Celts

[Strabo]

Any samples from the french Tumulus culture sites? Are they L2 heavy like the eastern Tumulus?

Would be cool to compare with RSFO era samples

[Strabo]

Celtic west of the Rhine has to have existed before RSFO. It’s likely RSFO is an urnfieldised group which expanded west from the west bank of the middle Rhine judging by the origin point of the particularl pottery subgroup. In my view Celtic must have existed on the west bank of the Mid to upper rhine in the middle bronze age and RSFO was a subgroup of that that was urnfieldised and then underwent secondary expansion west. It’s definitely part of the story of Celtic spreading but it’s not the whole story.

Would not any west bank middle-upper Rhine MBA be related to Tumulus? (and therefore linking RSFO to Tumulus as well) 

www.academia.edu/40403116/_La_grande_illusion_Une_r%C3%A9vision_critique_du_r%C3%B4le_des_tertres_fun%C3%A9raires_de_la_for%C3%AAt_de_Haguenau_dans_la_diffusion_de_la_Culture_des_Tumulus_Bronze_B2_Bronze_D2_

Celtic west of the Rhine has to have existed before RSFO. It’s likely RSFO is an urnfieldised group which expanded west from the west bank of the middle Rhine judging by the origin point of the particularl pottery subgroup. In my view Celtic must have existed on the west bank of the Mid to upper rhine in the middle bronze age and RSFO was a subgroup of that that was urnfieldised and then underwent secondary expansion west. It’s definitely part of the story of Celtic spreading but it’s not the whole story.

Can you be more specific and give the name the group and a link to a paper about it? Did you have Deverel Rimbury/Manche Mer-Du Nord in mind? 

See page 101, À l’aube du Bronze final entre Manche et Escaut. Un faciès céramique Deverel-Rimbury tardif ? 

http://aprab.org/jet/PreprintHaA1.pdf

[Strabo]

yea I agree that many look like some kind of shared not borrowed vocab but the fact very little of it is not known i’m Italic would push it into maybe the post-2200BC era when somehow the distant ancestors of Celtic and Germanic were adjacent but Celtics old Celto-Italic partner had moved away from contact. So it looks to me like late beaker/EBA date rather than going right back to earlier eras. The shared non IE part in Celtic and Germanic is not in Italic which similarly suggests it dated to late beaker times c.2200BC at earliest and was not absorbed immediately in the single grave culture 2900-2300BC.

https://indo-european.eu/wp-content/uplo...-early.jpg

Would you associate proto celts with Reisenbecher?

[Manofthehour]

I wonder what the haplotype distribution is like for these expanding groups. In present-day France, DF27 has as much if not more of a presence throughout most regions than U152. L21 increases in gradient towards the North and West. 
I'd imagine this to be the case with Gallic tribes.

Is most DF27 in France linked with a more archaic substratum that later receives (mostly L2?) migration from the Rhine in LBA? I wonder if DF27 was already a predominate (or close to, or at least as much) Y-lineage as U152 in the EBA-LBA Middle Rhine.  
Who knows at this point I guess. 

[alanarchae]

Celtic west of the Rhine has to have existed before RSFO. It’s likely RSFO is an urnfieldised group which expanded west from the west bank of the middle Rhine judging by the origin point of the particularl pottery subgroup. In my view Celtic must have existed on the west bank of the Mid to upper rhine in the middle bronze age and RSFO was a subgroup of that that was urnfieldised and then underwent secondary expansion west. It’s definitely part of the story of Celtic spreading but it’s not the whole story.

Would not any west bank middle-upper Rhine MBA be related to Tumulus? (and therefore linking RSFO to Tumulus as well) 

www.academia.edu/40403116/_La_grande_illusion_Une_r%C3%A9vision_critique_du_r%C3%B4le_des_tertres_fun%C3%A9raires_de_la_for%C3%AAt_de_Haguenau_dans_la_diffusion_de_la_Culture_des_Tumulus_Bronze_B2_Bronze_D2_

Celtic west of the Rhine has to have existed before RSFO. It’s likely RSFO is an urnfieldised group which expanded west from the west bank of the middle Rhine judging by the origin point of the particularl pottery subgroup. In my view Celtic must have existed on the west bank of the Mid to upper rhine in the middle bronze age and RSFO was a subgroup of that that was urnfieldised and then underwent secondary expansion west. It’s definitely part of the story of Celtic spreading but it’s not the whole story.

