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16 The Celtic World – a history
about 400 BC . The invading Celts subdued the aboriginal inhabitants of the island with their superior iron weapons. According to him this immigration produced a complete revolution in the life of the country, introducing a new culture, a new language, new rulers, a new organization. 2 Matters were much the same in England at this time. In 1920 the archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford studied a series of hoards of bronze objects and concluded ‘towards the close of the Bronze Age the British Isles were invaded by the first wave of Celtic- speaking peoples bringing with them leaf-shaped bronze swords, many other entirely new types of bronze objects, and at least two types of pottery new to these islands’. 3 Very influential in British archaeology, he was employed by the Ordnance Survey and is renowned for founding the important archaeological journal Antiquity and for his early use of aerial photography. This invasion model was widely accepted and developed in various ways in the following decades. However, in time it was recognized that the distribution of some sword types might reflect trade and exchange rather than the movement of migrating Celtic ‘sword-bearers’. Eventually 1.1 A cartographic reconstruction of the ancient world according to Herodotus c. 430 BC .This map was created in the nineteenth century in a series on ancient oceanographical views for the scientific reports of the voyage of HMS Challenger in 1872–6 and published in 1895. Pyrene and the Ister (the River Danube) are depicted on the upper left.
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