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The Ancient Celts
For two and a half thousand years the Celts have continued to fascinate those who have come into contact with them, yet their origins have remained a mystery and even today are the subject of heated debate among historians and archaeologists. In this erudite and profusely illustrated history, Barry Cunliffe explores the archaeological reality of these bold warriors and skilled craftsmen of barbarian Europe who inspired fear in the Greeks and Romans. Tracing the emergence of chiefdoms and their migrations as far as Bosnia and the Czech Republic, he assesses the disparity between the traditional and contemporary information on the Celts and offers new insight into the true identity of this ancient people.
360 pages, Paperback
First published June 26, 2018
188 people are currently reading
2796 people want to read
About the author
Barry Cunliffe
174 books159 followersSir Barrington Windsor Cunliffe taught archaeology in the Universities of Bristol and Southampton and was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 2008, thereafter becoming Emeritus Professor. He has excavated widely in Britain (Fishbourne, Bath, Danebury, Hengistbury Head, Brading) and in the Channel Islands, Brittany, and Spain, and has been President of the Council for British Archaeology and of the Society of Antiquaries, Governor of the Museum of London, and a Trustee of the British Museum. He is currently a Commissioner of English Heritage.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 99 reviews
May 6, 2020
I am stopping now after having read one third of the book. Whatever you do, don't choose the audiobook. The printed book is said to have numerous maps and pictures. The maps are necessary. In addition, the audiobook version, read by Julian Elfer, is read too fast.
The book begins with two prefaces, stating what is known, but more importantly, what is not known, and this is a lot! There are two prefaces, one for each of the book’s two editions. There follows a detailed review of what we know about the Celts through classical literature. This literature, we are told, is not reliable. The author goes on to analyzes migration movements of the Celts through a detailed century by century study of archaeological data. This section has little about culture or traditions. In understanding migration patterns, perhaps conclusions can be drawn about the origin of these people. With the publication of this, the second edition, there remain diverse theories and hypotheses to be tested. One day in the future, hopefully, DNA studies will provide reliable answers. This is what I have grasped in reading the book this far.
I have struggled to make sense of a large amount of diverse facts.
I find the content dry, confusing and unorganized.
The book begins with two prefaces, stating what is known, but more importantly, what is not known, and this is a lot! There are two prefaces, one for each of the book’s two editions. There follows a detailed review of what we know about the Celts through classical literature. This literature, we are told, is not reliable. The author goes on to analyzes migration movements of the Celts through a detailed century by century study of archaeological data. This section has little about culture or traditions. In understanding migration patterns, perhaps conclusions can be drawn about the origin of these people. With the publication of this, the second edition, there remain diverse theories and hypotheses to be tested. One day in the future, hopefully, DNA studies will provide reliable answers. This is what I have grasped in reading the book this far.
I have struggled to make sense of a large amount of diverse facts.
I find the content dry, confusing and unorganized.
January 15, 2019
Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
This book is a gorgeous object, lavishly illustrated with photographs of Celtic artefacts and finds. The book was written by a well-known expert in the field, and I have no doubt of his credentials or his accuracy in laying out what we know and the interpretations that can be drawn (fairly cautiously) from that. This certainly isn’t the kind of book that looks at the mythology about the Celtic peoples written by the Romans and swallows it whole; Cunliffe bases the book on all kinds of different evidence, drawing it together to provide a picture of the groups of people one could confidently consider part of the same Celtic race.
The only problem is that something about Cunliffe’s style sends me to sleep. It’s not that I doubt that he’s fascinated by the subject matter, but he doesn’t communicate a good sense of that enthusiasm, to my mind — there are writers who can make the minutiae really speak even to a layperson, and there are those who can’t. Cunliffe is rather the latter. It’s still an excellent resource about the Celtic peoples, but it wasn’t the best for light reading by a curious outsider to the field.
This book is a gorgeous object, lavishly illustrated with photographs of Celtic artefacts and finds. The book was written by a well-known expert in the field, and I have no doubt of his credentials or his accuracy in laying out what we know and the interpretations that can be drawn (fairly cautiously) from that. This certainly isn’t the kind of book that looks at the mythology about the Celtic peoples written by the Romans and swallows it whole; Cunliffe bases the book on all kinds of different evidence, drawing it together to provide a picture of the groups of people one could confidently consider part of the same Celtic race.
The only problem is that something about Cunliffe’s style sends me to sleep. It’s not that I doubt that he’s fascinated by the subject matter, but he doesn’t communicate a good sense of that enthusiasm, to my mind — there are writers who can make the minutiae really speak even to a layperson, and there are those who can’t. Cunliffe is rather the latter. It’s still an excellent resource about the Celtic peoples, but it wasn’t the best for light reading by a curious outsider to the field.
May 2, 2016
Text is dry and dense on the whole, with the thrust on archaeological finds. Some history and the ancient writers have been discussed. There were absolutely gorgeous color plates and fascinating woodcuts and drawings! What I gleaned is from the text explaining the illustrations. This book has been very informative. I'm giving this a 4****, not for the style, but for what I've learned. I found the final section of each chapter usually summarized the chapter.
At the Celts' farthest extent, in the 3rd century BC, they extended from Hungary to Britain and Ireland. The name 'Pritani' for the people of Britain was coined by a traveller to that land looking for tin in the 4th century BC, Pytheas of Massalia. A long section discussed Celtic art: its own creativity and the fact the Celts borrowed Etruscan and Thracian techniques. The Gunderstrup cauldron found in Jutland is a good example: fashioned in the Middle Danube, with Celtic design but the gilding and silver of Thracian technique. I now know what a carnyx looked like. Significance of the torc was religious--protection of the gods. The book also discussed oppida , which were nucleated settlements, Celtic social oranization. There was a large section on the Roman Invasion, also history of the Roman period with Rome's absorption of and influence on the Celts. In the discussion on the "Free Celts" [never dominated by Rome--Ireland] vernacular oral literature, the Táin, was mentioned and finally written down in the 11th century AD. It reflects a Celtic epic.
