Celtic from the West 2: Rethinking the Bronze Age and the Arrival of Indo-European in Atlantic Europe

Front Cover
Oxbow Books, 2013 - Foreign Language Study - 237 pages
Europe's Atlantic façade has long been treated as marginal to the formation of the European Bronze Age and the puzzle of the origin and early spread of the Indo-European languages. Until recently the idea that Atlantic Europe was a wholly pre-Indo-European world throughout the Bronze Age remained plausible. Rapidly expanding evidence for the later prehistory and the pre-Roman languages of the West increasingly exclude that possibility. It is therefore time to refocus on a narrowing list of 'suspects' as possible archaeological proxies for the arrival of this great language family and emergence of its Celtic branch. This reconsideration inevitably throws penetrating new light on the formation of later prehistoric Atlantic Europe and the implications of new evidence for interregional connections.
Celtic from the West 2 continues the series launched with Celtic from the West: Alternative Perspectives from Archaeology, Genetics, Language and Literature (2010; 2012) in exploring the new idea that the Celtic languages emerged in the Atlantic Zone during the Bronze Age. This Celtic Atlantic hypothesis represents a major departure from the long-established, but increasingly problematical scenario in which the Ancient Celtic languages and peoples called Keltoi (Celts) are closely bound up with the archaeology of the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures of Iron Age west-central Europe.

About the author (2013)

Professor John Koch is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, University of Wales. His interests include the languages, literatures, and civilizations of the early Celtic peoples from prehistory through the early Middle Ages. His works have developed original ideas in such fields as the earliest Welsh poetry, the Mabinogi, Continental Celtic, Irish saga literature, St Patrick, the classical authors' descriptions of the ancient Celts, and Bronze Age and Iron Age archaeology. He is the author of groundbreaking volumes, such as The Gododdin of Aneirin and The Celtic Heroic Age, has co-authored major innovative works, such as The Inscriptions of Early Medieval Brittany, and has contributed widely to international volumes and journals. He is the co-editor of all three Celtic from the West volumes. Barry Cunliffe was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 2007. He has worked on many of the iconic British excavations including Fishbourne Roman Palace, Danebury Hillfort and Hengistbury Head. He is an authority on the Iron Age and the Celts, and the author of many scholarly and popular publications including The Oxford Illustrated History of Prehistoric Europe, Britain Begins, and The Celts, A Very Short Introduction.

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