Insular Celts
The Insular Celts are the speakers of Insular Celtic languages.
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[edit] Pre-Celtic Britain
Little is known of the culture and language of pre-Celtic Britain, but remnants of the latter may remain in the names of some geographical features, such as the rivers Clyde, Tamar and Thames, whose etymology is unclear but possibly derive from a pre-Celtic substrate (Gelling). By the Roman period, however, most of the inhabitants of the isles of Ireland and Britain were speaking Goidelic or Brythonic languages, close counterparts to the Celtic languages spoken on the European mainland.
The Celtic settlement of the British Isles is difficult to document genetically. Two books, The Blood of the Isles by Bryan Sykes and The Origins of the British: a Genetic Detective Story by Stephen Oppenheimer discuss genetic evidence, concluding that while there is evidence for a series of migrations from the Iberian Peninsula during the Mesolithic and, to a lesser extent, the Neolithic eras,[1] there is comparatively little trace of any Iron Age migration. In terms of Y-chromosomes, Sykes finds that the "Oisin" (R1b) clan is in the majority which has strong affinities to paleolithic Iberia, with no evidence of a large scale arrival from Central Europe. He further claims that the majority of the gene pool of the current inhabitants of the British Isles, whether they consider themselves to be "Anglo Saxon", "Celt" or otherwise, may derive from the original Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who migrated north from Iberia approximately 13,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
[edit] Celtic invasion
The Celts first appear at the beginning of the European Iron Age. They are united by features of their languages, which derive from a Proto-Celtic language.
The timeline of the arrival of Celtic speakers in the British Isles is unclear.
In 1946 the Celtic scholar T. F. O'Rahilly published his extremely influential mode of the early history of Ireland which postulated four separate waves of Celtic invaders, spanning most of the Iron Age (700 to 100 BC). Later research indicated that the culture may have developed gradually and continuously between the Celts and the indigenous populations. Similarly in Ireland little archaeological evidence was found for large intrusive groups of Celtic immigrants, suggesting to archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew that the native late Bronze Age inhabitants gradually absorbed European Celtic influences and language.
Genetic studies have supported the prevalence of native populations. A study by Christian Capelli, David Goldstein and others at University College, London showed that genetic markers associated with Gaelic names in Ireland and Scotland are also common in certain parts of Wales and England (in most cases, The Southeast of England with the lowest counts of these markers) are similar to the genetic markers of the Basque people, who speak a non-Indo-European language. This similarity supported earlier findings in suggesting a large pre-Celtic genetic ancestry, likely going back to the Paleolithic. They suggest that Celtic culture and the Celtic language may have been imported to Britain by cultural contact, not mass invasions around 600 BC. In the 1970s a "continuity model" was popularized by Colin Burgess in his book The Age of Stonehenge which theorised that Celtic culture in Great Britain "emerged" rather than resulted from invasion and that the Celts were not invading aliens, but the descendants of the people of Stonehenge. More recent genetic studies regarding Y-DNA Haplogroup I2b2-L38 have concluded that there was some Late Iron Age migration of Celtic La Tène people, through Belgium, to the British Isles[2] including north-east Ireland.[3]
The archaeological evidence is of substantial cultural continuity through the 1st millennium BC,[4] although with a significant overlay of selectively adopted elements of La Tène culture. There are claims of continental-style states appearing in southern England close to the end of the period, possibly reflecting in part immigration by élites from various Gallic states such as those of the Belgae.[5] Evidence of chariot burials in England begins about 300 BC and is mostly confined to the Arras culture associated with the Parisii.
[edit] Iron Age Britain
The British Iron Age is a conventional name in the archaeology of Great Britain, typically excluding prehistoric Ireland, which had an independent Iron Age culture of its own.[6] The parallel phase of Irish archaeology is termed the Irish Iron Age,[7]
The British Iron Age lasted in theory from the first significant use of iron for tools and weapons in Britain to the Romanisation of the southern half of the island. The Romanised culture is termed Roman Britain and is considered to supplant the British Iron Age.