Religion was interesting: Druids, sacred springs and wells, triplism ['in threes'], an important concept to the Celts: their trinity of three goddesses; the three-faced deity; the triskele, which we see as a motif in Celtic design. Willing human sacrifice to propitiate the gods was mentioned: the 'triple death'. Also, the circle was important. We can see this in the shapes of sacred groves and in the circles of standing stones [stelae]. We don't really know their purpose but archaeologists feel they served a religious purpose or were some kind of boundary marker. These stone circles have been found in France, too. There was an interesting section on how Celtic language developed.
Worth a mention are the annotated bibliogaphy in the 'Guide to Further Reading', the timeline, and the maps section. The Index was reasonably complete.
Highly recommended for lovers of Celtic history and culture.
At the Celts' farthest extent, in the 3rd century BC, they extended from Hungary to Britain and Ireland. The name 'Pritani' for the people of Britain was coined by a traveller to that land looking for tin in the 4th century BC, Pytheas of Massalia. A long section discussed Celtic art: its own creativity and the fact the Celts borrowed Etruscan and Thracian techniques. The Gunderstrup cauldron found in Jutland is a good example: fashioned in the Middle Danube, with Celtic design but the gilding and silver of Thracian technique. I now know what a carnyx looked like. Significance of the torc was religious--protection of the gods. The book also discussed oppida , which were nucleated settlements, Celtic social oranization. There was a large section on the Roman Invasion, also history of the Roman period with Rome's absorption of and influence on the Celts. In the discussion on the "Free Celts" [never dominated by Rome--Ireland] vernacular oral literature, the Táin, was mentioned and finally written down in the 11th century AD. It reflects a Celtic epic.
Religion was interesting: Druids, sacred springs and wells, triplism ['in threes'], an important concept to the Celts: their trinity of three goddesses; the three-faced deity; the triskele, which we see as a motif in Celtic design. Willing human sacrifice to propitiate the gods was mentioned: the 'triple death'. Also, the circle was important. We can see this in the shapes of sacred groves and in the circles of standing stones [stelae]. We don't really know their purpose but archaeologists feel they served a religious purpose or were some kind of boundary marker. These stone circles have been found in France, too. There was an interesting section on how Celtic language developed.
Worth a mention are the annotated bibliogaphy in the 'Guide to Further Reading', the timeline, and the maps section. The Index was reasonably complete.
Highly recommended for lovers of Celtic history and culture.
November 18, 2008
The author is an archeologist first and foremost and as such he includes a lot of that in the book, however he makes the effort to include other views also. The author was trying to give a picture of who the Ancient Celts were and in doing so he used three main tools. The first tool was how other people viewed the Celts and through what glasses. He gave us views that ranged from the classical writers to the historian of today. He also gave us a glimpse of why these people may have viewed the Celts the way they did. The second tool was the available archeological finds. Even these finds depended on who was interpreting them and how they saw these finds fitting in with their ideas and theories. The third tool is the linguistic and vernacular records. The linguistic evidence is very controversial and at times still untranslated, while the vernacular records has the hand of the Christian monks to muddy the waters a little (or a lot).
In a broad sense and in the confines of the material he had to cover in this book I would have to say that he achieved the goal he set out for himself. He gave us a broad sense of who the Celts were, where they have been and where they ended up. He was also able to tell us of the influences that were exerted on them and shaped them. He did also leave me with a lot of questions and details that I would have liked to have known. I think however, that in order for him to answer these questions he would have needed volumes. I think that for a more detailed picture of the Celts you would have to study the individual areas that they lived and the influences exerted on them there. Specific books on the Irish Celts and the British Celts and so on would probably have been better. Even with these parameters you would have needed detailed volumes on language, mythology, the cultures that they came in contact with, how these cultures saw the Celts and archeology to give a more through picture.
In a broad sense and in the confines of the material he had to cover in this book I would have to say that he achieved the goal he set out for himself. He gave us a broad sense of who the Celts were, where they have been and where they ended up. He was also able to tell us of the influences that were exerted on them and shaped them. He did also leave me with a lot of questions and details that I would have liked to have known. I think however, that in order for him to answer these questions he would have needed volumes. I think that for a more detailed picture of the Celts you would have to study the individual areas that they lived and the influences exerted on them there. Specific books on the Irish Celts and the British Celts and so on would probably have been better. Even with these parameters you would have needed detailed volumes on language, mythology, the cultures that they came in contact with, how these cultures saw the Celts and archeology to give a more through picture.
March 23, 2025
I don’t know why but I left this book with a strong urge to read some Asterix 😁
December 8, 2011
Barry Cunliffe approaches assessing the “barbarians” of Gaul with a different outlook than other scholars. Using archeology and the burial rites of the Celtic tribes, he takes the reader from the early phase of migration of around 1000 BC through the Middle Ages. By following the burial patterns of the elite of the tribal aristocracy as the Celtics make their way from Asia Minor to the far tips of the British Isles, Cunliffe asserts most of the migrations most likely took place to gather new sources of wealth and land.
The book is a very understandable, as the author couples Roman historical text and archeological fact, addressing the takeover of the regions above the Etruscans, and the intermingling of the Celtic tribes with those of the Roman populace. In conjunction to what other scholars have written about the Celtic movements in Europe, the author notes that the various tribes, which existed after the migration from Asia Minor, were in assimilation with the Roman people, but added that it was only after the Celtic tribes saw the wealth of the coast, did they begin to raid on a regular basis to supply their economic necessity.
Not only does he make use of the early Roman historians such as Polybius and Poseidonius, but he follows the re-writing of the early Roman histories as they were re-evaluated by Livy (59 BC – 17 AD), and others such as Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Athenaeus, and Julius Caesar. While the author states that much of the history of the Celtic tribes written by these Roman Historians was probably prejudiced by their romantic view of Roman conquest, he is quick to offer archeological evidence which could support their observations of the Celtic tribes and their engagement with the Roman Army.
