Tracing the Spread of Celtic Languages using Ancient Genomics

[Kaltmeister]

Für Kurzentschlossene/For spontaneous travelers:

Lecture on the actual state of research of the battle on the Tollense, by Dr. Jantzen. Today, 18:00 in Neuwied.

   

[Riverman]

Für Kurzentschlossene/For spontaneous travelers:

Lecture on the actual state of research of the battle on the Tollense, by Dr. Jantzen. Today, 18:00 in Neuwied.

No online participation I guess?

[Kaltmeister]

Für Kurzentschlossene/For spontaneous travelers:

Lecture on the actual state of research of the battle on the Tollense, by Dr. Jantzen. Today, 18:00 in Neuwied.

No online participation I guess?

No, and as far as I can see it is not planned to film the event to present it online.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/23680838...5803784720

[Roslav]

And perhaps more crucially, there seems to be one fundamental assumption in his conclusion – density of toponymic evidence correlates with settlement/ethnic continuity.

That assumption is fundamentally wrong on all levels, because it assumes a continuity of the previous populations toponymy, kind of proving other people lived there. But this is not always the case, especially if there was as radical shift with a population replacement. This is pretty evident if looking at e.g. Austria and comparing old place names (pre-Germanic, pre-Slavic) for the non-Slavic vs. the Slavic parts.
In the Slavic parts, the survival rate of pre-Slavic place names is so much worse, than in the Bavarian-Germanic Early Medieval zone, that this example disproves the whole assumption. If there was a radical shift in the population, with little regional continuity, the earlier layers can disappear completely or nearly so. Then you might have the odd situation of areas in which say the Slavic people moved first, but in which there was some regional continuity, the frequency of Slavic place names was lower than in some of their latest acquisitions, in which there was little to no substrate effect.

To make another example for that matter, clearly Celtic place names were all over the place in areas like Austria and Hungary, before the later people came in, yet the long term survival rates especially in area with near total Slavic replacement events was rather meagre.

Yes, it does seem a bit odd that the article offers little criticism of the method. It makes the effect of successive Germanic and Slavic expansions difficult to estimate. Actually it is pretty much impossible to account for all the Celtic place names lost after Germanic tribes took over most of Southern Germany and Czechia. That many must have been replaced, seems pretty obvious when you look at the map of Celtic inscriptions in Figure 2, which he also relies on in his discussion, and contrast it with the Roman limes. 

Obviously the place names included in the analysis have been pre-selected and restricted to certain specific roots or names attested within a certain timeframe (which is reasonable, although it may introduce a stronger random factor effect). 

But the author does not really offer any solid solution. He states that “archaeological ‘cultures’ and languages do not have to coincide” and seems to dismiss the idea that Proto-Celtic originated in the area of the East Hallstatt culture (which he assigns to a hypothetical “Eastern Alpine Indo-European” language). He rather proposes that Eastern Hallstatt may have been overrun and dominated by Celtic elites at some point, which essentially implies they came from the Western Hallstatt zone. 

Remarkably, he seems much more cautious when it comes to the Western Hallstatt culture. He also seems critical of the Atlantic zone origins – “Westwards could also be the direction of travel that brought Celtic to Brittany, Britain, and Ireland” “These blanks are not what one might expect if Celtic really spread from the Atlantic”. 

So I do not really see an ultimate conclusion here, but when Lepontic is taken into the picture (which he does acknowledge to be an important factor), then it appears to me that at least he does not exclude the Western Tumulus  (as shown here https://journals.openedition.org/histoir...=1&lang=en ) and Western Urnfield/Hallstatt as the potential source of Proto-Celtic. 

