Huddersfield contributes to British Museum event on Celtic origin
(Left to right) Professors Richards, Koch, Aldhouse-Green, James and Cunliffe at the British Museum special event last Friday. Photo credit: Jonathan Mitchell
Fri, 23 Oct 2015 10:03:00 BST
A professor from the Department of Biological Sciences at Huddersfield has recently taken part in a prestigious panel discussion on the origins of the Celts at the British Museum in London.
Professor of Archaeogenetics Martin Richards was invited to join four of the country’s leading experts on Celtic archaeology and languages at the Museum last Friday. The event was part of a wider programme for the public organised by the museum to coincide with a major new exhibition, Celts: art and identity.
The exhibition presents a radically new vision of Celtic origins that has been developing amongst scholars over the past twenty years. The fresh perspective is an inter-disciplinary synthesis that has brought together archaeologists, linguists and – most recently – geneticists too.
The traditional view took as its starting point references to Celts as “northern barbarians” in the classical Greek and Roman texts, and homed in on the sources of so-called “Celtic art” that spread widely from Central Europe in the Iron Age, during the first millennium BC. By contrast, the new view focuses on the Celtic languages, arguing that they spread into Central Europe from the Atlantic façade much earlier, possibly with an ultimate source in the Copper Age of Portugal and Spain. This model has been dubbed “Celtic from the West”.
The event at the Museum, entitled In search of the Celts: beyond art, language and genetics, was chaired by Oxford University’s Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe, and included archaeologists Professor Miranda Aldhouse-Green (Cardiff) and Professor Simon James (Leicester) – who was amongst the first to challenge the traditional view of the Celts. Also speaking was linguist Professor John Koch (University of Wales in Aberystwyth), whose work on inscriptions from the Iberian Peninsula has identified the earliest known written evidence of the Celtic language family, and who with Professor Cunliffe is a pioneer of the “Celtic from the West” model.
The event broke new ground by bringing together scholars from three very different disciplines to discuss their work on Celtic origins in a public forum, and it also highlighted the importance that genetic studies, especially using DNA from ancient human remains, are beginning to assume in the debate. This is now an important focus of research for the Archaeogenetics Research Group at Huddersfield, which uses DNA from both living people and ancient remains to track human migrations. The work is being carried out as part of a major new research effort that began with the launch of the new Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarship programme in September.
