The Celtic Debate

The conventional assumption that the pre-Roman populations of Britain and Ireland were ethnically Celtic, and that Celtic culture survived in the north and west beyond the Roman occupation of Britain, was first challenged in the 1990s in a critical process that has sometimes since been parodied beyond the legitimate questions raised by Celtosceptics. Whilst it is true that the term ‘Celtic’ was only widely applied to speakers of a language group from the eighteenth century, the equation of linguistically Celtic speaking Gauls with Celts of ancient historians still seems archaeologically and linguistically tenable, even if the case for equating Celtic-speaking Britons with ethnic Celts is no more than inference. By the same rationale, Celtic art should refer to the art of people who might reasonably be regarded as ethnic Celts (including those who regarded themselves as Celtiberians), and not just to La Tène art, which is both chronologically and geographically restricted. The case for regarding early Irish Christian art as Celtic is largely specious, except as a product of the ‘Celtic’ church. The case for regarding the origins of the Celts as extending back into earlier prehistory carries conviction, though the further suggestion that these origins lay in South-Western Europe remains far from persuasive to many linguists as well as to archaeologists.

Hierarchical or Egalitarian?

The model of social structure in British prehistory still owes much to the legacy of Gordon Childe, for whom economic competition was the catalyst of social inequalities. Even from the Neolithic, however, control of land or stock would have conveyed status, and the construction of major works such as tombs or henges implies authority over labour and resources, even if it was religious rather than temporal. Classical sources indicated that late pre-Roman Iron Age society was stratified, but recent opinion has questioned how far back this extended into earlier prehistory. Using grave goods as a proxy for social status may be simplistic, though whether explained as possessions of the dead, debts repaid by dependents, dedications to deities or ancestors, or displays of communal wealth consumption, they surely indicate social complexity. Settlements in British prehistory or early historic archaeology seldom display clear evidence of social hierarchy, since social status was evidently not expressed in the same terms as in contemporary materialistic and capitalistic societies. Anthropological models of social development from simple communities to chiefdoms and state societies can now be seen as neither consistent nor uniform in progression.

Mobility in Prehistory and Early Historic Times

For most of the twentieth century migration and invasion were the default explanation of material culture change in archaeology. This model was largely derived from the record of documentary history, which not only recorded the Gaulish diaspora of later prehistory but the migrations that resulted in the breakup of the Roman Empire. The equation of archaeological distributions—the formula ‘pots = people’—was a model adopted and promoted by Gordon Childe, and remained fundamental to archaeological interpretation into the 1960s. Thereafter diffusionism was discredited among British prehistorians, though less so among European archaeologists and classical or historical archaeologists. Even the Beaker phenomenon became a ‘cult package’ rather than the product of settlers, and it is only as a result of more recent isotopic and DNA analyses that the scale of settlement from the continent introducing Beakers has begun to be demonstrated. Other factors in culture contact including long-distance trade have long been evident, for example, from the distribution of finds of Baltic amber from Northern and North-Western Europe to the Mediterranean, or the distribution of continental pottery and glass via the western seaways in the post-Roman period.

Stonehenge and Avebury

As Britain’s foremost prehistoric monument, Stonehenge illustrates changing fashions in interpretation of, and public and professional attitudes towards, the national archaeological heritage over at least three centuries. From Stukeley and the early antiquaries there was constant interest in Stonehenge and its environs, including Avebury and Silbury Hill. But it was not until the twentieth century, after the site had become a listed ancient monument and had been taken into state guardianship, that the greatest damage was inflicted through fieldwork that remained unpublished until the end of the century. Stonehenge evidently was significant in terms of the seasonal solar cycle, but in the mid-twentieth century especially it became the focus of astro-archaeologists with complex theories of astronomical and calendrical significance. Interest has always focused on the origin of the bluestones, whether the product of glacial drift or transported from south Wales by the builders. Research on Stonehenge and its neighbourhood in recent years has greatly enhanced understanding of the site’s chronological and structural sequence, and its possible roles as a place of ritual, burial, and ceremonial activity. Now with Avebury part of the World Heritage site, Stonehenge is once again subject to controversy as to how best to protect its environment from greatly increased volumes of traffic.

Public Archaeology

Unlike other academic disciplines, archaeology has always involved a public dimension, and from its origins in antiquarian curiosity to ‘citizen science’ and ‘crowdfunding’ of modern research archaeologists have generally acknowledged their obligation to make information on heritage research publicly available. Major exhibitions in national museums have also demonstrated the scale of public interest, though visitor numbers to museums and heritage attractions generally have been adversely affected, except for major tourist attractions, whenever entrance charges have been imposed. In response to economic demands many museums have shifted priorities from curation and research to public outreach with an emphasis upon interactive displays, whilst staffing structures have subordinated academic qualifications to commercial and marketing criteria. Television archaeology has proved popular from the 1950s to the present day, though, in contrast to allied disciplines, there has been a consistent trend in archaeology to dumbing down presentation. Experimental archaeology too has seen progressive dumbing down from serious practical research into early agriculture or building technology to re-enactment for entertainment alone.

