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Is Scotland's Celtic heritage simply an 18th-century political con-trick, asks ANDREW COLLIER (Scotsman writer)
THEY were a proud people, walking the hills and glens of this country hundreds of years before Christ. They were fierce yet civilised, builders yet philosophers, hard-headed administrators yet religious mystics. They were, in our fond imagination, the earliest Scots.
Our Celtic forefathers are much more than abstract figures from the mists of history. Their heritage lives on today. We see it in the remarkable brochs they built, the metalwork they forged, the incredible stone circles such as Callanish where they may have worshipped their gods and goddesses in complex rituals.
We even see this ancient people in ourselves. Whenever we drink a whisky, or sing along to our folk music, or even bellow Flower of Scotland on the crowded terraces of Murrayfield, we are reconnecting, quite deliberately, to this romantic but very real past.
We were Celts then, we tell ourselves, and we are Celts now. This racial background sets us apart from the Anglo-Saxon English or the joyless, robotic Germans. It gives us a natural affinity with our brother Celtic nations, ranging from the Irish through to the Cornish and Bretons, and provides us with a shared heritage and sense of place. This Celtic background defines our history, impacts on our culture, and makes us Scots. Or so the wisdom goes. The problem is that, according to a new and growing strand of historical thinking, it may not be correct. A burgeoning and increasingly influential group of academics has begun to claim publicly that the Celts may never have existed.
For Scots, this is a remarkable, paradigm-shifting accusation. It amounts to more than a stripping away of heritage, a calculated racial insult, a dispossession of our history. It amounts, in its own way, to the theft of our nationhood. If we're not Celts, we might justly ask ourselves, then what are we?
The cat has been set among the cultural pigeons on this issue by Dr Simon James, a respected archaeologist at the University of Durham. James dismisses the historic, long-peddled notion of a united European Celtic culture stretching from Spain to Scotland and marked by traits such as druidism, high art and warrior skills. Writing in the latest issue of the academic journal Antiquity, James says that use of the label Celtic to describe a homogenous European people some two millennia ago is bogus. There is little evidence for such a community, he says, claiming it derives from a socially convenient theory which emerged after the Act of Union between Scotland and England in 1707.
He writes: "Within a couple of generations, educated people across Europe were employing it as a quasi-ethic name - Scottish gentlemen, for instance, liked to think of their ancestors as Celts. It would be interesting to know why the idea of Celticness was adopted so enthusiastically.
"Did it touch on ancient reality, or meet a more contemporary need? I believe that it was taken up in Britain because of the sociopolitics of the 18th century, especially the unification of Scotland in 1707."
James explains further: "There was a growing sense of the need to define and defend the non-English identities of the west and north, just when the ancient term British had just been pre-empted by the new Anglocentric state. Provision of Celtic as an alternative joint ethnonym for 'of the British Isles but not English' was timely."
So there you have it: the re-casting of our own history was part of a cunning unionist ploy and we were all suckers enough to believe it. James continues by arguing that once this false label took hold, archaeologists and others were taken in too, developing their theories around it and so enhancing the misunderstanding.
His theory may seem mischievous, but there are plenty of academics and authorities on that period of European history who place some faith in it. Fraser Hunter, the curator of the Iron Age and Roman collection at the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh, says there is little evidence of any real connection between the various cultures of Europe at that time. "What you had were regional strains of a broadly common language, two different art styles and differing archaeologies. It was such a diverse mixture that you really have to question how useful the term 'Celtic' is," he says.
"In the Iron Age, which is what we're talking about, we had a Europe of the regions but no pan-European culture. There were some similarities, but there were tremendous differences in things like farming, housing and even how people buried their dead."
None of this fits with the traditional notion of a Celtic people originating in central Europe and migrating west from about 500BC onwards, eventually settling throughout Europe from Scotland to Turkey. These people are said to have been strong, civilised and culturally united in terms of art, language and weaponry, only dying out as their tribes fell to Roman rule.
The revisionists, however, have concocted a different theory. They believe that there was no single Celtic culture, rather a series of communities across Europe, evolving in parallel with limited contact between them.
Contacts which did exist, so this theory goes, were loose but strong enough to forge commonalities in areas such as language and art. Most importantly of all, they say, the idea of Celtic European migration was a myth.
Who is right? That, of course, is the supreme question. The Celts did not leave newspapers and videotapes buried in the walls of their forts and brochs. Since no literature dates from the period, we can only take calculated but imprecise stabs into the dark. In a way, the whole controversial, convoluted subject is an academic's dream since it allows masses of supposition on the basis of little evidence. Another authority on the period, Dr Miranda Aldhouse-Green, reader in archaeology at the University of Wales in Newport, gives qualified support for James's work. She, too, believes that some of the romantic legend attaching to the Celts is nothing more than post-union fantasy. "There is a movement in modern archaeology to deconstruct, get rid of assumptions and labels and look at things again. That is what is happening here. The problem is, though, that if you get rid of the term Celt, you have to put something in its place.
"If you carry this to its logical conclusion, you would scrap the terms Greek and Roman as well. The Greeks didn't think of themselves as Greek, but as Athenian or Corinthian or whatever. It is because we see things in common between them that we call them Greek."
Aldhouse-Green believes there was some sort of common identity among the Celtic peoples. She points out that various types of fairly abstract curvilinear art have been found from Ireland to Romania, and that motifs on sword scabbards have emerged from London to Hungary. She also dismisses any preconception that if the indigenous Scots of the time were not Celts, then they must have been primitive agrarian peasants. "The evidence shows that we are dealing with a highly intellectual, conceptual people. The brochs they built, for instance, were architecturally extremely sophisticated. They were pastoral, rural people, but also highly developed. They had, for instance, thought out their religious theory and practice and were using complex ideas and cosmologies."
But If there was no Celtic race as such, then why is it that when you travel to Ireland or Brittany or the far west country of England, these places have a distinct atmosphere that is markedly different from, say, the hop fields of Kent or the Saxon flatness of East Anglia? Aldhouse-Green believes this may be due to nothing more than topography. "These are rugged and mountainous areas, good for rearing sheep but not for an economy based on towns and markets. It may be that people are connecting with this, as well as perhaps with language and music."
Another expert who does not believe that the Celts existed as a homogenous entity is Professor Colin Hazelgrove, a colleague of Simon James at the University of Durham. "I would refer to them as diverse cultures. These people fought each other, had weaponry, and their art styles were similar. That in itself, though doesn't make them identical - people wear blue jeans in different countries these days, but it doesn't mean they're the same."
Here is a fascinating question: if Scots feel they are Celts now, with this shared sense of history and belonging with some other European regions and nations, does it matter if we are not linked to with these ancient peoples more than 2,000 years ago? The answer is no. If you feel a bond - and no-one can deny that there are links between Scotland and Ireland, for instance, which amount to some intangible feeling of brotherhood - the past is nothing more than history, interesting for those who study it such as James or Aldhouse-Green but in no way plugged in to the ebb and flow of modern cultural relationships.
And if you still feel cheated of your heritage? Then Fraser Hunter at the National Museums of Scotland can provide you with another stark slice of reality: there may not have been a Celtic race at around the time God became man in Palestine, but there wasn't a Scotland either. "At that time, the West of Scotland would have looked towards Ireland, while the East would tended to have natural connections to the east of England. There were lots of regions and lots of petty kings, but Scotland didn't come about until many centuries later." Hunter does, however, sound one optimistic note "This whole period in Scottish history is fascinating, and doesn't need to simply be viewed as some pale shadow of a pan-European Celtic region. At the time, we were doing some pretty fantastic things on our own."
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