- Chapter Six -
centres of political power and of developing social hierarchies. Some of the most
massively fortified sites in prehistoric Europe, however, were built by the early
farming societies of the Neolithic, societies which we like to think were much less
differentiated than those of the Iron Age. It is essential, therefore, to avoid inappro-
priate analogies with the medieval and later world and to recognize that the world of
the Celts was fundamentally different from our own.
Taken together, these lines of evidence suggest that Celtic society was marked by
important differences of social status, but the basis on which the authority and power
of those enjoying higher status rested needs to be further explored. The degree
of such differentiation can easily be exaggerated, and we must resist the temptation
to reconstruct Celtic society as we would like it to have been.
SOCIAL GROUPS AND IDENTITIES
There is no evidence to suggest that anyone in prehistoric or early historic times
thought of himself or herself as a Celt. On the contrary, names such as Celt, Gaul
or Gael were given by outsiders, whether Greek geographers, Roman historians or
Anglo-Norman conquerors, according to their own perceptions of themselves
and other peoples. Such large-scale identities were never shared by the so-called
Celts themselves, despite a certain similarity of material culture, especially in such
areas as art and prestige goods, throughout much of Europe, nor was there ever any
political unity at such a scale.
The largest social or political groupings that may have been meaningful were
much smaller. The classical authors refer to many groups such as the Arverni, the
Helvetii or the !ceni; Caesar's regular word in Latin for such groups is civitas, usually
translated into English as 'tribe', and though they may have been very different in
internal organization from the classical city-state, his use of the term shows that
he recognized them as political entities. At their largest, they could number several
hundred thousand people; when Caesar conquered the Helvetii, he gave their
population as 263,000 and, although there may be some doubt about the exact figure,
the general order of magnitude must be correct (De Bello Gallico 1.2-30).
Some of these tribes are known to have comprised a number of smaller groups, for
which Caesar's term is a pagus; it is not clear, however, whether these were equal
subdivisions, perhaps on a territorial basis, or whether they were groups subordinate
to the dominant one which gave its name to the larger entity. Whether they had an
ideology of identity, at the level of either the civitas or the pagus, based on concepts of
ethnicity or descent rather than just on political allegiance to a common elite and a
single individual, is obscure. Archaeology has had little success in identifying common
traits in sites or material to match these political groups. In the Late Iron Age, the
production and distribution of coinage has often been attributed to a tribal origin
(e.g. Nash 1978a), but that may merely reflect the political purpose of the coins;
otherwise, the very rarity of such apparently tribal traits as the gold neck-rings of the
Iceni in eastern England or the distinctive inhumation burial tradition of the Parisi in
east Yorkshire simply emphasizes how little such identities were signalled in ways that
archaeology has yet been able to recover, if indeed they were signalled at all.88