There appears to be no plausible alternative. I guess it would have to be North-Central France in the Loire and Seine basin? So kind of easternmost Atlantic zone groups that somehow trickled down into Switzerland and through the Alpine passes into Lombardy? Sounds quite convoluted and by an extension of his own “most economical hypothesis” approach, the Tumulus/Western Hallstatt seems the more obvious candidate. Bottomline is, if he considers Northwestern Italy and Cisalpine Gaul as potentially part of the early Proto-Celtic area or its immediate vicinity, then Switzerland and adjoining parts of France have to be considered to be at least some sort of an intermediate Proto-Celtic homeland towards the end of the second millennium BC (Normandy and Loire-Seine included or not). I can’t really see any way around it.

[Orentil]

Für Kurzentschlossene/For spontaneous travelers:

Lecture on the actual state of research of the battle on the Tollense, by Dr. Jantzen. Today, 18:00 in Neuwied.

Hhm, tempting, would be within reach...2 h presentation, that's enough for a lot of details...

[Riverman]

But the author does not really offer any solid solution. He states that “archaeological ‘cultures’ and languages do not have to coincide” and seems to dismiss the idea that Proto-Celtic originated in the area of the East Hallstatt culture (which he assigns to a hypothetical “Eastern Alpine Indo-European” language). He rather proposes that Eastern Hallstatt may have been overrun and dominated by Celtic elites at some point, which essentially implies they came from the Western Hallstatt zone. 

He is right about Eastern Hallstatt being probably not fully Celtic at all, but this doesn't disprove anything, because at the end of the Urnfield period, there was yet another massive push from the East, with the Thraco-Cimmerian horizon and on top of that the Vekerzug pulse migration, which brought another batch of Eastern Urnfield people to the West.
That's why I wrote earlier that R-L2/Bell Beaker ancestry remained a constant, and they entered the Carpathian basian multiple times, being pushed back multplie times also!

Stages:
1) Carpathian Tell cultures were very different
2) Tumulus culture expansion brought Bell Beaker/R-L2 ancestry
3) Urnfield revolutionised the TC people and made them expand Westwards, but in the East, they were slowly pushed back by Eastern Urnfielders (Kyjatice, Lusatians, Gáva-Holigrady)
4) Thraco-Cimmerians swept them back, pushed them West and mixed with them. Venetic people were different, the Frög group and Kalenderberg group of Eastern Hallstatt showed strong Eastern, rather Daco-Thracian influences, resulting in highly mixed populations.
5) La Tene (inspired by Greek and Vekerzug influences!) started to come from Western Hallstatt, and this brought in yet another batch of fairly Bell Beaker-like/R-L2 dominated core Celtic people. Now if those people, these Celtic tribals, we see as far as the Tisza and Transylvania again, would have come from the mixed Eastern Hallstatt background, they would have looked very different, but they didn't.

So what we can observe are multiple waves of these R-L2/Bell Beaker-like people, rushing in, pushing other people in the Carpathian region back, but falling apart ultimately and being replaced themselves, either mixing, fleeing or being annihilated.
The Carpathian basin was a region everybody wanted to have, but this made it one of the most mixed and most dangerous places in the world. Only at the very Western and Eastern end there was a longer term continuity of more Celtic-like vs. North Thracian/Dacian people. The areas in between, especially Transdanubia and Alföld were basically killing fields in between, with every couple of generations steppe nomads rushing in and destroying whatever was built up in the meantime, be it Western (Celtic) or Eastern (North Thracian/Dacian) derived.

This makes me agree with Eastern Hallstatt being more like a hub which helped to transform the Western Hallstatt core region, with all those Daco-Thracian and Cimmerian-Scythian influences, which played a huge role in the development of the Celts. Like the introduction of new horse breeds, new types of mobile warfare, better weaponry and metal working, animal style - the second big influence was the Greco-Etruscan influence, from the Rhone and Northern Italy. The Western TC/Urnfield/Hallstatt people absorbed those influences, creating the final Celtic stage of La Tene.

In any case, the Celts which roamed in the Balkans could have come from the highly mixed Eastern Hallstatt-Vekerzug context. That's not possible, just like they couldn't have emerged from Uneticians before, in the Bronze Age. Such kind of people as they appear must have come from pockets which received a lot of cultural influence from the East and South, but little genetic, especially patrilinear admixture. Eastern Hallstatt is no candidate for this, because it was too mixed, especially in its endphase with the Vekerzug impact. We see that in Chotin, with lots of Lusatian-Kyjatice-Gáva lineages.

