Diachronic distribution of Celtic peoples:

  6th century BC, core Hallstatt territory

  275 BC, maximum Celtic expansion

  Lusitanian area of Iberia where Celtic presence is uncertain

Pre-Celtic Europe is the period of the prehistory of Europe before the emergence and spread of the Celtic peoples.

History

When the Celts were first recorded about 600 BC, they were already widespread across Iberia, Gaul, and Central Europe. In Ireland, the Book of Invasions gives a legendary account of the arrival of incoming peoples.

Languages

Proto-Celtic is mainly dated to approximately 800 BC, coincident with the Hallstatt culture, while the earliest possible divergence of pre-proto-Celtic dialects from Proto-Indo-European is mainly dated to between 3000 BC and 2000 BC.

In continental Europe, pre-Celtic languages of the European Bronze Age may be taken to comprise two distinct groups.

• Non-Indo-European languages (i.e. pre-Indo-European languages); these include Aquitanian (precursor of the Basque),^[1][2] Rhaetic, Etruscan,^[3] Iberian, which might be related to Basque but is still unclassified, and Paleo-Sardinian (there is evidence suggesting that it had connection to the reconstructed Proto-Basque and to the Iberian language). Some scholars group Etruscan, Rhaetic and Lemnian together in the hypothetical Tyrrhenian language family, which possibly originated in the Aegean Sea region or during the Neolithic north of the Alps.^[4][5][6][7] Conversely, the Lemnian language could have arrived in the Aegean Sea during the Late Bronze Age, when Mycenaean rulers recruited groups of mercenaries from Sicily, Sardinia and various parts of the Italian peninsula.^[8]
• Indo-European dialects, such as Illyrian, possibly Lusitanian, the Proto-Italo-Celtic dialects, Belgian and "Old European".^[9] However, Lusitanian and Belgian may turn out to be Celtic, while Old European may turn out to be either Celtic or non-Indo-European. The very existence of Indo-European speakers in Western Europe before the arrival of the Celts is highly speculative.

It has been suggested that results of large-scale genetic surveys, undertaken since the late 20th century, show that the present-day speakers of pre-Indo-European languages might not solely represent relict populations. For instance, Basques show a dominance of the Y-DNA Haplogroup R1b,^[10] which a majority of scholars now propose spread through Europe relatively recently, from the Eurasian steppe and/or southwest Asia in the late Neolithic period or early Bronze Age (4,000 to 8,000 years ago).^{[11][10][12][13][14][15]} R1b replaced nearly all indigenous male lineages in Iberia from 4500 to 4000 BC.^[16] However, present-day Basques also retain some very rare and archaic lineages, such as the Paleolithic mitochondrial DNA Haplogroup U8a, and autosomal genetic analysis (the whole genome, not just Y-DNA) has shown that a majority of their ancestry derives from Neolithic farmers and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, predating the arrival of speakers of Indo-European languages.^{[11][17][18][19]}

Archaeology

A simplified map of archaeological cultures of the late Bronze Age (c. 1200 BC):

  Terramare culture

  central Urnfield culture

  northern Urnfield culture

  Lusatian culture

  (in central Europe) Knovíz culture

  Danubian culture

  Atlantic Bronze Age

  Nordic Bronze Age

See also

References

Bibliography