The Celts: Search for a Civilization

Professor Alice Roberts is one of our finest popular science broadcasters and this book is the companion to the series on the Celts she made with historian Neil Oliver for the BBC. The book manages to go into more depth on the subjects covered in that series and Roberts does a fine job of marshalling the evidence and voicing her own doubts about accepted conclusions.

Taking a fresh look at where the “Celts” came from, their influence and culture, this eminently readable book takes us on a journey back to the Bronze Age and tries to deduce exactly who the Celts were and how their culture spread across Europe. The accepted model, since the 19th Century anyways, proposes that Celtic culture sprang up in middle Europe and spread both East and West through mass migrations, finding its furthest extent in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. But Roberts and the sources she draws upon contend that the archeological evidence does not back this up.

Indeed it is far more logical to look at the way language and technologies spread. The advent of Bronze weapons, metal working, ore extraction - all these required skilled people spreading their knowledge. That required language to be taught. It does not necessarily mean invasion and displacement. Indeed there is little evidence for that.

These elusive, mysterious Celts, who left no written record of themselves, only the wealth of art found in high status burials sites, and the second-hand, biased histories of the Greeks and Romans who encountered them, are hard to pin down.

Roberts skilfully explores the Celtic world through the existing archeology, visiting sites in Germany, France, Portugal and Ireland along the way, and steers a path through to a new understanding of how Celtic culture might have spread across Europe.

This book is never heavy going, it is written in a clear and easy style that is the hallmark of the best popular science and history. A very good introduction to current thinking on the Celtic history.