[Andour]

Therefore I expect the following to have happened:
- Straubinger group develops the core package for Tumulus culture and expands, also on top of closely related people to the West, and replacing other people to the East. How much replacement was the result of the Westward expansion is much harder to assess, since they were so closely related, compared to say the shift from Encrusted Potter to TC, which is just a clear cut thing.
- Then the Eastern TC after intensive contacts with locals develop the Urnfield package and this swaps back all the way to the Western TC border - and this is critical: Beyond! 
I'm absolutely confident that this "beyond" was associated with actual Celtic people spreading on top of people which were not Celtic, even if they were somehow, very distantly related and it was, like written above, no full scale replacement and a bit of a domino pattern.
But within the established R-L2/TC framework in Central Europe, it might be even less of a replacement event or more of it, this is impossible to tell at this point. My guess is that elites and warrrior groups moved indeed, but no large scale replacement took place.

Concerning the language, the most logical assumption is that Celtic or at least Para-Celtic languages were spoken in much of the Tumulus culture sphere North of the Alps. That's no certainty but pretty likely.

One of our problems in picturing what happened may lie in the fact that we tend to imagine a one-shot massive movement from east to west during Urnfield times.

My take is that following the spread of P312 Beakers over western Europe, a myriad dialects emerged between the Atlantic and Austria, ranging from Para-Italic to Para-Celtic. Look at a map of ancient Italic dialects. It gives an idea of how a mother language can split into numerous branches, verging on mutual unintelligibility, in a matter of centuries. Brittany is not a large region. Yet it has four distinct Breton dialects. My grandmothers lived ten kilometers apart, yet there were dialectal differences in their respective Occitans.

Ancient Lusitanian - never definitely classified, standing half-way between Celtic and Italic - and ancient Ligurian (for what is known of it) point to a language continuum with multiple shades to it.

What I think happened in the Late Bronze Age is not a full-scale massive migration from east to west, nor even an orderly domino pattern. It's more like what happened (and can be documented) in the Iron Age with, for example, the migrations of the Boii : individual clans independently deciding to wander afar, explore and settle where they could make room for themselves - some of them crossing the Channel. Something, also, that might resemble the later Germanic migrations, with the difference that Urnfield era migrations sent people raiding into areas which were genetically and linguistically similar or close. The tribes who moved may have been under pressure from each other, or from some climate event, or lusting for land due to demographic expansion. Bear in mind that the same period witnessed the raiding spree of the Sea peoples, and the Tollense battle. People leaving the TC core areas must have spoken less diverged dialects. Ultimately, those close dialects found themselves sprinkled all over western Europe, with hotspots of settlement which superseded the locals and then grasped more land until they were in contact with each other. For the people conquered, switching to the new dialect may have been a somewhat painless effort. Over time, this had a unifying effect over a huge linguistic area, even though variants survived (the Sequani and Celtiberian apparently didn't turn P-Celtic).

I also think this wanderlust lasted over time, through the Hallstatt period, and into La Tène times. In the 9C BC, populations all over western Europe leave the plains and take refuge in hillforts. Why should they do so unless danger was rampant ?

The Gaulish incursions into the Padan plain, and the decision of the Helvetii to migrate to the Atlantic coast might be ascribed to the same "tradition". Not mentioning the Gaulish trip to Galatia.