Can you be more specific and give the name the group and a link to a paper about it? Did you have Deverel Rimbury/Manche Mer-Du Nord in mind? 

See page 101, À l’aube du Bronze final entre Manche et Escaut. Un faciès céramique Deverel-Rimbury tardif ? 

http://aprab.org/jet/PreprintHaA1.pdf

I’m afraid I don’t really have answers. It just seems to me that given a italo-celtic is believe to be a very brief and early node just after NW IE, then the branch leading to Celtic likely split off Italo Celtic somewhere on the west side of the Rhine by the late beaker period and that some form of pre proto or para Celtic likely existed quite widely from then on. I kind of imagine para Celtic dialects all over future northern/central/eastern Gaul and the British Isies througthe whole Bronze Age and any regional version of cultures that fell into that area (be it early bronze age, mid bronze age western tumulus/channel maritory or late bronze age RSFO urnfield or NW Atlantic late bronze age would have spoken para Celtic dialects as that was simply the dialects of the zone. 

I also think there would not have been constant divergence like a tree model but periods of convergence. Different para Celtic dialects would rise and fall due to the level of prestige they had. But often the networks like NW Atlantic late bronze age and urnfield actually had considerable interaction. Britain in the late bronze age basically took most of its metalwork ideas from urnfield then put an insular spin and then spread them via networking in the Atlantic. We also seem to be able to detect a fair amount of movement from France and adjacent in yhr autosomal DNA of the late bronze age of Britain - a time when Britain was in the Atlantic Bronze  Age network AND receiving string influences from urnfield metalwork, So I don’t think the Atlantic and Urnfield networks were quite as separate as people tend to think. Britain was actually s conduit for urnfield influence into the Atlantic. 

I tend to suspect by even 1100BC there might have been several Celtic dialects operating including a west urnfield one and a NW Atlantic/insular one. I think the realtity was likely very complex like you see in ancient Greece with dialects rising and falling and spreading and replacing depending on prestige. For example, without any kind of conquest, the Macedonians switched from their own dialect to the prestigious Greek koine i

[alanarchae]

one thing we know about the absolutely certain Celtic speaking areas as the dawn of history is they tended to be genetically conservative populations in areas where the yDNA still closely resembled the basic pattern set down in beaker times. This also looks true of the iron age Latins. The conservative yDNA pattern that seeks characteristic of Celtic speakers at the dawn of the light of history strongly implies that Celtic arose within the zone of that kind of very beaker derived populations - likely north/central/eastern Gaul. This also matches the weird way proto Celtic seems to have almost zero borrowings from othet IE groups. Both thr genetics and the proto language do not fit for example the busy melting pot of yDNA, cultures and vast regions you see in core unetice or indeed most of Germany for example. It rather better fits a peripheral conservative location with an extremely bell beaker derived population to the west of the Rhine. There are a lot of isoglosses exclusively shared between pre proto Celtic and pre proto Germanic that sage g shared with Italic or anybody else. So I tend to think the real area where the branch that led to Celtic was located in the early to mid bronze age was a lot more northern than the kind of north alpine zone where a lot of people have placed it. It’s much more likely to have been along the west bank of the mid and upper rhine imo than anywhere further south or east of the Rhine.

I suppose what I am saying is I think early Celtic or pre proto Celtic was likely permanently established in much of the Gaul/west bank of Rhine (and probably the isles) from the beaker era and basically all the later cultural phases and networks did not budge it and indeed were likely local adaptors/participants rather than any kind of linguistic displacement. Though I will temper that with the likelihood different dialects of the same branch could rise to prestige and spread by elite adoption - as can be seen in ancient t Greece.

[alanarchae]

oh and I certainly am not denying that there would have been internal migration and conquest within the greater early Celtic zone I have argued for above. But that would only mean one Celtic dialect replacing another a celtic dialect. Certainly the recent studies of French and British iron age genetics indicates Gaul and Britain were genetically conservative and their yDNA strong echoes patterns there since the beaned era. You could say that much of the Celtic speaking block of Gaul, Britain, Ireland and Iberia were (in course grained terms) basically backwaters where beaker era yDNA was still incredibly dominant when ghr Romans arrived. This is in sharp contrast to the big turnovers of yDNA you see east of the Rhine starting immediately at the end of the beaker era.

