The prehistoric environment is often perceived as natural and wild. By later prehistory, however, few environments were passive backcloths to human activity; most had been, or were being, fundamentally changed by people. Here we are concerned with the environments of the first millennia BC and AD over much of Europe, extending from the British Isles to the Black Sea and from southern Germany to the Mediterranean. Most of the evidence reviewed is from the western half of this area, in parts of which humanly created ‘cultural landscapes’ had come about thousands of years before with the activities of the first farmers. In other instances major changes resulted from deliberate actions during the period in question.
Past environments can be reconstructed using many sources of evidence. Lakes, peat bogs, valleys and occupation deposits on archaeological sites provide sequences of sediment containing biological evidence, such as pollen, seeds, wood, snails, insects and animal bones, which document landscape change during the period whilst the deposits were accumulating. For further discussion of sources of evidence see Evans (1978) and Bell and Walker (1992).
The geographical area in question exhibits remarkable diversity m terms of both its natural and cultural landscapes. There is not something inherently identifiable as a distinctive ‘Celtic environment’. The area is defined, not by environmental criteria, but in terms of that geographical area which classical writers described as Celtic (Chapter i); the distribution of Celtic place-names and linguistic elements; and various aspects of material culture which are regarded as Celtic. Each of these criteria defines an entity at differing points in time. Where we place the geographical boundaries varies according to the criteria we adopt and the date in question. This chapter takes rather a wide geographical view and includes evidence from the Netherlands and some reference to work in Denmark.
Geographically loosely defined as the Celtic world may be, it none the less represents a significant entity for the investigation of particular issues concerning people-environment relationships. There are, for instance, the environmental consequences of the relationship between the politically and economically powerful so-called ‘core’ areas of classical societies, Greece, Etruria and Rome to the south, and the ‘periphery’ of the Celtic world to the north. It is a period of dramatic social
And political change, the environmental consequences of which are examined. These changes relate first to the geographical expansion of the Celtic world in the first millennium BC, then to the northward expansion of the Roman Empire over most of the area and then in the fifth century the empire’s collapse, the southward migrations of Germanic people and the resurgence in the wreckage of the Roman Empire of pre-Roman Celtic traditions which were strongest in the peripheral areas of Ireland, Wales and Brittany. These are issues which have traditionally been examined through historical sources, art history, place-names, material culture, etc. Environmental archaeology also has a distinctive contribution to make in evaluating the degree of continuity and change over this period. Its contribution Is sometimes Independent of the vicissitudes in the lives of individual settlements which dominate many aspects of the archaeological record. It may tell us whether there was continuity of land-use In the wider surrounding environment.
World History
