John Collis
UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD (RETIRED)
Studies of Iron Age Europe have largely been dominated by interpretations based on usually patchy historical sources or on ethnic origins based on linguistic models (the ‘Culture Historical’ paradigm). From the 1960s in archaeology there has been a shift in the dominant paradigm to anthropological and geographical models, the so-called ‘New’ or ‘Processual’ Archaeology, but under the term ‘Post-Processual’ a range of different approaches has been developed. In Celtic Studies (and other language based disciplines) and in Medieval Archaeology the new approaches (‘Celtoscepticism’) have been slow to be adopted, and even the definition of the Celts is still strongly disputed (linguistic, or archaeological, or an ethnic usage in the Ancient World based on unknown criteria). In this session we will be considering to what extent we can still use terms like
‘Celtic’, and what approaches are replacing the ethnic interpretations of the European Iron Age in understanding the spread of ideas in aspects of the material culture, including ‘Celtic Art’.
