Newsgroups: soc.culture.celtic
Subject: Re: Who lived in Great Britain before the Kelts?
From: phys218@csc.canterbury.ac.nz
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 05:07:52 GMT
Organization: University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Mark Eaton wrote, "Im reading Colin Renfrews 'Archaeology and Language,
the puzzle of indo-european origins'. excellent, Id recommend it...
anyways, the Iberian speaking people were in Spain and Portugal prior to
the spread of indo-european culture (Celts and others)...
The group of people in Britain prior to IE were the Bell Beaker Civ...
They were members of a wider Beaker civilization which covered much of
central and north europe. They were a neolithic culture, characterized
by individual mound burial, perforated stone axes, and handle-less
pottery. (bell beaker pottery).
The influx of IE culture into europe began as early as 3000bc, and
should have reached britain by the middle of the 2000 or so...
Renfrew seems to think that IE culture was not, for the most part,
carried by nomadic invaders, but was spread from community to community,
accompanying the superior tech (equestrianery, wheel, bronze working)...
and IE languages of course."

I think that Prof. Renfrew goes further than that, Mark.  His approach
is processual - he looks at the various ways in which a language can
become dominant in a district or region (at last some archaeologists
are using the language of science, mathematics), and concludes that, in
the case of the Indo-European languages in Europe, the only plausible
explanation for their dominance is that they were the languages of the
first group to densely populate the land - the first farmers.

In other words, according to the Renfrew thesis, in most of Europe the
*first* farmers or neolithic settlers were speakers of Indo-European
languages.  The major exceptions would be regions where existing
populations became dense enough to hold on to their own customs, either
by developing a successful local non-farming economy or by adopting
farming techniques before the Indo-European speakers settled among
them. Such regions might include the Atlantic and North Sea coastal
regions where there seem to have been large mesolithic populations and
which were most remote from the initial neolithic settlements in the
south east.  We amateurs might speculate that languages such as Basque
and the supposed non-Indo-European component of Pictish are survivors of
that kind.

If the neolithic settlers who gradually covered Europe in the three or
four thousand years after about 6000 B.C. were speakers of Indo-European,
then their language(s) must have changed over that time.  The "wave of
settlement" theory transforms language change over time into language
variation in space.  The later languages of any given region (allowing
for disrupting movements) would be the result of the subsequent
evolution of whatever kind of Indo-European was spoken by the people on
the neolithic "wave front" as it passed through that region.  From
memory, I think that Prof. Renfrew suggests that the Celtic languages
are descended from the Indo-European spoken spoken by the first farmers
in central and western Europe.  The Q-Celtic and P-Celtic classification
would then arise from the results of subsequent local evolution.  It is
possible that the users of the famous bell beakers were speakers of
ancestral Celtic languages.

Given the lack of evidence of any substantial pre-neolithic population,
its seems almost certain that the first inhabitants of Ireland must have
been Indo-European speakers.  Whether their language or was ancestral to
the Gaelic is another matter.  That it was is suggested by the lack of
evidence of any significant new settlement after the first neolithic
settlement.  On the other hand, if one of the legendary invasions, such
as that of the Milesians, put in place a new, foreign ruling aristocracy,
its langauge might have replaced that of its subjects by the mechanism
of elite dominance that has more recently seen English pushing out the
Gaelic.

It's fun speculating, anyway.

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Lyndon Watson                              L.Watson@csc.canterbury.ac.nz
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Newsgroups: soc.culture.celtic