CHAPTER NINE
PEOPLE AND NATURE IN THE
CELTIC WORLD
--.•. --
Martin Bell
T
he prehistoric environment is often perceived as natural and wild. By later
prehistory, however, few environments were passive backcloths to human
activity; most had been, or were being, fundamentally changed by people. Here we
are concerned with the environments of the first millennia Be and AD over much of
Europe, extending from the British Isles to the Black Sea and from southern
Germany to the Mediterranean. Most of the evidence reviewed is from the western
half of this area, in parts of which humanly created 'cultural landscapes' had
come about thousands of years before with the activities of the first farmers. In
other instances major changes resulted from deliberate actions during the period
in question.
Past environments can be reconstructed using many sources of evidence. Lakes,
peat bogs, valleys and occupation deposits on archaeological sites provide sequences
of sediment containing biological evidence, such as pollen, seeds, wood, snails,
insects and animal bones, which document landscape change during the period whilst
the deposits were accumulating. For further discussion of sources of evidence see
Evans (1978) and Bell and Walker (1992).
The geographical area in question exhibits remarkable diversity in terms of both
its natural and cultural landscapes. There is not something inherently identifiable as
a distinctive 'Celtic environment'. The area is defined, not by environmental criteria,
but in terms of that geographical area which classical writers described as Celtic
(Chapter I); the distribution of Celtic place-names and linguistic elements; and
various aspects of material culture which are regarded as Celtic. Each of these criteria
defines an entity at differing points in time. Where we place the geographical
boundaries varies according to the criteria we adopt and the date in question. This
chapter takes rather a wide geographical view and includes evidence from the
Netherlands and some reference to work in Denmark.
Geographically loosely defined as the Celtic world may be, it none the less
represents a significant entity for the investigation of particular issues concerning
people-environment relationships. There are, for instance, the environmental
consequences of the relationship between the politically and economically powerful
so-called 'core' areas of classical societies, Greece, Etruria and Rome to the south, and
the 'periphery' of the Celtic world to the north. It is a period of dramatic social
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