Ancient Celts

The ancient Celts were various tribal groups living in parts of western and central Europe in the Late Bronze Age and through the Iron Age (c. 700 BCE to c. 400 CE). Given the name Celts by ancient writers, these tribes and their culture migrated and so they established a presence in territories from Portugal to Turkey.

Although diverse tribes and never a single unified state, the ancient Celts were connected by the Celtic language and marked similarities in art, modes of warfare, religion, and burial practices. Although the Celtic culture was absorbed within the Roman Empire from the 1st century BCE, Celtic people continued to thrive in more remote parts of Europe like Ireland and northern Britain where Celtic languages are still spoken today.

The term ‘Celts’ is commonly used to refer to peoples who lived in Iron Age Europe north of the Mediterranean region prior to the Roman conquest after ancient writers gave them that name. However, it is a problematic label. This is because these peoples were not part of a unified state but, rather, belonged to a multitude of tribes, many of which had no direct contact with each other. The term remains useful for its convenience but it does disguise the complex relations between different western and central European tribes, the overlapping of some cultural features in time and space, and the isolation and uniqueness of other such features. The European Iron Age was certainly a vibrant period of cultural interaction, trade relations, warfare, and migrations. Most scholars agree that the origins of Celtic culture can be traced back to three earlier, closely-related, and overlapping cultural groups. The first of these is the Late Bronze Age Urnfield culture present around the upper Danube from c. 1300 BCE.

The name of this culture derives from the common practice of interring the cremated remains of the deceased in urns and burying them. These peoples remain obscure for lack of archaeological evidence. From the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE and over the next two or three centuries, ironworking technology spread across Europe. As a consequence, iron replaced bronze as the metal of choice to make stronger and more durable tools and weapons.

The second proto-Celtic group was the Hallstatt culture, named after the site of that name in Upper Austria, which existed from c. 1200 to c. 450 BCE but was at its peak in the 8th to 6th century BCE. The Hallstatt culture spread to cover what is today western Austria, southern Germany, Switzerland, and eastern France on the one side, and eastern Austria, Bohemia, and parts of the Balkans on the other. It was the western side of this area that would eventually develop into what we might today call the ancient Celts. The Hallstatt culture likely spread via various means such as trade, tribal alliances, intermarriages, imitation, and migration. These peoples prospered thanks to local deposits of salt, iron, and copper; commodities which could be traded along waterways. That trade reached as far south as the Mediterranean cultures (the Etruscans in Italy and the Greek colonies in southern France) is evidenced by the presence of imported goods in Hallstatt burial mounds and precious goods such as gold and amber jewellery. The Hallstatt culture went into decline in the 5th century BCE, likely due to local resources running out, increased tribal competition, and the shift of trade routes elsewhere.

World History