In modern society it is normal to distinguish different areas of activity such as the political, the economic and the social. These divisions, however, are the product of a historically specific set of recent and contemporary societies and should not be used automatically as appropriate categories for the discussion of other social groups; the division, for instance, between a public sphere of political activity and a private sphere of social life is predominantly a recent one. It has been common in recent years for archaeologists to talk of the economy being ‘embedded’ in society; to use another metaphor, we should perhaps think of political, economic and social as being three different facets of the same set of activities.
Nor should we be tempted to think of a uniform type of Celtic society. Whether it is right to think of the Celts as a homogeneous ethnic group with a common descent, language and culture, or merely as a language group, or even more minimally as a grouping imposed by others, it is unrealistic to think that their social organization was the same throughout the whole of the time and space in which they are recorded. The enormous differences in settlement and economy shown by archaeology, between the Late Iron Age in central Europe and the Early Christian period in Ireland for instance, suggest that the scale of social organization and its degree of complexity must equally have varied. There may have been some features which recurred from time to time throughout this large geographical and chronological range, and may have been derived from a common origin, but we should not start out with the expectation of a uniform pattern of Celtic society and a common set of social practices.
World History