The book itself is a wealth of primary resources of the Roman Historians, as the author inserts many of the original texts into the body of his chapters. It also contains a vast sampling of black and white, and color photos, which depicts archeological finds, weaponry, aerial views of forts, maps of the regions from the time periods, statutes and other burial artifacts found in the Gaul and British regions. These visuals help the reader to understand the Celts as an artistic and compassionate individual, as much of the artifacts originate from the burial plots excavated. The intrigue designs show a developed human being, more so than the Roman Historians offer to their readers, depicting the Celtic peoples as those who were savage barbarians, and cared only to wage war and attack others.
As the author states: “Celtic art was functional and served a variety of ever-changing needs. Its practitioners carried with them not only skill but a deep knowledge of society’s beliefs and values expressed in symbols.” (pg. 132) Recognizing this art in the Celtic society acknowledges that this society is a learned and advanced people. The author expressed this adequately within his texts, and “The Ancient Celts” would be an excellent book to use to gather knowledge of the ever shifting migration and development of the Celtic presence in Europe.
The book is a very understandable, as the author couples Roman historical text and archeological fact, addressing the takeover of the regions above the Etruscans, and the intermingling of the Celtic tribes with those of the Roman populace. In conjunction to what other scholars have written about the Celtic movements in Europe, the author notes that the various tribes, which existed after the migration from Asia Minor, were in assimilation with the Roman people, but added that it was only after the Celtic tribes saw the wealth of the coast, did they begin to raid on a regular basis to supply their economic necessity.
Not only does he make use of the early Roman historians such as Polybius and Poseidonius, but he follows the re-writing of the early Roman histories as they were re-evaluated by Livy (59 BC – 17 AD), and others such as Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Athenaeus, and Julius Caesar. While the author states that much of the history of the Celtic tribes written by these Roman Historians was probably prejudiced by their romantic view of Roman conquest, he is quick to offer archeological evidence which could support their observations of the Celtic tribes and their engagement with the Roman Army.
The book itself is a wealth of primary resources of the Roman Historians, as the author inserts many of the original texts into the body of his chapters. It also contains a vast sampling of black and white, and color photos, which depicts archeological finds, weaponry, aerial views of forts, maps of the regions from the time periods, statutes and other burial artifacts found in the Gaul and British regions. These visuals help the reader to understand the Celts as an artistic and compassionate individual, as much of the artifacts originate from the burial plots excavated. The intrigue designs show a developed human being, more so than the Roman Historians offer to their readers, depicting the Celtic peoples as those who were savage barbarians, and cared only to wage war and attack others.
As the author states: “Celtic art was functional and served a variety of ever-changing needs. Its practitioners carried with them not only skill but a deep knowledge of society’s beliefs and values expressed in symbols.” (pg. 132) Recognizing this art in the Celtic society acknowledges that this society is a learned and advanced people. The author expressed this adequately within his texts, and “The Ancient Celts” would be an excellent book to use to gather knowledge of the ever shifting migration and development of the Celtic presence in Europe.
April 2, 2021
I found the book amazing, informative and disappointing. It ties together threads that are familiar from courses in World History - more properly European civilization - with the history of peoples living in Northern Europe. Part of the problem is that the Greeks and Romans left a written record while the history of the North has been pieced together from fragmentary descriptions left by the Greeks and Romans and artifacts dug up in northern lands. We know about the Corded Ware culture, the Beaker, the Urnfield, the Hallstatt and the Le Tene. We don't know how they developed and interacted. We don't know how they evolved into the families of modern day Europe.
Variants of Celt were spoken all over Europe, including the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), and the British Isles. Why is Italian so different from Spanish, French and British?
I was amazed to learn that the Phoenicians set up ports on the Iberian Peninsula to trade for ores (copper and tin?) and Mediterranean countries relied on copper, tin and gold imported from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The Hallstatt Celts mined salt in Austria. Hence Salzburg,e.g. They made a fortune selling it to the Greeks and the Romans. Celtic warriors were valued and feared mercenaries in the armies of Carthage, Etrusca, Rome, Greece and Persia. Caesar brought millions of Celts back to Rome as slaves after his conquest of Gaul.
The missing piece is the DNA. A decade ago, I joined as world-wide genome project. I have the R1B1a2 marker which is the most common male haplotype. I am related to over half the males in Europe and America. I am also Type III Irish. While Cunliff connects the Irish to the Mediterrnean perception of the Celts, he omits the available DNA evidence.
He recognizes that Neolithic farmers from the Black Sea region entered Europe about 8000 years ago and merged with the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Sometime later (my guess is second millennium BCE - about the time of the shift from the Hallstatt Culture to the La Tene Culture) Nomadic raiders from the Eastern Steppes entered Europe. Apparently we don't know what happened in the aftermath. But a comparison of my DNA with ancient DNA shows that 47% came from the hunter-gatherers; 43% from the farmers and 10% from the nomads.
Where this book doesn't help answering when my ancestors migrated to Ireland from the Continent.
Variants of Celt were spoken all over Europe, including the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), and the British Isles. Why is Italian so different from Spanish, French and British?
I was amazed to learn that the Phoenicians set up ports on the Iberian Peninsula to trade for ores (copper and tin?) and Mediterranean countries relied on copper, tin and gold imported from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The Hallstatt Celts mined salt in Austria. Hence Salzburg,e.g. They made a fortune selling it to the Greeks and the Romans. Celtic warriors were valued and feared mercenaries in the armies of Carthage, Etrusca, Rome, Greece and Persia. Caesar brought millions of Celts back to Rome as slaves after his conquest of Gaul.
