Speaker: John Collis
It is usually assumed that Celtic Art got its name because it was the art of the Ancient Celts, but this is only true in a round-about way. When it first gained this name it was thought that the style was confined to Britain and Ireland, and was rare or unknown on the continent. The first use of the term seems to be by Daniel Wilson in Prehistoric Scotland in 1851 but the first article and definition is by John Obadiah Westwood in 1856 to describe the Early Christian Art of Irish and northern and western British manuscripts and stone monuments. John Kemble (1857) first recognised that it was also prehistoric, and his work was published posthumously by Sir Wollaston Franks in 1863 in Horae ferales, which was widely cited across Europe. The use of ‘Celtic’ was based on the false assumption that the ancient inhabitants of Britain and Ireland were Celts, when in fact this is a modern invention, starting in 1582. It was not until the end of the 19th century that the continental dimension was recognised, by Sir Arthur Evans in the 1880s and 1890s, continuing on with other English publications by J. Romilly Allen (1904) and Reginald Smith (1905). In Germany the main publisher of prehistoric metal finds, the elder Ludwig Lindenschmid, refused to accept there was any metalworking north of the Alps before the arrival of the Romans. In France and Switzerland it was assumed that the Celts had arrived in the Bronze Age and were replaced by Gauls in the Iron Age. Joseph Déchelette was the first continental scholar to accept the concept of Celtic Art (1911-14) re-dating the arrival of the Celts in France to the Iron Age, laying the basis for 20th century interpretations of the Ancient Celts. In 1944 the German scholar Paul Jacobsthal who fled to Oxford in the 1930s, published a monumental study ‘Early Celtic Art’ which in the later 20th century led to the belief that the art and the Celts originated in southern Germany in the 6th – 5th centuries BC, an interpretation which has increasingly come under attack in the last 30 years.
Prof John Collis has written extensively about the Iron Age in Britain and Europe, in this context especially his book ‘The Celts : Origins, myths and inventions’ looking at the development of the concept of the Celts. He has excavated especially in France, and in his native Winchester, and, in Derbyshire, the multi-period burial site of Wigber Low near Ashbourne. He was a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology in the University of Sheffield from 1972 to 2005, including a period as Head of Department.
Society Lecture