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Barry Cunliffe and John T. Koch (eds) Celtic from the West: Alternative perspectives from archaeology, genetics, language and literature. Oxord, Oxbow, 2010. 384pp. ISBN: 978-1-84217-410- 4.
This volume of eleven papers follows a conference on the same subject and is largely driven by the desire to explore a new hypothesis regarding Celtic origins. The editors have found the traditional model of a Hallstatt/La Tène origin for the Celts to be increasingly limited (in some cases totally repudiated by all available evidence) and, rather, they believed it was worth while exploring a different hypothesis: "Celtic probably evolved in the Atlantic Zone during the Bronze Age". This forms the primary agenda of the volume, arranged under the headings of 'Archaeology', 'Genetics' and 'Language and Literature', although not all the contributors adhere to an Atlantic origin.
The first paper by Barry Cunliffe reviews the historical and archaeological evidence in support of an Atlantic origin. The primary focus is on the initial spread of the Neolithic economy to Portugal and then the opening up of the Atlantic façade as an interaction zone seen in such phenomena as the spread of the Neolithic, megaliths, areas of exchange in stone axes, and later the Atlantic expansion of the Beakers and later Bronze Age horizons of metal working that suggests that there was a distinct cultural zone for the Atlantic from the Neolithic onwards. Cunliffe concludes with a series of questions that suggest the possibility that the Indo-European languages were carried into Atlantic Europe across the Mediterranean, that Celtic may have formed either during the Neolithic or, possibly, with the rise of the Beakers in Iberia from whence they spread across the rest of the Atlantic zone. Alternatively, he recognizes the possibility that there is an 'eastern' component in the Beaker phenomenon and that Celtic may have spread this way as well. In any event, he opens the possibility that Celtic is quite early in Indo-European expansions (a Celtic formation and expansion before c 2000 BC would place it on the rough temporal plain often imagined for Indo-Iranian or Greek) and that its point of departure was the far west rather than the north Alpine region most often proposed.
Raimund Karl examines how both our lack...