The missing piece is the DNA. A decade ago, I joined as world-wide genome project. I have the R1B1a2 marker which is the most common male haplotype. I am related to over half the males in Europe and America. I am also Type III Irish. While Cunliff connects the Irish to the Mediterrnean perception of the Celts, he omits the available DNA evidence.
He recognizes that Neolithic farmers from the Black Sea region entered Europe about 8000 years ago and merged with the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Sometime later (my guess is second millennium BCE - about the time of the shift from the Hallstatt Culture to the La Tene Culture) Nomadic raiders from the Eastern Steppes entered Europe. Apparently we don't know what happened in the aftermath. But a comparison of my DNA with ancient DNA shows that 47% came from the hunter-gatherers; 43% from the farmers and 10% from the nomads.
Where this book doesn't help answering when my ancestors migrated to Ireland from the Continent.
September 9, 2011
This huge books best feature is it is full of pics of Celtic artifacts, maps, and illustrations. He concentrates on the Celts of the European continent and not so much on what went on with them in the British Isles. He bases most of this on archaeological evidence. Not that I don't think that those sources had their biases and flaws but I think Cunliffe over does it at times with trying to discredit written accounts of the Celts. The biggest flaw this book has is, in spite of the interesting subject, the writing is very dry at times. That said its still something you probably would want to have on your shelf if you are interested in the Celts.
November 7, 2024
Interesting, detailed, and critical of sources.
October 30, 2013
This was for me the main course book, the 1997 or 1999 version, at the course "Celtic History and Culture" as Uppsala university in Sweden. As supplement books I had Miranda Green's "The Celtic World" and Nora Chadwick's "The Celts"(1997 edition).
The languish is a bit complicated and academic and it shows that he an archaeologist because he goes much on the archaeological finds but doesn't disregard the written sources available from the Romans and then Greeks but blend them in confirming what's found in the ground.
In that way he does it fantastic creating a as whole picture as we can get by the Celts, a really good book and the most complete book you can find about the Celts and how the people around them affected them!
I've read chapters 3(Barbarian Europe and the Mediterranean: 1300-400BC), 4(The Migrations: 400-200BC), 5(Warfare and Society), 6(The Arts during the Migration Period), 8(The communities of the Atlantic Facade), 9(The communities of the Eastern Fringes) and 10(Religious Systems).
From that I can say that Cunliffe don't only focus on the Celts during this period but are describing the neighboring people/cultures living in the same period before he goes on what happened to the Celts in those nearby ares and how that affected them and how things happened to those societies influence the Celts. In that way he gives us as readers the whole picture of the time which is a big advance to understand what is happening in the Celtic areas.
The only negative thing are that he disregard a lot of the sources about the heathen temples founded by the Celts in France and Germany and take away focus on them to more focus on groves and springs in the religious section.
The languish is a bit complicated and academic and it shows that he an archaeologist because he goes much on the archaeological finds but doesn't disregard the written sources available from the Romans and then Greeks but blend them in confirming what's found in the ground.
In that way he does it fantastic creating a as whole picture as we can get by the Celts, a really good book and the most complete book you can find about the Celts and how the people around them affected them!
I've read chapters 3(Barbarian Europe and the Mediterranean: 1300-400BC), 4(The Migrations: 400-200BC), 5(Warfare and Society), 6(The Arts during the Migration Period), 8(The communities of the Atlantic Facade), 9(The communities of the Eastern Fringes) and 10(Religious Systems).
From that I can say that Cunliffe don't only focus on the Celts during this period but are describing the neighboring people/cultures living in the same period before he goes on what happened to the Celts in those nearby ares and how that affected them and how things happened to those societies influence the Celts. In that way he gives us as readers the whole picture of the time which is a big advance to understand what is happening in the Celtic areas.
The only negative thing are that he disregard a lot of the sources about the heathen temples founded by the Celts in France and Germany and take away focus on them to more focus on groves and springs in the religious section.
August 8, 2025
I have never read a History book that is this unstructured. The language is dry and it's difficult to find concrete information with misleading titles of each section. Instead of writing along a timeline or some form of structure, Cunliffe has made the choice to jump back and forth, never containing any sense of order. The actual content is interesting but the lack of structure is frustrating and distracts from the fascinating life of the Celts.
October 7, 2020
Finally, i finished it.
I don't know what it is, because I enjoy learning about archaeological stuff, but the way it's presented feels so dry and just, "so in this dig they found this and this and this" and not so much about what that means? Idk.
I enjoyed the religion chapter and especially the stuff toward the end with the Celts getting pushed out / defeated by Rome and Germanic peoples. Most, most especially the little bit of Roman forces pushing through Britain.
Other than that, blah.
I don't know what it is, because I enjoy learning about archaeological stuff, but the way it's presented feels so dry and just, "so in this dig they found this and this and this" and not so much about what that means? Idk.
I enjoyed the religion chapter and especially the stuff toward the end with the Celts getting pushed out / defeated by Rome and Germanic peoples. Most, most especially the little bit of Roman forces pushing through Britain.
Other than that, blah.
November 10, 2023
Bust.
A little too dry and starts too far back in history on more general topics not directly related to the Celts. If you get this, make sure to get in paper, not eBook, and then flip to the middle of the book and start there.
A little too dry and starts too far back in history on more general topics not directly related to the Celts. If you get this, make sure to get in paper, not eBook, and then flip to the middle of the book and start there.
June 25, 2021
Not exactly fascinating prose, but some interesting notes, mostly about our more modern ideas about Celts from what I could tell.
October 23, 2017
A solid 3.5 star read. Cunliffe didn't leave me feeling like I was drowning in my research!
March 17, 2025
Barry Cunliffe's The Ancient Celts is an ambitious attempt at writing a general history of an obscure, often obfuscated ancient people. His reconstruction of the past is skillful, his weighing of the evidence measured, and his conclusions tempered with a humble admission of what we do not and cannot know. All in all, it is a good book, if a little dry.
