What are the flaws in Barry Cunliffe’s “Celtic from the West” hypothesis that still don’t make it a very compelling /popular theory?
Could you give us a brief synopsis?
The prepondrance of webites I’ve seen support the Hallstadt origins of the Celts and their expansion across western Europe and the Briish isles from there. I don’t see a lot of schiolarly critiques of the more recent Cunliffe/Koch hypothesis.
The Cunliffe/Koch hypothesis
" points to a west European and Iberian origin of the Celtic people in the Late Bronze Age or earlier."
it “challenges that once almost universally held view that the origins of the Celts lie with the Hallstatt…This traditional view was also developed over the last three centuries. culture of the Alps…A more recent view of Celtic origins points to it having evolved from Europe’s Atlantic western coastal areas. Interesting cultural similarities exist along the western seaboard of Europe, stretching from the Iberian Peninsula, along the Atlantic coastline and up to Ireland and northern Scotland.”
Leaving aside the problematic nature of “Celtic” as a cultural, not linguistic, concept in itself, there are apparently problems with categorization of Hispanic language as Celtic which the theory relies on.
It seems Celtic From The Centre is the new hotness, anyway… this paper addresses Cunliffe’s arguments directly:
Should someone get a jump on Celtic From the North, Celtic From the South, and Celtic From Outer Space papers?
Don’t forget Celtic From Pellucidar…
Or if we want to go with the Hollow Earth theory:
Celtic from the Center of the Earth AKA Lizard Celts
Hey, Patricia Kennealy (Kennealy-Morrison) wrote a whole series about Celts in outer space. Annoyingly, it wasn’t popular enough for the planned third series to get written. She died this year, so I guess those of us who liked it will never learn where she planned to go with it.
Thanks MrDiubble. This is useful and balanced.
This is my field and I know all three authors (Cunliffe, Koch, and Sims-Williams), so I’m reluctant to say too much on a public message board. Cunliffe is not a linguist, but he is a brilliant thinker who is providing some much-need challenges to received wisdom. There are so few people working on Continental Celtic, and every new discovery changes the map, that I think the short version is “wait another few years: they’re still working it out.”
My own prediction is that the Hallstatt theory is right for inherited Indo-European Celtic, but that Cunliffe is right about what sent it spreading up the Atlantic coast to the British Isles. The problem is that Koch is (sorry, John) flat-out wrong about some of the key language questions, though to his credit he’s at least examining things afresh that others have long ruled out.