduced by social action" (p. 75). The process of adoption of Ira Tene culture and ideologies that James is describing almost mirrors this "ethnification."

Perhaps James actually says more about the complexities of "ethnicity" as a concept than he actually does about "the Celts." He obviously wants people to change what they believe about how the processes of "etihnicity" actually work, which in itself is a very positive contribution. Whether or not the relationship between insular and continental Iron Age peoples was a genetic or inherited one seems almost immaterial for, as James so rightly shows us, ethnicities shift and change. Peoples today in Britain, Ireland and the European continent exhibit both similarities and differences, and have multiple allegiances. "Monoculture" exists alongside highly localised behaviours, variations and fashions.

In the end, James concedes that modern Celts exist as a legitimate ethnic group on the grounds that they are self-naming and have a shared sense of difference and history (pp. 137-8). As he himself notes, this type of deconstruction can apply to many ethnicities, including British, German, American, Australian Aborigine, and so on. One must ask, then, why there seems to be this pressing need to keep deconstructing the Celts in particular? Is it a result, as some have suggested, of devolutionary measures in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland threatening English hegemony? Here an important point needs to be made about the alarming sentiments on the back cover. James seems to go some way toward attempting to dispel critiques of "Little Englander" perspectives (p. 141), yet the blurb on the back cover states: "He considers whether the `Celticness' of the British Isles is a romantic fantasy, even a politically dangerous falsification of history which has implications in the current debate on devolution and self-government for the Celtic regions." This may have been merely a marketing ploy, but it does not represent the argument of the book well and seems reactionary in the extreme.