ABSTRACT
In the mid-fifth century bc Herodotus referred to the people living on the Danube, near the Pyrenees and in further Spain, whom he called the Celts (Histories 2.33, 3.115, 4.49). His writing contributed to the classification and interpretation of his world and that of his audiences (Tierney 1960: 189–93; Hartog 1980), yet in many ways his comments continue to characterise current approaches to the European Iron Age, which largely reflect the presumption that geographically definable groups should be the subject of an essentially historical study.