[Strabo]

This is in sharp contrast to the big turnovers of yDNA you see east of the Rhine starting immediately at the end of the beaker era.

Could you be more specific? I thought the oldest samples of P312 gang (barring L21) were to be found  in southern half of Germany, and that there is a continual presence of p312, specifically U152 stretching along the danube until the Germanic times. Are you saying P312 was kicked out of southern germany at the end of beaker and then came back to colonise it again?

[Strabo]

Im not really sure what a celt actually is. 

Perhaps an alternative approach would be to instead focus on individual celtic peoples, geography and languages from securely celtic speaking areas by LIA. For example, proto-Gauls, proto Celtiberians, Proto lepontics/Golaseca, proto britons etc to see if there are some post beaker common threads. I am not sure if a proto gaul profile would differ from a proto celtic one that much if gauls stayed in the homeland. I wouldnt include peoples from Armorica, south france or south of the Garonne in my definition of a proto gaul even if people from there were later known as Gauls/Celts. If post proto celtic spread relatively late, then the ancestry of celts who separated from proto celts would in theory be linked to more "unadmixed, conservative" proto gauls. So for example a north/central europe ancesctry input into the assimilated populations, maybe something like East France IA perhaps?  

A non danube homeland of celtic means that IA samples in the danube region that cluster with or are shifted towards France or East France IA would be the most likely result of La tene "celtic" (I would say Gaulish to be more precise) eastward expansion. And/or earlier expansions from west to east. However I gather that the current of expansion of cultural packages before La Tene was from east to west, hence a pre La tene eastern expansion of proto gauls less likely?

[Riverman]

What's for certain is that Celtic emerged from the Tumulus into Western Urnfielders horizon.
The Tumulus culture groups expansion seems to have had a relatively genocidal character in most regions, which means in the regions they conquered, not much of the preceding population, especially the male population, survived and persisted.
That's not exceptional, especially in that MBA-LBA time frame, but its worth being pointed out.

That layer of the Tumulus culture seems still ti have encompassed the vast majority of Italo-Celtic Centum speakers in my opinion. Not necessarily Italic and Celtic only, but a related range of dialects.

In the East of this formation R-L2 is the nearly exclusive carrier of this culture.

[Orentil]

Not sure if everybody here is aware that there is a big project called "Microscope" running at the MPI in Jena lead by Stephan Schiffels to investigate  the 'Celtic' world? However, it might take some time till we see a big publication.

https://www.eva.mpg.de/archaeogenetics/p...icroscope/

"With this new toolbox, we are undertaking the largest archaeogenetic investigation of the pre-Roman European Iron Age to date. A specific focus will be the ‘Celtic’ world, encompassing a core region spanning from parts of France into Slovakia, and which reached its maximum extent in the third century BC, spanning from the Iberian Peninsula to Anatolia. We collaborate with a large number of partners from archaeology and anthropology, as well as genetic laboratories, to sample and analyse 600 skeletal remains from this region and time period. Using the new methods, we investigate i) population structure during the early Iron Age in the 'Celtic' core region of Western and Central Europe; ii) the genetic evidence for the so-called 'Celtic migrations' from the third century BC; iii) how migration and population admixture are reflected at the community- and family level by ‘zooming in’ into selected archaeological sites to reconstruct family pedigrees.
"Celtic" culture, language and burial customs were once widely spread across Europe. In this project, we are sampling hundreds of skeletal human remains from this time period to investigate the European Iron Age."

[alanarchae]

whatever the story of the spread of Celtic language and culture, the Celts we encounter when we actually know pretty well for sure they are Celtic (basically about 600BC-100AD) are not only heterogenous but they also very strongly divide into blocks where one of the main branches of P312 or another is utterly dominant - and (in course grained resolution terms) that dominance appears to reflect what was set down in the beaker era. So I do not believe most of the genesis of Celticity was down to some sort of major demographic steamroller. It looks much more like an outcome of constant interaction among elites through the bronze age.