November 18, 2012
Although this book has a gorgeous cover and the author is an Oxford professor and expert on ancient Celts, I found his writing style extremely dry. Before reading this I read "A Brief History of The Celts" by Peter Berresford Ellis, which gave me most of the same information but in a very much more interesting and lively way. Probably the most useful (for me) part of Barry Cunliffe's book are the aerial photographs of hill forts, and the maps of Celtic migrations. He doesn't seem to make any of his own hypotheses about the origin of the ancient Celts nor about their daily lives, beliefs, or behavior, which he's qualified to do, and which I'd love to hear. Too bad!
April 17, 2013
Die spinnen, die Kelten
Dieses Buch war die Grundlage eines gleichnamigen Universitätskurses, den ich in meinem Auslandssemester an der University of Glasgow belegt hatte. Letztlich bedeutet dies: Es ist eine Einführung in das Thema der alten Kelten für Fachpublikum oder für minimal vorgebildete Laien.
Von der Aufmachung her eignet es sich aber vielleicht auch als Coffee-Table-Book: Schöne Hardcover-Gestaltung, festes, dickes Papier und viele Farbfotos heben den Band aus der reinen Geschichtsfachbuch-Ecke heraus.
Dieses Buch war die Grundlage eines gleichnamigen Universitätskurses, den ich in meinem Auslandssemester an der University of Glasgow belegt hatte. Letztlich bedeutet dies: Es ist eine Einführung in das Thema der alten Kelten für Fachpublikum oder für minimal vorgebildete Laien.
Von der Aufmachung her eignet es sich aber vielleicht auch als Coffee-Table-Book: Schöne Hardcover-Gestaltung, festes, dickes Papier und viele Farbfotos heben den Band aus der reinen Geschichtsfachbuch-Ecke heraus.
October 3, 2014
As sound as it could be, this work shows a wealth of information and sources. Crafted in a gorgeous presentation, lavished cover and a beautiful edition, the performance of the subject was webbed on theories and insights rather than full scientific evidence. The narrative is low and dull sometimes, nevertheless it can keep the interest flowing.
February 15, 2023
Starting off by noting there is a divergence in opinion between the linguists and the archaeologists about the Celts the book then proceeds to give a lot of data. Often though it seems to be floating and unattached. The book as a whole didn't seem to be a single unit.
July 6, 2014
A book which gives you lots of detailed information about the subject. Still I skipped some pages, mostly those with archaeological descriptions.
July 2, 2014
A good start to celtic studies,and good pics too.Barry Cunliffe entertains.
December 25, 2014
An excellent book which I read after Nora Chadwick's work. It is well written and thought provoking.
March 22, 2018
Informative but quite a few mistakes in the text. When dealing with this amount of information it's rather helpful if the text isn't additionally confusing by grammatical errors.
October 24, 2025
My only experience with Cunliffe so far - except for his entries in Prehistoric Europe - was Iron Age Communities in Britain, so that was the book which (unfairly, I guess) set my expectations for this one. The first impression was, therefore, a bit disappointing: why so short? It's supposed to cover not only Iron Age, but the whole Celtic history, not only Britain, but everywhere Celts lived - and yet it's over twice thinner? A closer look revealed that part of the reason for this is the pages being Bible-thin (the book is some 450 pages long, but looks like 250 at best...) - but it's hard to deny it's nowhere close to the level of detail presented in Iron Age Communities in Britain. And it's not trying to be. It's more of a general overview - well written, at times quite detailed, but not dedicating 60 pages to analysing all the types of pottery available. And, despite my initial mild disappointment, I'm not sure if that's a bad thing... Not at all 😅
The first thing which stroke me when I opened the book (2nd edition, the one from 2018) was how freaking beautiful it is. The font, the text layout, the pictures - it's all so aesthetically pleasing. Everything is in colour, even those tiny icons separating page count from the text. This book has maps in colour. And it's not some super exclusive limited edition costing 5x more than the usual one; no, that's the default. How amazing is that? (In the meantime I received my copy of Britain Begins, also by Cunliffe and printed by Oxford, and it looks like this is their standard style. Wow!)
As for the text itself... Look, after that Iron Age Communities book I had no doubts it was going to be good. It's Barry freaking Cunliffe, what else can you expect? Very highly readable, lots of detail (though within a reasonable scope, as mentioned above), lots of food for thought, many passages marked for future reference. As always, I loved especially the parts related in any way to the organisation of the society and its daily (or more festive) life - the ones which make movie-like scenes flash before your eyes. One thing which I found surprising was how seriously the author treats all the ancient mentions of the Celts; while many people tend to dismiss them as biased (or maybe even fully made up) and therefore of little value, Cunliffe takes a detailed look at them and in many cases concludes that actually, the archaeological evidence bears out what the ancients wrote. Didn't expect that.
The chapters about the iron age and the Roman intermezzo felt kind of boring, as if there was no new information in them all of a sudden; turns out those are exactly the times the author covered also in his contributions to Prehistoric Europe. I'd been wondering to which extend his approach will differ in this book, written 20 years later, and... Yeah, not much. It wasn't the same essays word for word, but the content was close to identical.
Talking about differing approaches: Cunliffe is a firm believer in the Celtic from the West hypothesis, inextricably tied to the hypothesis of the Anatolian origin of PIE in Europe, and that's the viewpoint he chooses to present in this book as well. Most of the time he's doing a good job: he states it's a hypothesis, presents the alternative(s) and, despite it's clear which option he favours, he manages to stay reasonably objective. There is, however, one exception: all caution goes to hell whenever Tartessian enters the scene. Cunliffe's narrative is clear: John T. Koch deciphered it, proved beyond any doubt that Tartessian was a Celtic language, and therefore those 10th c. BC writings are the earliest examples of a Celtic language being recorded. Unfortunately, as far as I know the reality is a little more complex and Koch's findings are far from being universally accepted. And that makes a HUGE difference. Because if Tartessian was not a Celtic language, but some pre-Indo-European one, then the whole construct of Celtic from the West... Well, maybe not collapses, but turns out to be built on very shaky foundations. So that's something that surprised me too - that the author is either willing to bend the reality a bit or 100% convinced of the validity of Koch's discoveries.
