CHAPTER SIX
POWER, POLITICS AND
STATUS
--.•. --
Timothy Champion
I
n modern society it is normal to distinguish different areas of activity such as the
political, the economic and the social. These divisions, however, are the product of
a historically specific set of recent and contemporary societies and should not be used
automatically as appropriate categories for the discussion of other social groups; the
division, for instance, between a public sphere of political activity and a private
sphere of social life is predominantly a recent one. It has been common in recent
years for archaeologists to talk of the economy being 'embedded' in society; to use
another metaphor, we should perhaps think of political, economic and social as being
three different facets of the same set of activities.
Nor should we be tempted to think of a uniform type of Celtic society. Whether
it is right to think of the Celts as a homogeneous ethnic group with a common
descent, language and culture, or merely as a language group, or even more
minimally as a grouping imposed by others, it is unrealistic to think that their social
organization was the same throughout the whole of the time and space in which they
are recorded. The enormous differences in settlement and economy shown by
archaeology, between the Late Iron Age in central Europe and the Early Christian
period in Ireland for instance, suggest that the scale of social organization and its
degree of complexity must equally have varied. There may have been some features
which recurred from time to time throughout this large geographical and chrono-
logical range, and may have been derived from a common origin, but we should not
start out with the expectation of a uniform pattern of Celtic society and a common
set of social practices.
THE EVIDENCE
As with other aspects of our knowledge of the Celts, we are dependent for our
understanding of their social organization upon two types of evidence, the archaeo-
logical and the documentary. Questions about social organization are much harder
to answer than those about material culture or technology, and both of these types
of evidence raise special problems of interpretation, of rather different sorts.
The documentary evidence requires double interpretation; in other words there is