I think the bronze age is key because unlike the more territorial polities of the iron age (certainly the La Tene era), it’s very striking how the elites of the bronze age were mostly marked out by control of metals, exotica etc over distance and keeping up with fashions. There was likely not a huge land hunger in most of the bronze age. The same land could support much larger populations as we see in the AD era. The estimates of the population of north-central Europe grow a bit but not spectacularly between say 2400BC and 800BC. It’s usually estimated to start steepening in the iron age with a big jump at the end of the iron age. So I think that to some extent explains why elites focussed on control of materials etc through the Bronze Age. Land just wasn’t a scarce commodity in north and central Europe in the bronze age. Plus of course, before iron, controlling bronze was incredible power - if you were denied access that would effectively send you back to the stone age.

So imo Celtic evolved across a very wide area among elites and was probably a lingua franca too. Communication was vital for elites based on long distance networking They likely intermarried and fostered over distance constantly to retain that ability. So imo there was more a constant flow of permanent (wives) and temporary (fosterage, super-tribal specialists/religious classes etc) and that may be the bulk of the story of Celtic. Invasions did happen but they were likely rare regional specific events and most were likely triggered by iron age rises in population pressure which would not have been such a big factor in the bronze Age.

[Riverman]

The Celtic impact in the East is very noticeable and definitely a tribal migration. The main problem in the West is the general similarity of Celts and neighbouring Bell Beaker derived people.

A recent comparison in a paper, I don’t remember which, points to a clear heartland of the associated profile in South Western Germany and adjacent French and Swiss territories.
I guess it will boil down to that in the end.

The Celtic G2 branches are an interesting piece of the puzzle, because they appear everywhere and are more clearly defined by low resolution samples, unlike R1b Bell Beakers.

[alanarchae]

The Celtic impact in the East is very noticeable and definitely a tribal migration. The main problem in the West is the general similarity of Celts and neighbouring Bell Beaker derived people.

A recent comparison in a paper, I don’t remember which, points to a clear heartland of the associated profile in South Western Germany and adjacent French and Swiss territories.
I guess it will boil down to that in the end.

The Celtic G2 branches are an interesting piece of the puzzle, because they appear everywhere and are more clearly defined by low resolution samples, unlike R1b Bell Beakers.

I doubt it. They might be a subset but I doubt the core of protocol celtic could be in that area. Certainly not in that kind of confined zone. It also doesn’t fit very well linguistically because that is a bit of an interface zone and early sources place Raetians who were undergoing Celticisation at that very time in that kind of area.  It’s also an area where many people fancy seeing Italics entering Italy and it is true archatologu shows repeated string contacts with that area in the early, middle and late brinze age . Linguists place celts-Italiv as a short phase just after common NW IE. Yet proto Celtic has no borrowings from Italic, Raetic etc. I don’t think it’s possible to place both Celtic and Italic anywhere near each other after the EBA. I think you need to look much further downstream on the Rhine to find a king terms part of the area in which Celtic evolved. Remember Celtic’s only known linguistic contact is with pre-Germanic. Loads of common vocab. I think RSFO was the urnfieldisation of a middle rhine west bank Celtic group. I’m pretty sure it was part of the Celtic world. Though that is of course impossible to know. later on the same area is a La Tene core, again indicating it was persistent part of the Celtic world. I am not convinced the celticity ot the Alps could be that deep

[alanarchae]

i’ve thing I think people need to understand is how easily elites will shift from one dialect to another of the same language if it becomes prestigious in their wider network. It’s much easier to do than change to a totally different language family. We see this in ancient Greece where kingdoms and tribes will switch to the dialects of another tribe/kingdom like when the Macedonians switched to the prestigious koine. A much later example is Ireland c. 550AD when en-masse all the dozens of irish petty kingdoms suddenly switched to a new dialect ‘Old Irish’ over a generation or two at most. That was not at all about invasion, conquest etc because ireland remained a very politically fragmented island for centuries after. But what it did have -and this likely goes back deep into prehistory - was super tribal learned class of druids (later church men), poets, elite craftsmen, lawyers etc AND MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY they had a strong tradition where the elite effectively swapped their children between the ages of toddler to about aged 16. That tradition has been spotted in brinze age ancient DNA is several areas including Bavaria. Some fosterlings were many 100s of miles from home.

That at first seems a very weird practice but it makes sense if it was specifically designed back in the bronze age as a means of keeping of keeping constant convergence and mutual intelligibility among elites spread all over. It’s also very useful for political alliances. I actually think fosterage is the magic ingredient that only very recently has become identified as very important in IE studies. It was discussed in the most recent book on the subject.