The Further Reading section at the end of the book is a goldmine. Sooooo much good stuff there, and not only in English. Looks like if I want to have any chance at cracking the Tartessian controversy, I need to learn Spanish at last. Dammit!
The first thing which stroke me when I opened the book (2nd edition, the one from 2018) was how freaking beautiful it is. The font, the text layout, the pictures - it's all so aesthetically pleasing. Everything is in colour, even those tiny icons separating page count from the text. This book has maps in colour. And it's not some super exclusive limited edition costing 5x more than the usual one; no, that's the default. How amazing is that? (In the meantime I received my copy of Britain Begins, also by Cunliffe and printed by Oxford, and it looks like this is their standard style. Wow!)
As for the text itself... Look, after that Iron Age Communities book I had no doubts it was going to be good. It's Barry freaking Cunliffe, what else can you expect? Very highly readable, lots of detail (though within a reasonable scope, as mentioned above), lots of food for thought, many passages marked for future reference. As always, I loved especially the parts related in any way to the organisation of the society and its daily (or more festive) life - the ones which make movie-like scenes flash before your eyes. One thing which I found surprising was how seriously the author treats all the ancient mentions of the Celts; while many people tend to dismiss them as biased (or maybe even fully made up) and therefore of little value, Cunliffe takes a detailed look at them and in many cases concludes that actually, the archaeological evidence bears out what the ancients wrote. Didn't expect that.
The chapters about the iron age and the Roman intermezzo felt kind of boring, as if there was no new information in them all of a sudden; turns out those are exactly the times the author covered also in his contributions to Prehistoric Europe. I'd been wondering to which extend his approach will differ in this book, written 20 years later, and... Yeah, not much. It wasn't the same essays word for word, but the content was close to identical.
Talking about differing approaches: Cunliffe is a firm believer in the Celtic from the West hypothesis, inextricably tied to the hypothesis of the Anatolian origin of PIE in Europe, and that's the viewpoint he chooses to present in this book as well. Most of the time he's doing a good job: he states it's a hypothesis, presents the alternative(s) and, despite it's clear which option he favours, he manages to stay reasonably objective. There is, however, one exception: all caution goes to hell whenever Tartessian enters the scene. Cunliffe's narrative is clear: John T. Koch deciphered it, proved beyond any doubt that Tartessian was a Celtic language, and therefore those 10th c. BC writings are the earliest examples of a Celtic language being recorded. Unfortunately, as far as I know the reality is a little more complex and Koch's findings are far from being universally accepted. And that makes a HUGE difference. Because if Tartessian was not a Celtic language, but some pre-Indo-European one, then the whole construct of Celtic from the West... Well, maybe not collapses, but turns out to be built on very shaky foundations. So that's something that surprised me too - that the author is either willing to bend the reality a bit or 100% convinced of the validity of Koch's discoveries.
The Further Reading section at the end of the book is a goldmine. Sooooo much good stuff there, and not only in English. Looks like if I want to have any chance at cracking the Tartessian controversy, I need to learn Spanish at last. Dammit!
December 18, 2024
If you don't already know the names of all the various empires and subcultures of bronze age Europe, and if you happen not to carry in your mind detailed topographical and political maps of modern and ancient Europe, this book might not be the place to start. I have listened to most of this book at least twice and much of it five or more times, and I still got little more than bits and scraps of interesting stories from the text.
If, on the other hand, you enjoy pausing frequently from a book to read Wikipedia entries, this book is crammed with references worth learning about. The printed text contains beautiful visual aids, which are interesting, but which don't illucidate the writing sufficiently to make it accessible to somebody with less than an obsessive academic interest in the topic.
As much an epistemology as a history of the Celts, the author seems to compile and regurgitate various historical accounts of the Celts in a disjointed way and without much additional explanation or aid for modern readers. Not until the second half of the book does the author even start to give modern place names as points of reference.
This is frustrating, to say the least. I would expect a text on physics to entail prerequisite study, but this is a book about people and culture. It should be accessible to people, not just a hickorynut-shell-full of historians.
I am simultaneously reading Histories of Herodotus and getting much more out of it. Herodotus is a much better storyteller, and he writes his histories as chronological stories. Barry Cunliffe, by contrast, jumps here and there roughly following topics such as religion or war while traversing broad swaths of time and space, unloading the views of a handful of ancient historians with the occasional editorialization without explanations for the author's views.
Ancient geography is a prerequisite to the smooth reading of this book. Take the following for instance. "The geographer Hecataeus ... was aware that the Greek colony of Massalia ... lay in the land of the Ligurians near the territory of the Celts and that the settlement of Narbo (Narbonne) was Celtic."
Great. Where are ... or rather where were those places? Maybe my impoverished American education should shoulder partial blame, but I believe it's possible to communicate better a topic with which the audience is unfamiliar.
I lived for a year in Northern Italy and for several years in Switzerland, but I still had to google the Po Valley, which was referenced without so much as a pause to help the reader locate it mentally. Much of the geographical description merits a lengthy pause to consider the author's meaning.
Similarly, the author mentions one group of Celts preferring "impressed, or cardial pottery" but doesn't tell the reader what that means or looks like.
The search for the author's meaning is delayed further by the use of outdated termonology or terms from a less current language base, such as the Cynetoi for the Cynetes.
I had to chuckle also at the beginning of the book because the author warns against reading one's own cultural frame of reference backwards onto the Celts, especially for personal glorification. This warning bookends his name dropping of the view of Celtic research espoused by J. R. R. Tolkien, a fellow Oxford professor.
