Instead, I have decided to rant about some points that I think matter, and to summarize and paraphrase some of the these approaches in that context, leaving out all jargon. It is sometimes interesting to see what is left. First, they did. At least the Greek and Latin authors were much preoccupied with questions of ethnicity, usually other peoples'. Second, Ancient ethnicity has much current relevance, in that ideas of past ethnic identity inform not only such relatively innocuous phenomena as the Celtic Renaissance but they are also invoked to bolster conflicting claims in very real and bloody clashes over modern peoples and territories.
Ethnicity is everywhere.
Third, our scholarly researches take place within this context of resurgent interest in differentiating among ethnicities. The interwoven strands of archaeology and ethnic focus from the 17th century to the present have been exhaustively studied. Emotions run high in the current dispute over whether the ancient Celts ever existed, and if so what relationship if any they had to 20th century occupants of the British Isles. In the case of Greece, everyone seems to know and care who the ancient Macedonians were and should be now. Given the painful history of fatal perversions of our disciplines leading up to and during the third Reich, it is perhaps not surprising that German archaeology and prehistory have been suspended in an anti-theory interpretational deep freeze for the past half century.