longwayhome
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quote:
ORIGINAL: jlf1961
Actually, they are typical cliche' cracks
And in truth, the only problem I have with the UK stems from a bit of a ruckus which forced an ancestor from his native land to avoid having his neck stretched in 1848.
And the Welsh, Scot, Irish tendency to hold grudges for centuries is well documented.
As for the original inhabitants of the Isles in question, the best guess (as good as any other I suppose) predating the Celts consisted of various bands of neolithic nomads who, considering the neolithic settlement remains may have started to die out around the end of the last ice age. Evidence suggest that by the time the Celts arrived around 500BCE, the islands were sparsely populated, without a centralized cultural identity...
So, that gives the Celts the longest standing claim to the Islands, so all those that came after, Romans, Guals, Normans, Britons (originally from a part of France, not Britain itself,) Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Norse, etc are just migrant invaders.
But, lets face reality here, everyone knows that the Celts are the true superior peoples, I mean Saint Brendan did discover America before that blasted Viking got out of diapers.
No, not true, mate.
Let's leave aside the principle that no-one has a longer standing claim because all citizens have an equal claim, whatever their genetics or culture, and just concentrate on your assertion that the Celts were the first organised society replacing a previous culture which was dying out.
There were waves of Celtic invaders from around 750BC. The Brittonic Celts (the Britons) were in fact amongst the earliest and can partly be identified from their common language which developed into Welsh, Cornish, Cumbric, Breton and by postulation Pictish although there is some debate about this given the paucity of the language evidence for Pictish. The Britons therefore were the original wave of Celtic invaders/settlers not a later migration as you suggest.
There were similarities in the Brittonic languages and culture, thus why they are grouped together. The suggestion is that from sometime after 800BC the British and its closely related variants was the primary language of the eastern island now referred to as Great Britain.
The Irish and Scottish Celts arrived later, their culture displacing the previous Bronze Age culture of the western island (now referred to as Ireland) and eventually, through a long process of warfare and assimilation also displacing the very vibrant kingdoms at the time in what has become Scotland, these people produced a dominant Gaelic Celtic culture across Scotland and Ireland. (This was of course much later when Roman Britain had come and gone, and what is now England had been subject to further waves of European migration.)
However the Celts were far from the "original" inhabitants of the Ireland or Great Britain.
The pre-historical settlements before the Ice Age from around 12,000BC to 10,000BC are now thought to be permanent rather than entirely nomadic but they did come to an end with the Ice Age. There is evidence of settlement after the Ice Age between 6000BC and 4000BC after the disappearance of the land bridge created the British Isles in the modern geographical sense, and these sporadic settlements developed into thriving Neolithic and Bronze Age societies and cultures. Once again there is evidence for waves of settlement, e.g. the Beaker people, who were linked culturally to mainland Europe. This was all between 4000BC and around 800BC. The Celts as evidenced by their language and culture came after this.
The societies and cultures of the pre-Celtic Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples cannot be said in any way to be insignificant and they were for thousands of years the inhabitants of the islands before the Britonnic Celts (the Britons arrived). They formed vibrant cultures from Orkney to Cornwall, with their most enduring cultural artefacts being the henges or stone circles present across the islands, including the Scottish islands. This was all well after the Ice Age and there is no evidence that these people died out or declined in any way, except that they were superseded by the Celts and Celtic language and culture.
In that sense the Celts were "invaders" who came to dominate the previous Bronze Age cultures. The mixed process of peaceful settlement, competition and warfare which led to their society and culture being superseded in the islands as a whole did not take place as a result of a single invasion. The first wave of Brittonic Celts whose culture came to dominate the Great British Island was crucially before the second wave of Gaelic Celts in Ireland. In Scotland it was the coming of the second wave of Gaelic Celts who eventually superseded the Brotonnic Celtic Kingdoms in Scotland, including the kingdom based in Dumbarton which remains Britain's longest surviving polity. This too was not a single process of invasion but a mixture of settlement, war, conflict and cultural suppression.
In no way therefore can the Celts be regarded as the original post Ice Age inhabitants of he Britain and Ireland. Their culture superseded the previous Bronze Age cultures as they were economically and militarily more advanced.
I have kept referring to culture for a very specific and important reason. In terms of population the Celts assimilated with the existing population, and their culture came to dominate society. The Celts did not however replace the previous population, like a new species moving into the geographical range of a dying or declining species. Yes the population grew but it was growing anyway. The Celts did not sweep across an empty country populating it, any more than the Romans or Normans did centuries later.
Finally the two different Celtic cultures were for some time two related but distinct cultures across the islands. They were not however in any sense two polities or even political systems. There were also a variety of languages which were comprehensible to each other, just like many Slavic languages but they were not the same. From that point of view the Celtic migrations may have reduced the cultural diversity of the islands, but can hardly be said to have formed the first recognisable society, especially when there were previously settled societies with active cultural and trading links across the UK and into Europe.
Let's be clear. I am a Celt from the Celtic fringe of the UK but, even if I wanted to, I cold not play the game of claiming that "my" people are anything other than one of a number of migratory groups who came to these islands, first dominating (and possibly oppressing) the previous culture, then contributing to Britain's modern cultural diversity. Even the genetics such as we understand them suggest that many of the waves of migration, separated by time, were of people with the same genetic make-up but with different cultures and technologies. So playing the game of the "longest standing claim" is complicated, if not foolish.
The UK is my country because I live and work here. In modern parlance I am a citizen. My rights and worth are the same as all the other people who live and work here, whenever their ancestors arrived.
Spouting historically inaccurate facts to back up spurious claims for one group over another is a fool's game.
< Message edited by longwayhome -- 2/22/2017 11:36:11 PM >
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