As with other aspects of our knowledge of the Celts, we are dependent for our understanding of their social organization upon two types of evidence, the archaeological and the documentary. Questions about social organization are much harder to answer than those about material culture or technology, and both of these types of evidence raise special problems of interpretation, of rather different sorts.
The documentary evidence requires double interpretation; in other words there is
A question about our own understanding of the written record, and also about the author’s understanding and treatment of the available evidence. Despite the superficial appearance of the written records as a more reliable testimony to past social organization than archaeology, their evidence needs very careful appraisal. There are two main bodies of written evidence for the social organization of the Celts, the works of the Greek and Roman authors who mention them, and various writings, especially legal tracts, surviving from early medieval Ireland.
References to the Celts in the classical authors are fragmentary, and none of them is concerned primarily with a discussion of Celtic society. One major source would have been the ethnographic work of Poseidonios, but this survives only in scattered references in later authors (Tierney i960); he seems to be recording the position, perhaps specific to particular parts of France, around too BC. Julius Caesar has a particular value as an eye-witness to events in Gaul in the middle of the first century BC (Nash 1976), but though his military and political activities brought him into contact with powerful leaders, and there are many references to them in his works, he does not offer us a sustained account of Geltic society. His evidence is also specific to a particular period, and he is best informed about central France and Switzerland, though mentioning conditions elsewhere. The differences between the versions of Geltic social organization given by Poseidonios and Caesar are a clear reminder that Celtic society was changing through time, especially during the period of intensifying contact with the expanding Roman world, and indeed that such contact may itself have been a potent force for change.
In addition to the limitations of such evidence, there is a problem in understanding the references that do survive. When Caesar, for instance, uses the Latin word rex (king) to refer to a Celtic social institution, it is important not only to ask how well informed he could have been, and how well he understood the social conditions, but also to appreciate that both he and his readers were conditioned by the prevailing ideology of the classical world towards the non-classical or barbarian peoples, and that he was interpreting Celtic institutions in the linguistic terms of the Latin language; he would have to choose the most appropriate term, despite what may have been major differences in the real nature of the social institutions he was trying to describe. Constraints of language may therefore lead to an assimilation of social institutions, and a blurring of real cultural differences. In our own turn, modern readers of Caesar have to come to terms with contemporary attitudes towards the classical world and imperial conquest, as well the difficulty of Interpreting his language, as in the translation of rex as king.
The early medieval Irish literature may seem to escape one of these layers of interpretative difficulty, since it comprises documents written by a society about Itself, but they still require a very careful understanding of the social context in which they were produced. Some of the most interesting are a wide variety of legal texts dealing with early Irish law (Kelly 1988); unlike the classical authors, some of these early Irish sources are specifically concerned with social organization, even obsessively so. The Crith Gablach, for instance, spells out in great detail the possessions of various grades of farmer. The writing down of hitherto traditional wisdom is a sign not just of the adoption of literacy but of a fundamental change in the nature of authority, and a detailed concern for the definition of social rank indicates a period when social ranking is in a state of flux; many of the legal tracts date originally to the seventh and eighth centuries AD, when the power of the church was expanding and the nature of Irish kingship was changing dramatically. Some of the documents contain references that are clearly archaic, and it is necessary to ask whether we are dealing with the definition of a social organization as it actually was, or as it was ideally wished for. Much of early Irish literature, including the law tracts, was the product of a highly educated clerical elite, well versed in classical and biblical scholarship, writing documents for the contemporary context, which should not therefore be taken simply as giving an accurate reflection of earlier society (McCone 1990).
The archaeological evidence also clearly needs to be subjected to a process of theoretical interpretation, since the aim is to relate the contemporary record of material finds to the past pattern of social organization, and a set of ideas is needed to form the basis of such inferences. Early iron age hill-forts m southern Germany, for instance, have been compared to medieval castles, and their occupants therefore equated to medieval nobles and their social organization to the feudal system. There is, however, no reason to accept such a comparison, whether the pattern is thought to be continuous or not, simply on the grounds of geographical identity. Appropriate principles for such inferences can be derived from a wider consideration of anthropological and ethnographic evidence. These might be based on arguments for recurring types of social institution found frequently in Indo-European society, or on an even wider consideration of the known nature of societies of an approximately similar type.
Three categories of evidence have been particularly interpreted as indicators of social organization. Burial traditions in the Iron Age were often marked by a considerable variation in the treatment of the dead, including the wealth of the goods interred with the body, and wealthier and more elaborate graves can be read as a sign of higher social status. The nature of that enhanced social standing needs definition; it has often been seen as a status based on political power, but it could also perhaps be based on the authority of factors such as age. In any case, the burials were part of the active process of social readjustment after a death, and they may tell us more about the ideas of the survivors than the real identity of the deceased. Though they cannot be taken as a simple record of social status, they do give us a valuable insight into Celtic society. The burial traditions, however, were not uniform throughout the Celtic world, and in some parts of western Europe there are long periods with few known burials.
Archaeologists have long been recovering high quality artefacts of the Iron Age, especially decorated jewellery of gold or bronze, often found in elaborate graves, and have taken these as symbols of social distinction. Such use of prestige goods is a well-documented strategy in many societies with differences of social ranking, and the flourishing of craftsmanship in the Celtic world must owe much to the demand for such symbols.
The evidence of settlements is rather more problematic. There is little sign that domestic architecture was used as a means of displaying social difference, as it has been in more recent times in Europe, but there are some sites which seem more elaborately built, especially ones with impressive defences. There are also many areas of iron age Europe with large defended hill-forts, which have often been taken as centres of political power and of developing social hierarchies. Some of the most massively fortified sites in prehistoric Europe, however, were built by the early farming societies of the Neolithic, societies which we like to think were much less differentiated than those of the Iron Age. It is essential, therefore, to avoid inappropriate analogies with the medieval and later world and to recognize that the world of the Celts was fundamentally different from our own.
Taken together, these lines of evidence suggest that Celtic society was marked by important differences of social status, but the basis on which the authority and power of those enjoying higher status rested needs to be further explored. The degree of such differentiation can easily be exaggerated, and we must resist the temptation to reconstruct Celtic society as we would like it to have been.
World History
