Celts and Cargo Cult Science
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 15/10/2015

Oliver Nakoinz
INSTITUTE OF PRE- AND PROTOHISTORY, KIEL UNIVERSITY

When the famous physicist and Nobel price winner Richard Feynman coined the term 'cargo cult science' in 1974, he observed a lack of integrity in superficially correct research. This paper will show, that the Celtic paradigm is some kind of cargo cult science. Ethnicity as a paradigm in Iron Age research is seldom questioned. But does is possess the necessary integrity? It appears thatethnicity is woven into a system of key terms: ethnicity, nationalism, race and culture. These components supplied the air of significance, modern science, empiric evidence and historic identification, support each other and circumvent critique. Butassumptions appear to be wrong. The danger is twofold: In the socio-political system ethnic knowledge can be used to suppress minorities and in the scholarly system dubious knowledge becomes established. The Celtic paradigm grew in an
environment as described and persisted as knowledge, which is supposed to be valid.

Modern cultural theory and network theory will be addressed as alternative approaches for the ethnic paradigm. Some of the advantages of a formal analysis culture are, that it does not implicate ethnic or racial interpretations, that it is not restricted to spatially bounded cultures, allows to map nested structures and can represent fuzzy borders. The strength of network approaches is, that they focus on relationships and can map rather complex interaction structures. Although these approaches overcome some of the problems with the ethnic paradigm, we have to be aware, that they are also prone for wrong assumptions.