Recovery, Recording, and Publication

Was Pitt-Rivers really the ‘father of field archaeology’? He certainly contributed to artefact seriation and was aware of the importance of everyday artefacts for archaeological reconstruction, but, though meticulous in recording artefacts, he was not noted for recognizing structural features and he did not excavate stratigraphically. Field survey had a long history in Britain before the establishment of the Royal Commissions at the beginning of the twentieth century, with air photography subsequently developing out of military survey in the First World War. The importance of stratigraphy, association, and context was promoted by Sir Mortimer Wheeler from the 1930s, but scientific techniques were not widely applied until after the Second World War, with the advent of radiocarbon dating, geophysical survey, and a developing range of analytical techniques. Environmental archaeology as an integral part of the discipline was a relatively late development, as were osteological studies, notwithstanding the interest in craniology since Victorian times. ‘Rescue’ archaeology and development-funded archaeology has not only transformed the scale and quantity of finds, but has transformed qualitatively understanding of settlement patterns and distributions.

Defining the Agenda

The ‘facts’ of history do not speak for themselves. The dataset is determined by what questions we ask, which change according to generational fashion. Its value is also determined by the standards of recovery and recording. These have changed with improvements in technology, but also as a consequence with a quantum shift brought about by commercial development on a large scale, and the expansion of popular interest. British archaeology traditionally was dominated by the historical model, in contrast to North America where archeology was an extension of social anthropology. Fashions in archaeological interpretation reflect contemporary social and intellectual fashions, but different branches of archaeology may not follow the same trends. Archaeology with its role in national heritage internationally has also been used for purposes of political propaganda.

Romanization

Defining Romanization is problematical, not least because there was no uniform concept throughout the empire of what it meant to be ‘Roman’. Assessments from the early twentieth century, when the term was introduced, automatically included a value judgement that Romanization of native communities was a good thing, and something that they would have aspired to. This was based largely on the colonialist viewpoint of classical scholars of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras that presupposed that the imposition of ‘civilized’ standards on subject peoples was morally justified and practically beneficial. Changing attitudes have not only rendered this viewpoint unacceptable, but have also made debate itself unacceptable in some quarters. In reality interaction between native communities and the occupying regime was different in different parts of Britain, and the impact of occupation, in terms of urban development, for example, was extremely variable. For much of the twentieth century Romano-British archaeology was built upon the historically based legacy of Haverfield and Collingwood, in which military history formed the basic framework for research, but new approaches were triggered in the 1990s by advances in technology and development-funded archaeology. Recent research has argued that south-eastern Britain at least already included client kingdoms of Rome, though the case remains controversial.

Changing Interpretative Models in Archaeology

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were periods of data collection and classification, with an emphasis on establishing chronology. For North Alpine Europe this involved a process of cross-dating with the more reliably established chronologies of the Mediterranean and Middle East. The technological Three Age System was subsequently matched by models of social progression from savagery to civilization. Synthesis and analysis progressed with Gordon Childe, whose cultural-historical model persisted into the 1960s, when the equation of artefact distributions and ethnic groups was first seriously challenged. Key contributions in the early post-war years were Hawkes’s ‘ladder of inference’ and Clark’s economic prehistory. From the late 1960s prehistory underwent ‘deconstruction’ with the advent of processual models, adopted from the United States, and the important contributions in Britain of David Clarke. These in turn gave way to an even more diverse range of ‘post-processual’ approaches, with an increasing emphasis on identity. More recently intuitive approaches signal a more fundamental departure from traditional scholarly principles.

The Picts

The Picts surprisingly escaped critical scrutiny at the time that the Celts were subject to deconstruction, though their status in popular mythology is even more tenuous. The explanation of the name as Roman army slang for ‘painted savages’ is probably false etymology, and it seems unlikely that any native population would call themselves by the derogatory name, equivalent to ‘Wogs’, used by their colonial oppressors. It was more probably a term, misunderstood by the Roman military, for non-Romanized north Britons, and was certainly not an ethnic term until adopted much later by the people of eastern Scotland in the face of incursions by Anglians, Gaelish Scots, and Vikings. Few if any categories of archaeological monument are typical of this eastern Scottish region, though standing stones with symbols and later cross slabs are concentrated here. The language of the Picts was Celtic, and the notion of a distinctive tradition of matrilineal descent is now widely discredited. Pit-names are mainly from a later date, and early place names are not notably coincident with any supposed ‘Pictish homeland’. Recent research has suggested that simpler forms of symbols on portable stones originated in the third or fourth century. Symbols on stones may have served as funerary markers or on land boundaries, and may have incorporated an element of language, possibly names. This was evidently an important period in the coalescence of populations in the process of state formation.