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Even though Celtishness is today mainly expressed in language, music, sport and other cultural
pursuits, there lurks beneath it an unspoken belief in some form of ancient Celtic race whose
descendants live on today. Could genetics test this assumption? Is there a genetic basis for this
underlying belief in a race, or races, of ancient Celts and can we show it by sifting through the
genes of today’s ‘Celts’? Or is Celtishness a purely cultural phenomenon, at once sincerely felt and
eagerly exploited but with no underlying biological framework?
If behind the paraphernalia of the Celtic brand there really does lie some grain of substance in
the notion of a Celtic people, this immediately begs the question of when they arrived in the Isles
and where they came from. Indeed, where does the notion that the Celts ever existed as a separate
people, capable of acting together, moving together and arriving somewhere, actually stem from?
The notion, oddly enough, is a surprisingly recent one. It began to take shape in the years around
1700 when Edward Lhuyd, from Oswestry on the Welsh border, became the director of the
Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Lhuyd travelled widely in Ireland, Wales and the Scottish
Highlands, collecting antiquities and manuscripts for the museum and recording the folklore of the
lands he visited. On his travels he noticed the similarities between Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish
and Scots Gaelic and the ancient languages of Gaul. In his book Archaeologia Britannica,
published in 1707, he was the first to group these languages together and embrace them under the
generic term of Celtic. He was also the first to point out that the languages belonged to two distinct
sets, distinguished from each other by their pronunciation. The harsher consonants of Breton,
Cornish and Welsh (as in ap, meaning ‘son of’) led Lhuyd to call these the P-Celtic languages,
while the softer sounds of Irish and Scots Gaelic (as in mac with the same meaning) were referred
to by Lhuyd as Q-Celtic. Having found a language family, it was all too easy to invent a people and
Lhuyd very soon constructed a historical explanation of how this linguistic continuity may have
come about. He suggested that, first of all, Irish Britons moved to the Isles, but were pushed into
Scotland and northern Britain by a second wave of Gauls from France, who then occupied Wales
and the south and west of England.
Implicit in all of this is the concept that there existed one or more groups of Celts who moved
around from one place to another, taking their language with them as they went. This is an idea in
the grand tradition of migration as the sole explanation for cultural change – a tradition which until
recently dominated not only linguistics but archaeology as well. A type of pottery or a particular
burial ritual found in two different places was taken as proof that people from one moved to
occupy the second. This type of reasoning drove archaeology for most of the twentieth century and
became the standard dogma for the spread of any cultural change, be it language, weapon design,
stone tools or even agriculture. In the last twenty years or so the pendulum of academic fashion has
begun to swing to the other extreme, where nobody actually moves anywhere except to pass on
their ideas and scurry back home.
But back to the Celts. Edward Lhuyd, though he helped create the concept of the Celtic people,
did not invent the word. It makes its first appearance as Keltoi in ancient Greek, where it is used as
a derogatory catch-all name for strangers and foreigners, people from another place. Uncivilized,
rough, uncouth, not ‘one of us’. By the time Julius Caesar wrote his Gallic Wars, around 60 BC, the
people of Gaul, according to Caesar, called themselves Celts. So while the Greeks used Keltoi to
refer to outsiders, coming from beyond the limits of the civilized Mediterranean world, the name
itself might originally have come from one or more of the tribes themselves. For the Romans, the