[Riverman]

We do have documented scenarios for how and why people moved. Basically there are a couple of options, but the most common are:
- The population became to big for the regional ressources. A subset of the population, similar to the "ver sacrum" scenario, with a chosen group of the tribe having to leave and search for new opportunities with the weapon in their hand.
- warlords and warbands start raids, they poke in, they plunder, if they sense weakness, they simply take over, either by subduing locals, taking local wives or annihilating the locals.
- large scale efforts to expand in a coordinated fashion. Like the Uneticians seem to have done it already. This requires more structure, at least chiefdoms, if not proto-states.
- The next applied to kind of desperate or a bit greedy people. In any case a whole tribe starts to look for better opportunities. Some Celtic tribes did that and we know from the historical accounts that they even burnt their houses and fields, to make clear they never want to return to their old home and have to conquer a new one. This is more drastic for more agrarian and settled people, which need to think more carefully about this. Like we know, again from the historical accounts, that the same Celtic tribes were used to grain and couldn't last long on the move, without plunder and settling down again. This is therefore no real "wanderlust" in my opinion, but turns pretty quickly into desperation. Which was, in most such instances, at the start of the migration as well, since pressure from outside was the main motivation behind the decision.

The good thing about ancient and modern DNA records is we can deduce some pattern from it. Like if there would have been no genetic shift at all, even a mild domino effect wouldn't be viable. But if there is a significant genetic shift, like the recent paper, which started the debate, claimed, and we see a significant influx of new patrilineages as well, as far as Britain, we can be pretty sure things were moving. Just definitely not a replacement event, but rather elites and specialists migrating, with small nuclei of settlements probably from which newcomers could radiate in specific instances.

[Mitchell-Atkins]

Was there a proto-Hallstatt area that lead to the later western and Eastern Hallstatt?

Eg where the western and eastern zones overlapped in Austria, Bavaria and Czechia?

[Riverman]

The impulse for the formation of Hallstatt came from the East (Thraco-Cimmerian horizon) and kind of affected much of the earlier Urnfield areas up to Austria heavily. Whereas it was a more direct influence to the East, it was a more mediated to the West. Pretty similar to the Unetice influence say in Lower Austria and Leubingen vs. Straubing. Like again the core zone of R-L2/U152 the Proto-Celts was less affected.
I personally struggle as to how much Celtic or something else groups like the Unterkrainische group were. I mean they were heavily influenced by the Thraco-Cimmerian and North Thracian, as well as Northern Italian sphere, but at the same time they clearly show connections to the Western groups as well. The more West one goes, the more West Hallstatt-like things become.

[Mitchell-Atkins]

“ An Alternative to ‘Celtic from the East’ and ‘Celtic from the West’”
The author

rather proposes that Eastern Hallstatt may have been overrun and dominated by Celtic elites at some point, which essentially implies they came from the Western Hallstatt zone

My question about  a proto-Celtic area that led to the eastern and western Hallstatt zones:

If, as riverman proposes, the tumulus/urnfield back flow west was the impetus for Hallstatt’s origin, then I would lean towards a Danube River valley in northern Austria and/or southern Germany as being a good candidate for a Celtic starting point; that leads to both the western and eastern Hallstatt zones.  

Edit:  I guess what I’m proposing is an area east of the author’s West Hallstatt idea, but west of the Eastern Hallstatt centroid.

Not sure if that aligns with archaeological data, but just throwing it out there.

[Roslav]

But the author does not really offer any solid solution. He states that “archaeological ‘cultures’ and languages do not have to coincide” and seems to dismiss the idea that Proto-Celtic originated in the area of the East Hallstatt culture (which he assigns to a hypothetical “Eastern Alpine Indo-European” language). He rather proposes that Eastern Hallstatt may have been overrun and dominated by Celtic elites at some point, which essentially implies they came from the Western Hallstatt zone. 

He is right about Eastern Hallstatt being probably not fully Celtic at all, but this doesn't disprove anything, because at the end of the Urnfield period, there was yet another massive push from the East, with the Thraco-Cimmerian horizon and on top of that the Vekerzug pulse migration, which brought another batch of Eastern Urnfield people to the West.
That's why I wrote earlier that R-L2/Bell Beaker ancestry remained a constant, and they entered the Carpathian basian multiple times, being pushed back multplie times also!

