On the Physical Anthropology of the ancient Celtic warriors (original) (raw)
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Ancient Celts: A reconsideration of Celtic Identity through dental nonmetric trait analysis
2021
The Celts are a collection of tribes and/or populations that inhabited much of Central Europe during the Iron Age and are still something of an enigma. The relationship among the spread of their material culture, the application of Celtic ethnicity, movements among the diverse populations possessing Iron Age Hallstatt and La Tene artefacts throughout Central Europe believed to have been spread by Celtic people, and/or spoken languages identified as Celtic have long been questioned by researchers. However, previous research has primarily focused only on chronological and typological descriptions and documentation of diachronic change. Diverse populations throughout Europe have been intrinsically linked based on perceived similarities in burial practice, art styles and material culture. Subsequently, these associations have resulted in the creation of the so-called La Tene=Celtic paradigm. Under this paradigm, the presence of La Tene artefacts designate a population as Celtic, which i...
International Ancient Warfare Conference, UCD, Dublin, 28 June 2018, 2018
Polybius has traditionally been ignored as an ethnographic author in the tradition of Herodotus. This is mainly due to the lack of ethnographic digressions as they appear in the work of the Halicarnassian. However, a closer look at Polybius' scattered descriptions of the Celts throughout his own Histories shows a vivid interest not only in the character of the Gauls, but also in the macro models of his predecessors who explained the differences between different peoples in the oecumene with different paces of development, the climatic nature of the respective regions and other philosophically inspired theories. The paper will show that Polybius used these arguments to make the Celts appear more primitive and dangerous than they actually were as to convince his readers that the Romans, who had often fought against this 'Barbarian' foe, were the defenders of civilisation and should be accepted as rulers over the Greek world.
2016
Dental anthropological study of the proto-Celts, and continental and non-continental Celtic tribes during the Iron Age, particularly its applicability in estimating biological affinities of these tribes, has been generally overlooked. The present study helps fill the gap in the current understanding of these groups in several ways. First, 36 morphological traits in 125 dentitions from four regional samples, representing the proto-Celts, the continental and non-continental Celts, along with a comparative European Iron Age sample, were recorded and analyzed. Frequencies of occurrence for each dental and osseous nonmetric trait were recorded for each sample. Second, the suite of traits was then compared among samples using principal components analysis, (PCA), and the Mean Measure of Divergence (MMD) distance statistic. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis were subsequently employed on the triangular pairwise MMD distance matrix to graphically illustrate the relationships betw...