No, this is not a post about how ladies and gentlemen of the nineteenth century recovered after too many pints of Guinness. Rather, it is about how nineteenth-century ideas about culture and identity have held on so tenaciously in popular history that even now, over a century later, we still have to struggle against them when trying to talk about peoples of the past. One of the subjects that often brings up these outdated ideas is “the Celts.”
Searching for the Celts
Here’s how the Victorian version of history goes. Between 500 and 400 BCE, a new group of people known as the Keltoi to the Greeks or the Gauls to the Romans, whom we call the Celts, emerged in the area of southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. From this homeland, they expanded explosively outwards in all directions led by aggressive warrior princes who fought from two-wheeled chariots with long iron swords. They raided Italy and Greece but were prevented from conquering those regions by the armies of the Greeks and Romans. In the west and north, however, the native peoples were far less sophisticated and could not resist the invaders. The Celts conquered France and Belgium, northern Spain, and the British Isles until at the western shores of Ireland their expansion was finally halted by the Atlantic Ocean.
Co-Geeking 
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