[edit] Roman era and Dark Ages
Some recent studies have suggested that the Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons) did not wipe out the Romano-British of England but rather, over the course of six centuries, conquered the native Brythonic people of what is now England and south-east Scotland and imposed their culture and language upon them,[8] much as the Gaels may have spread over Northern Britain This view is supported by the Celtic, or at least non-Germanic, names of some prominent early members of a number of "Anglo-Saxon" dynasties, such as Cerdic of Wessex and Penda of Mercia.[9][10] The Pennines remained a stronghold for Brythonic culture in England, the Cumbric language survived until the 12th century, whereas in isolated areas of East Anglia, a Brythonic language was only recorded as late as the Saxon period. Parts of the Brythonic culture still survives in the form of the Northumbrian smallpipes and Wrestling (Lancashire and Cumbrian wrestling). Still, others maintain that the picture is mixed and that in some places the indigenous population was indeed wiped out while in others it was assimilated. According to this school of thought the populations of Yorkshire, East Anglia, Northumberland and the Orkney and Shetland Islands are those populations with the fewest traces of ancient (Celtic) British continuation, probably because these are eastern areas which were exposed to invasion from the East by Angles, Saxons and Vikings.[11]
By the end of the Dark Ages, around the 8th century, the Insular Celtic peoples had become the bearers of the Gaelic and Welsh cultures of the historical Gaelic Ireland and Medieval Wales.
[edit] See also
- Celtic toponymy: Insular Celtic
- British toponymy: Celtic
- Goidelic substrate hypothesis
- Insular Celtic languages
- Iron Age Britain
- Genetic history of the British Isles
[edit] References
- ^ "Irish genes from Galicia". History News Network. http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/7406.html. Retrieved 2010-10-02.
- ^ De Beule, Hans (2010). "Early Bronze Age Origin and Late Iron Age (La Tène) Migrations of I-L38". The Russian Journal of Genetic Genealogy 1 (2): 47–55. http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxoYXBsb2dyb3VwaWwzOHxneDo3NjRhODJlMTZhNTI3MTU0. Retrieved 8 May 2011.
- ^ McEvoy and Bradley, Brian P and Daniel G (2010). Celtic from the West Chapter 5: Irish Genetics and Celts. Oxbow Books, Oxford, UK. pp. 117. ISBN 978-1-84217-410-4.
- ^ Cunliffe, Barry (2008). A Race Apart: Insularity and Connectivity in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 75, 2009, pp. 55–64. The Prehistoric Society. p. 61.
- ^ Koch, John (2005). Celtic Culture : A Historical Encyclopedia. ABL-CIO. pp. 197–198. ISBN 978-1851094400. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=f899xH_quaMC&pg=PA197&lpg=PA197&dq=koch+encyclopedia+belgae+to+britain&source=bl&ots=p__Di9EyZK&sig=QEuBBryh2wW2nwJtLaKAPTdJT7M&hl=en&ei=igh7TYmUMouOuQPvvu3wBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=koch%20encyclopedia%20belgae%20to%20britain&f=false. Retrieved March 12, 2011.
- ^ Cunliffe (2005) page 27.
- ^ Raftery, Barry (2005). "Iron-age Ireland". In O Croinin, Daibhi. Prehistoric and Early Ireland: Volume I. Oxford University Press. pp. 134–181. ISBN 0198217374, ISBN 9780198217374.
- ^ Pattison, John E. (2008), Is it Necessary to Assume an Apartheid-like Social Structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England?, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 275(1650):2423-2429; doi 10.1098/rspb.2008.0352.
- ^ "Records of the West Saxon dynasties survive in versions which have been subject to later manipulation, which may make it all the more significant that some of the founding 'Saxon' fathers have British names: Cerdic, Ceawlin, Cenwalh." in: Hills, C., Origins of the English, Duckworth (2003), p. 105. Also "The names Cerdic, Ceawlin and Caedwalla, all in the genealogy of the West Saxon kings, are apparently British." in: Ward-Perkins, B., Why did the Anglo-Saxons not become more British? The English Historical Review 115.462 (June 2000): p513.
- ^ P. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature [in Western England, 600–800], Cambridge 1990, p. 26.
- ^ "By analyzing 1772 Y chromosomes from 25 predominantly small urban locations, we found that different parts of the British Isles have sharply different paternal histories; the degree of population replacement and genetic continuity shows systematic variation across the sampled areas."A Y Chromosome Census of the British IslesPDF (208 KB)
