[Delbáeth]

As a general reply to those in the thread who have suggested that the Celtic people conquered and imposed their Culture and Languages on the indigenous people of the British Isles for example, well whilst reading a book, the author suggested another theory. Bear in mind, this is a book on general Scottish history, and it isn’t an in depth look into the Scottish peoples origin:

Who were the Celts?

The popular notion persists that at some time around 700 bc, Scotland was conquered by the Celts. These woad-painted, sword wielding warriors from central Europe had already over run most of the continent; now they arrived at these shores, subdued the natives, and made this land their own. By such means did the Celtic become apart of the European wide Celtic society stretching from Ireland to eastern Europe, a culture that would in time defiantly resist the armed might of Imperial Rome. The truth is very probably something different.

The idea that our history evolved around a cycle of invasions, colonisations and displacements is relatively recent. It originated in the nineteenth contrary through archaeologists attempting to explain how certain material objects or physical structures sharing close characteristics came to be found dispersed over huge distances. Hence the invention of the ‘beaker folk’, who at the start of the ‘Bronze Age’ created a form of pottery that is found widely around Europe. The creation of the Celts as an all conquering race followed the same logic. It was based largely on the discovery of decorative metal work from a lake near La Tène in Switzerland, of a type also to be found over great swathes of Europe. Archaeologists put 2 + 2 together - and came up with 5. They presumed that language and material culture (art, architecture and so forth) could be spread only through conquest.

That there was a tribe called the Celts is undeniable. The Greeks referred to the ‘Keltoi’ in the sixth centaury bc, and subsequent Roman authors wrote of the ‘Celtae’. By Julius Caesar’s time in the first century bc, these Celts were inhabiting southern and central France. Nowhere is there any hard evidence that these same Celts had invaded and conquered Scotland centuries earlier.

What there is evidence for, though, is of several closely related languages linking the people of a substantial part of northern and western Europe - and these tongues, which included Scottish Gaelic, Pictish, Cumbric and Brittonic, have been labelled ‘Celtic’. The error archaeologists made in the nineteenth centaury was to equate the linguistic spread with the material evidence. So how could language spread if not through conquest?

The answer is that it could have just been easily spread through the process of exchange and trade. As far back as Stone Age times, highly prized commodities like stone axes were traded over immense distances. During the Bronze Age the rare metals of gold and tin were similarly ‘exported’. In order for good to be traded, merchants would have needed to converse. Even if their respective languages were quite different and mutely unintelligible, some form of common language would have been required. This is after all how Swahili developed in more recent times, a fundamentally bandu tongue modified by Arabic through the extensive East African trade and now spoken by 30 million people world wide.

That said there might conceivably have been some small-scale conquests, or movements of tribes, from continental Europe into Scotland during pre-Roman era. Caesar him self wrote that Belgae, whose southern boundary marched with that of Celtae, having crossed to Southern England sometime before 100 bc, and it may be that similar encroachments were made along Scotland’s eastern coast. It is also conceivable that the arrival of the Belgae put pressure on new indigenous population and forced them north in search of pastures new. Famine and disease may also have prompted such wholesale movements of people.

Notwithstanding the passage of time, there is still a unique bond uniting the ‘Celtic’ peoples, chiefly those of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Man. There is no denying the common language and culture that identifies us, that marks us out of being from a common root. But it is most unlikely that the Scottish link with the Celtic tradition all came about with a single conquest, as attractive and as fascinating as that idea sounds.

This theory makes some sense too me, but then again I don't know all the theories out there.