There is a lot of information in this book, albeit from the frame of reference of the author's particular worldview. However, I found the key to unlocking this information lay not in the book itself, but in Wikipedia. I listened to about 60% of the book, then started over, repeating the audiobook recording several times a minute and pausing for frequent Wikipedia searches. There are easier and more enjoyable ways to learn.
If, on the other hand, you enjoy pausing frequently from a book to read Wikipedia entries, this book is crammed with references worth learning about. The printed text contains beautiful visual aids, which are interesting, but which don't illucidate the writing sufficiently to make it accessible to somebody with less than an obsessive academic interest in the topic.
As much an epistemology as a history of the Celts, the author seems to compile and regurgitate various historical accounts of the Celts in a disjointed way and without much additional explanation or aid for modern readers. Not until the second half of the book does the author even start to give modern place names as points of reference.
This is frustrating, to say the least. I would expect a text on physics to entail prerequisite study, but this is a book about people and culture. It should be accessible to people, not just a hickorynut-shell-full of historians.
I am simultaneously reading Histories of Herodotus and getting much more out of it. Herodotus is a much better storyteller, and he writes his histories as chronological stories. Barry Cunliffe, by contrast, jumps here and there roughly following topics such as religion or war while traversing broad swaths of time and space, unloading the views of a handful of ancient historians with the occasional editorialization without explanations for the author's views.
Ancient geography is a prerequisite to the smooth reading of this book. Take the following for instance. "The geographer Hecataeus ... was aware that the Greek colony of Massalia ... lay in the land of the Ligurians near the territory of the Celts and that the settlement of Narbo (Narbonne) was Celtic."
Great. Where are ... or rather where were those places? Maybe my impoverished American education should shoulder partial blame, but I believe it's possible to communicate better a topic with which the audience is unfamiliar.
I lived for a year in Northern Italy and for several years in Switzerland, but I still had to google the Po Valley, which was referenced without so much as a pause to help the reader locate it mentally. Much of the geographical description merits a lengthy pause to consider the author's meaning.
Similarly, the author mentions one group of Celts preferring "impressed, or cardial pottery" but doesn't tell the reader what that means or looks like.
The search for the author's meaning is delayed further by the use of outdated termonology or terms from a less current language base, such as the Cynetoi for the Cynetes.
I had to chuckle also at the beginning of the book because the author warns against reading one's own cultural frame of reference backwards onto the Celts, especially for personal glorification. This warning bookends his name dropping of the view of Celtic research espoused by J. R. R. Tolkien, a fellow Oxford professor.
There is a lot of information in this book, albeit from the frame of reference of the author's particular worldview. However, I found the key to unlocking this information lay not in the book itself, but in Wikipedia. I listened to about 60% of the book, then started over, repeating the audiobook recording several times a minute and pausing for frequent Wikipedia searches. There are easier and more enjoyable ways to learn.
April 1, 2022
A fine and detailed, if slightly tedious overview of Celtic history. I liked how careful the author is, the book is free of romanticization or speculation. It's also quite thorough, I feel like I've had an advanced undergraduate class in Celtic history. I just wish the author were a bit more of a storyteller and less of a scholar.
The first part of the book is particularly slow in part because the historic record is so thin. What a shame and surprise; you'd think given the wide range of the Celtic peoples there'd be a lot more archaeological evidence. But between the way stuff tends to get built on top of older stuff and the almost non-existent Celtic written record, there's just not a lot to go on.
The book picks up significantly once they enter the period of conflict with Rome, particularly Caesar's conquest. Entirely from Caesar's point of view, of course, it helps he wrote a whole book explaining his military campaign. Cunliffe does an excellent job taking us through that book and aligning the story to other historic evidence.
What I was really hoping was for more information on Celtic culture. What was life like? There's a lot written about the possible of matriarchal power; is that all fantasy or is it real? What was the religion like? But the author is very careful not to speculate and apparently we just lack for hard evidence. He does talk about what he can, particularly from evidence of burials, but it's just not a complete picture.
Definitely recommend if you want a broad overview of the Celts. I'm still astonished there was a culture that spanned most of Western Europe before the Romans.
The first part of the book is particularly slow in part because the historic record is so thin. What a shame and surprise; you'd think given the wide range of the Celtic peoples there'd be a lot more archaeological evidence. But between the way stuff tends to get built on top of older stuff and the almost non-existent Celtic written record, there's just not a lot to go on.
The book picks up significantly once they enter the period of conflict with Rome, particularly Caesar's conquest. Entirely from Caesar's point of view, of course, it helps he wrote a whole book explaining his military campaign. Cunliffe does an excellent job taking us through that book and aligning the story to other historic evidence.
What I was really hoping was for more information on Celtic culture. What was life like? There's a lot written about the possible of matriarchal power; is that all fantasy or is it real? What was the religion like? But the author is very careful not to speculate and apparently we just lack for hard evidence. He does talk about what he can, particularly from evidence of burials, but it's just not a complete picture.
Definitely recommend if you want a broad overview of the Celts. I'm still astonished there was a culture that spanned most of Western Europe before the Romans.
December 12, 2024
Cunliffe was a dean of European archeology in the era before and during the rise of civilization in the Mediterranean, and I read this book with relish. It helped me make sense of things I had known, or at least heard, about the Celts. Cunliffe writes clearly and fitting for authoritative textbook like book that this is, he is always balanced. For example, when talking about the arrival of Indo-European languages to Europe, Cunliffe presents both the traditional Kurgan hypothesis that sees Indo-Europeans riding west from the Pontic Steppes and the more recent Anatolian thesis that suggests Indo-Europeans came into Europe as farmers, and he offers a compromise.
