ABSTRACT
To the question ‘can we meaningfully talk about Celtic art?’, we have answered in the affirmative, but not simply as careless shorthand for La Tène art. It is possible to argue from the documentary record of ancient historians and geographers that there were people known to the classical world as Celts, and even people who regarded themselves as Celts. Furthermore, the evidence of personal and place-names, admittedly in many cases known from Roman period sources, allows us to infer, in the absence of any evidence for ethnic incursions to account for their recent introduction at that late date, that the Iron Age populations of Western and west Central Europe spoke related languages that are classified as Celtic. A case can therefore be made for regarding the art of any of these population groups, whether identified as Celtic on ethnic or linguistic grounds, as Celtic art. Plainly this must include La Tène art: indeed, the magnificence of the La Tène art phenomenon justifies giving it pride of place in any treatment of the subject. The fact that the archaeological distribution of La Tène culture is not coterminous with those areas recognized as Celtic ethnically or linguistically need excite no particular difficulty. Not since the generation of Gordon Childe have archaeologists expected such close correlations for many reasons, not least that the dynamic process of cultural interaction and change would have obscured geographical territories and boundaries over time. But it is also abundantly clear that Atlantic Europe had a different character archaeologically from the Urnfield-Hallstatt-La Tène sequence of Central Europe, and without presuming an Atlantic unity that may be more apparent than real, the Celtic zone evidently included a non-La Tène as well as a La Tène aspect.
