Here is a small, UK-biased selection of recent books, and a few important articles from academic journals. If you want to pursue anything further, these will lead you to hundred of other publications.
General books on the Ancient Celts
The debate on the meaning of 'Celticness'
Celtic Art
Druids
Simon James, The Atlantic Celts: Ancient people
or modern invention?
My latest book,
spring 1999, directly examines the origins of the idea that some modern people
in Ireland and Britain are Celts.
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My first book on
Celtic issues, a general survey of the ealry Celtic peoples of Europe, according
to the traditional view. It was the reserach I undertook to write this book
that first made me really question the whole idea of 'Ancient Celts', especially
in the islands.
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Iron Age Britain: Celtic
or not?
To coincide with the opening of the British Museum's new Iron Age displays
in 1997, Valery Rigby (curator of the Iron Age collections) and I wrote
a fully illustrated book, looking at the archaeology of the British Iron
Age against its wider European background (with special regard to the British
Museum's collections). Exploring the development of ideas about the period,
it also attempts to tackle the question, was Iron Age Britain 'Celtic'?
(Conceived from a fairly traditional viewpoint, this contains a large collection of authoratitive new papers on all aspects of Celtic life and culture)
(An enormous volume, comprising the catalogue of the 1991 Venice exhibition on the Celts, with a collection of thematic essays by almost everyone who is anyone in the field of Ancient Celtic studies. Lots of excellent colour illustrations, but be warned, the English translations of some of the papers are very odd!)
I have recently been involved in a pretty heated debate about the Celts in the British archaeological journal Antiquity. It was started by the following paper:
In this article Ruth and Vincent Megaw present a broadside against the 'Celt-scepticism' of people like Chapman, Hill, and Merriman. It accuses such scholars, very unfairly and quite implausibly in my view, of being motivated by English nationalism and anxiety rooted in the decline of British imperial power and the 'threat' of European federalism.)
I was moved to write a response, arguing that the rejection of a Celtic past was partly due to more and better archaeological evidence making the idea hard to sustain, but also that such archaeologists are indeed ideologically motivated - but usually by a post-colonial and multi-cultural agenda, certainly not a nationalist one: that, ironically, their emphasis on multiple, diverse societies in Iron Age Britain, at least, and rejection of uniform Celts, recognises that Britain has always been home to multiple identities, peoples, or nations - as the new Scottish parliament, and Welsh assembly, re-emphasise in our own time. My response was:
The Megaws have subsequently produced a brief response to me and to others:
Doubtless the debate will continue!
If you are interested in how the idea of Celts in the British Isles originated
and developed, this controversial book is invaluable.
(One of a number of papers by J.D. which emphasise the 'differentness' or 'otherness' of the British Iron Age past, and the danger of assuming it must be a familiar, known, Celtic one)
There is an article by J.D. (although minus pictures) on the Web: 'Weaving the strands of a new Iron Age'
See also:
(A critical look at the evidence for an identifiably 'Celtic spirit' in the remote past)
(A valuable addition to the debate, containing general papers on the nature
and construction of identities, past and present, plus several contributions
specifically on the Celts. See especially the contributions by Renfrew, Collis
and Fitzpatrick.)
A major new study of how we think about ethnicity, and how we can find vidnece
for it in the past; also, how we often create it when it wasn't really there...
(Contains papers on the invention of the romantic motif of the Scots Highlander, and for balance, the creation of many English 'traditions', during the nineteenth century.)
(An excellent general work on the 'La Tene' art style, the name given to the largely abstract, 'curvilinear' (curving-line) art popularly known as 'Celtic'.)
The best books (in my opinion!) are:
(Druids probably had nothing to do with Stonehenge - they flourished 1,000
years after the great stones appear to have been abandoned, perhaps representing
the collapse of an entirely different, earlier belief system. Similarly,
most archaeologists would argue that the modern Druidic orders are a product
of eighteenth century romanticism, and have no link with the real, Iron Age
Druids.)