I think this is good reasoning. Such a dynamic model with fluid border zones sounds much more realistic to me. Also, given what we know about potential extent of Rhaetic, Venetic and Liburnian, and also Illyrian, Eastern Hallstatt seems a less likely source of Proto-Celtic, but who knows what languages were spoken in Austria (and also Slovenia with parts of Hungary) at that time. Some of them could have easily been part of a Para- or Proto-Celtic/Italic language continuum. They sure seem to have shared a considerably similar cultural and genetic heritage. A more western origin may perhaps be further supported by the earliest accounts of Celts (Hecataeus and Herodotus) and Celtic-Lepontic inscriptions from the 6th-5th centuries BC (attachment). They all point towards an area centered around Switzerland and the Western Alps – Upper Danube, Upper Rhine and Rhone Valley. Roughly Baden-Wurtemberg, Switzerland, Alsace, Lorraine and Franche-Comte. 

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51wu..._QL80_.jpg 

https://celticbreizh.com/local/cache-vig...-996df.jpg 

This is the core area of Western Tumulus/Hallstatt and, probably more coincidentally than not, the two areas showing highest density of Roman inscriptions containing Celtic names are located immediately to the South and to the North of this zone, while the area of highest Celtic place names density in France (from the Barrington Atlas) to the West and North-West, map. They all overlap to an extent. 

 There are many more unique features of material culture that overlap with the same area, so the composite picture appears pretty suggestive. Personally, to me the big question is – how far beyond, to the West, East and North of this central area (which seems like a safe bet), did the early Proto-Celtic zone (by which I rather mean a range of related dialects like Celtiberian, Gaulish, Lepontic and Noric than some single, uniform vernacular) extend between ca 1500-1000 BC (I'd say that most obviously Southern Germany along the Danube is a natural extension of this zone).

[Riverman]

If you look at the map it is worth to note that we probably got some sort of Para-Celtic or Celtic people in an area, yet they had different admixtures and pretty different cultural orientations.
E.g. the Unterkrainische group and the Frög group appear to be pretty simlar on the East Hallstatt sphere of things, both are just "blue" on the map.
Yet their orientation was completely different:
- The Unterkrainische (Lower Krajina) group had strong ties with the Illyrians and Venetic people, practising inhumation in clan tumuli, similar to the Illyrians
- Frög group on the other hand was pretty much completely oriented to the East, with strong ties to the Thracian sphere, having rites like cremation burials, Thracian ceramic, even widow sacrifices (compare with the Indian Sati ritual) and other typically Eastern-Thracian customs.

Yet we can assume the majority in both instances, despite the immigration of Daco-Thracians and Illyrians respectively, was speaking some sort of Centum language, if not Celtic.

From Frög we have no results, unfortunately, but from the Unterkrainische we have a couple of results and the majority turned out to be Tumulus culture derived R-L2, with one J-L283 Illyrian outlier. Yet we can see, even in that context, that the Unterkrainische group was mixed.

I expect Frög to be also highly mixed, probably even more so (my assumption is it had some North Thracian E-V13 also), so the more clearly core Celtic terrritory is supposed to start to the West/North of these groups, rather.

[Mitchell-Atkins]

The area I was proposing would be centered on those gray squares along the Danube, which overlaps with Tumulus heartland and the aforementioned Straubing group.



From a spatial perspective, it’s a good spot for expansion from a core area

[Orentil]

Für Kurzentschlossene/For spontaneous travelers:

Lecture on the actual state of research of the battle on the Tollense, by Dr. Jantzen. Today, 18:00 in Neuwied.

Hhm, tempting, would be within reach...2 h presentation, that's enough for a lot of details...

Thanks again to Kaltmeister for recommending this presentation by Detlef Jantzen. Very nice, informative presentation even there was nothing spectacular new. Jantzen still favors the theory that in the Tollense valley a trade caravan was ambushed by a group of locals (maybe members of the Mecklenburg group), explaining the quite diverse Sr-isotope, archaeological and DNA finds.
Interesting is that they really plan to analyze the DNA from all around 90 skulls together with 14C measurements to be sure that this was a single event.