Academic Debate Surrounding The Celts And Celticity

The academic debate surrounding the Celts and Celticity shows no signs of abating and publications proposing conflicting views on the homeland, origins, movements and definitions of the Celts are plentiful. Some bolder hypotheses on the origins of the Celts are responsible for stretching the chronological and spatial borders so wide that it inevitably results in the angering of specialists of either linguistics or archaeology. In The Origins of the Irish Mallory brings together his academic expertise in both disciplines to trace the development of the Irish whilst intentionally avoiding the loaded term 'Celtic' in all but the penultimate chapter. However, as Mallory's first Irishman is Niall of the Nine Hostages from the fifth century ad,

Views of a number of scholars have been drawn in to provide the reader with the understanding of how complex studying a prehistoric period is. Most importantly, he analyses in detail the archaeological data to show which population movements in Europe involved Ireland and when these migrations could have taken place. He is therefore able claim that Ireland saw four waves of immigration. The earliest one dates to c. 8000 bc when Ireland was populated by the hunter-gathers who most likely originate in the Isle of Man basin. The second wave occurred in the Neolithic (c. 3800 bc) when agriculture rapidly spread across the island, although, as Mallory points out in chapter three, the claim that farming was introduced to Ireland via colonization is challenged by the 'acculturation' theory while most Irish archaeologists are in fact 'unsure' how the new farming culture spread to Ireland. This chapter is a fine example of how skilfully the author amalgamates views of various scholars with his own hypotheses into a coherent narrative. The third wave of immigrants, the Bell Beakers, arrived with a new type of ceramic culture in the mid-third millennium bc. Again, Mallory avoids proposing any definite arguments and uses the more flexible 'certain amount of' and 'some immigration' to describe the movements of the Beaker people to Ireland. Lastly, the author propounds the possibility that the emergence of hillforts in Ireland c.1200 to 800 bc reflects the 'possibility' of population movement from Britain into Ireland. Like most contemporary scholars, he repudiates the long-held view that it was in the Hallstatt and La Téne periods that a mass movement from the Continent to the British