Social changes in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Wales: The beginning of Celtic Wales? In R. Karl, K. Möller (eds.), Proceedings of the second European symposium in Celtic Studies, held at Prifysgol Bangor University from July 31st to August 3rd 2017, 159-179 Hagen/Westf.: curach bhán 2018.

During the late Bronze and Early Iron Age, significant social changes seem to be affecting the communities inhabiting Wales. While in the millennia before, the archaeological record seems to be showing a mostly egalitarian social organisation, things seem to change dramatically in the first half of the first millennium BC. Before this change, social difference seems to have hardly been expressed and conspicuous consumption of human labour mostly been focussed on communal, inclusive projects. During the first half of the first millennium BC, expression of social difference becomes the norm, especially in the context of the conspicuous consumption of human labour: particularly some, but by no means all, settlements and their boundaries are monumentalised. This creates ‘private’ spaces which apparently were accessible only to some members of the community to the exclusion of a majority of ‘others’; at the same time creating and expressing social difference. It is argued in this paper that these changes allow to date the beginning of a ‘Celtic’ Wales in a sociological sense: it is at this point in time that the kinds of societies emerge that characterise Wales for the next two millennia; that is, the kinds of ‘Celtic’ societies described in later historical sources, both classical and indigenous. It is such archaeologically traceable, local changes, which provide a considerably better starting points for our discipline and its historical narratives than idle speculations about the introduction of particular languages from abroad in prehistory; that is, in periods characterised by definition by the absence of any linguistic sources.