As far as the Celts and Celtic languages are concerned, he suggests that proto-Celtic may have started out as a trade language adopt by peoples living in Western Europe. That said, he does not draw a link between the peoples in Britain to the Basques as some have, and he does not address the argument that some of the peculiarities of the Celtic languages may derive from non-Indo-European grammatical structures. He also makes a strong case for understanding the Celts expansion eastward into Italy, and eventually further East eventually reaching Anatolia, was driven by over population. Some of these may have started out as raiding parties, but these brought back information that led to larger movements of both women and men seeking a better life. In the end though Celts only survived in their original homeland, ultimately being subsumed into the local cultures, so that they have left only linguistic remnants in the form of place names.
As far as the Celts and Celtic languages are concerned, he suggests that proto-Celtic may have started out as a trade language adopt by peoples living in Western Europe. That said, he does not draw a link between the peoples in Britain to the Basques as some have, and he does not address the argument that some of the peculiarities of the Celtic languages may derive from non-Indo-European grammatical structures. He also makes a strong case for understanding the Celts expansion eastward into Italy, and eventually further East eventually reaching Anatolia, was driven by over population. Some of these may have started out as raiding parties, but these brought back information that led to larger movements of both women and men seeking a better life. In the end though Celts only survived in their original homeland, ultimately being subsumed into the local cultures, so that they have left only linguistic remnants in the form of place names.
June 3, 2023
Undoubtedly, a thorough overview of the Celts. An excellent primer on the topic. But a rather dry read.
Compared to an equivalent book about the vikings, The Children of Ash and Elm, which I read just prior, this book on the Celts is terribly dull. The author is not particularly good at painting a picture of what everyday life for the Celts might have been like. Prose are functional. Much of the book reads like a shopping list.
Because a great deal of knowledge of the Celts comes from Roman accounts of Gall, a sizeable portion of the book focuses on the Romans. While I know this is necessary to put Galls/Celts into context, I cannot help but feel that there is an excessive focus on the Romans at times.
Cunliffe does not provide much to help readers distinguish between the people that the Romans called Galls and the people of Ireland and Britain. They are all simply termed "Celts" even after we were told in the beginning that these were not homogenous people and the term "Celt" may not even be appropriate for some.
While the book has its good moments, they are few and far between.
Definitely worth a read for the knowledge within if you can get through the dense prose. But a poor effort at lay history, which is especially irritating as history is inherently accessible to everyone. It requires no prior, esoteric knowledge to understand the way, say, chemistry does. Therefore, it is far easier to write accessible history books than science books, and so it is disappointing when such a relatively low bar isn't cleared.
Compared to an equivalent book about the vikings, The Children of Ash and Elm, which I read just prior, this book on the Celts is terribly dull. The author is not particularly good at painting a picture of what everyday life for the Celts might have been like. Prose are functional. Much of the book reads like a shopping list.
Because a great deal of knowledge of the Celts comes from Roman accounts of Gall, a sizeable portion of the book focuses on the Romans. While I know this is necessary to put Galls/Celts into context, I cannot help but feel that there is an excessive focus on the Romans at times.
Cunliffe does not provide much to help readers distinguish between the people that the Romans called Galls and the people of Ireland and Britain. They are all simply termed "Celts" even after we were told in the beginning that these were not homogenous people and the term "Celt" may not even be appropriate for some.
While the book has its good moments, they are few and far between.
Definitely worth a read for the knowledge within if you can get through the dense prose. But a poor effort at lay history, which is especially irritating as history is inherently accessible to everyone. It requires no prior, esoteric knowledge to understand the way, say, chemistry does. Therefore, it is far easier to write accessible history books than science books, and so it is disappointing when such a relatively low bar isn't cleared.
May 13, 2025
Interesting and engaging in its analysis of ancient Celtic culture and the broad narrative history of the ancient Celts.
Cunliffe does however give quite a lot of outdated theories, and also propounds his own pet theory of the origins of the Celts which most scholars view as wrong. Cunliffe claims that the Celts originated along the Atlantic periphery (essentially where Celtic languages are still spoken today) and spread eastward. By far the majority of scholars believe that the Celtic language and people originated at its earliest identifiable position in Central Europe (the Hallstatt culture in Austria) and spread westwards and eastwards from there.
He also has a strange view on how the Celtic language appeared - he believes that it wasn’t a native language of the Celts but a learned Lingua Franca that was adopted wholesale by otherwise unrelated peoples. It’s interesting but unfortunately not how languages work. His two examples of analogous languages - Swahili and Malay - do not hold up either in how he claims they developed or in their analogy with Celtic.
Given its 1990s publication date, it misses out on a whole swathe of recent ancient DNA evidence which gives favour to the old traditional theories of migration of people from Central Europe westward and eastward.
Aside from these points, the book is strongest where it gives analysis of the material and social cultures of the various Celtic tribes. It also does a very good job at analysing the way in which the Greeks and Romans viewed and interacted with the Celts.
Cunliffe does however give quite a lot of outdated theories, and also propounds his own pet theory of the origins of the Celts which most scholars view as wrong. Cunliffe claims that the Celts originated along the Atlantic periphery (essentially where Celtic languages are still spoken today) and spread eastward. By far the majority of scholars believe that the Celtic language and people originated at its earliest identifiable position in Central Europe (the Hallstatt culture in Austria) and spread westwards and eastwards from there.
He also has a strange view on how the Celtic language appeared - he believes that it wasn’t a native language of the Celts but a learned Lingua Franca that was adopted wholesale by otherwise unrelated peoples. It’s interesting but unfortunately not how languages work. His two examples of analogous languages - Swahili and Malay - do not hold up either in how he claims they developed or in their analogy with Celtic.
Given its 1990s publication date, it misses out on a whole swathe of recent ancient DNA evidence which gives favour to the old traditional theories of migration of people from Central Europe westward and eastward.
Aside from these points, the book is strongest where it gives analysis of the material and social cultures of the various Celtic tribes. It also does a very good job at analysing the way in which the Greeks and Romans viewed and interacted with the Celts.
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