The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People Or Modern Invention? Paperback – May 14, 1999

All my undergraduate studies on Irish history ignored the folk wisdom that has since been proved correct. This book accounts for it all and satisfies my itch that, for decades, has said, "yeah, but..." Scholarly, readable, a treasure.

Deep research for ancestry. Enlightening!

This book was published 10 years before modern genetic research on archaic human remains even began (and it's already been around 15 years since it began and has only sped up), so one must be aware that much of the material is obsolete. This is not the author's fault, so livid rants like the one star reviewer from 2018 are really unwarranted and out of line. That guy was blasting a book that was published almost twenty years ago! Don't be ridiculous like him, but do read this book with circumspect caution and a grain of salt if you do wind up buying it. There might still be some worthwhile breadcrumbs of thought to ponder.

Finally an antidote to the nationalist garbage

This book is pure drivel and needs to be allowed to go out of print like all of those ole timey books about Atlantis- which probably will have greater academic value in the future than this substandard tripe.Unfortunately for Prof. James and the whole "So what if my theory is not true, it's new" school of Quackademia, DNA testing has since proven that the old myths were right- IE the Milsian Celts DID come to the British isles from Celt-Iberia, just like the old folk tales and myths he poo-pooed on claimed. This is why people in Ireland, Scotland and parts of England show identical DNA markers as the Basques in Spain show. IE the Book of Invasions was right and poor Simon can blame Science for his theory crumbling.... Want to know more about the actual ethnic and cultural identity of the British Isles? You'd be better served by a reprint of TW Rolleston's 1911 era "Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race" than this politically baised doggeral. I am rather surprised poor Simon has not attempted suicide every time some staff writer creating content filler decides to do a feature story on the DNA testing of the British Isles....

With so much emotional attachment to the identity of being "Celtic", it was a gutsy move to publish a book bringing the Celtic identity of Britain into question. However, despite this, it is always good to take a fresh look at evidence from a different angle, whether one agrees with the conclusions or not.James presents his argument against a unified "Celtic" people in the British Isles, and presents this argument well. He especially calls into question the theory of a mass migration of Celtic peoples from Europe, demonstrating that there is very little archaeological evidence for it, especially when compared to regions where such migrations are known to have happened. In fact, the archaeological record just does not square with the theory.Unlike some, I did not find James' book overly burdensome with the details of what James was trying to say and how he approached it. Being from a non-archaeological background, I found this information both helpful and interesting. Admittedly, if you are experienced in such matters, you might find it a bit boring.It seems that James treats the evidence available from the archaeological record reasonably fairly, and presents a reasonably plausible argument for his views. He covers a lot of territory in such a small book, and at times, I would have liked to get more detail on some aspects of it.Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed a book that dared rock the boat, and take a new look at the available evidence. In concluding that the identity of the British people as "Celtic" is an 18th century response due to political and social conditions of the time was a gutsy move, but one that needed to be made. James has hit a nerve, and some of the threats he has received are testament to that. A brave man, indeed!One note of caution: if you have absolutely no knowledge about Celts and theories of the Celtic identity of British people, I would suggest that you read a broader introduction. This book is not really an introduction to Celtic history in itself.

Finally, a popularly-published book available in the same stores that sell the pro-Celtic master race neopagan drivel that many believe at present. What defines a Celt has been and still is widely debated in academic circles, from the famed mummies of Urumchi to some of the Sea Peoples recorded by Egyptians and Hebrews. Although not the best book of academic inquiry I've read, I'm happy to give it five stars for the courageous publication.

I needed it and got it on time and reasonably priced

A very readable book - and one for the real British History buff who wants the real history - even if that might raise more questions than it answers.*This is the first book to really look in detail at the origin of what the author clearly feels is a myth created in the 1700s by a nationalist Welshman. Like the author, I also started researching this period and found the description of "Celtic" to be so woolly and unhelpful that it seemed to have no real meaning at at all. So, because I had to understand the period and who these "Celts" were, I started looking back at the early evidence from Bede Gildas and the Roman writers to see what exactly they meant by "Celt". It took a while, but eventually, like the author, I found the evidence just did not support what is best described as a "Celtic myth" of the origins of the British.However, it was not until reading this book, that I finally understood how, when and why the myth was created and I was surprised to discover it was at late as the early 1700s.My only criticism is that in light of modern discoveries of DNA and the lack of any evidence for the "genocide" of welsh speaking Britons in England** , we've now got past the point where it is right to pose the celts as a question. However, some of that will be after the book was published! Now reading the evidence in the book which completely backs my own independent research, it is quite clear that the British "celts" are unequivocally a myth.**If the Britons had spoken a welsh-like language, then if there was a gradual take-over by Germanic speaking Anglo Saxons, there would undoubtedly by a large number of welsh words and welsh place names in English speaking areas of Britain. Therefore, the only way to reconcile the linguistic evidence with the theory of a welsh-speaking "celtic" population is one of mass genocide. But this is not what the archaeological evidence shows.*Like one of those puzzles where you move the bits around until you see a picture - once you accept that the Britons were not celts, it then leaves a gaping hole as to who we really were. And if the celts are a myth what about the Picts, what languages were spoken indeed, who are the Welsh? If there was not a genocide of Welsh speaking Britons in England, but there is no evidence of a previous non-Germanic speaking language before the Anglo-Saxons Indeed, who are the English?

A useful guide to the shift in emphasis on the relationship between the continental Celts and the people of the western British Isles often referred to as Celts.

I love the way this academic and presenter has an axe to grind and admits it. He is eminently reasonable in his arguments that Celticness is a modern invention, and a potentially dangerous one in that it risks creating a Celtic consciousness that has no historical foundation.Yup. But... it is has a genetic one~: Oppenheimer and others are getting adept at working on the implications of the Atlantic Rim peoples and the genetic haplotypes linked with them.Have fun with this and others in the debate. We may all have come out of Africa originally, but our mesolithic mothers and fathers settled the Atlantic coastal areas associated with the Celtic nations, and our neolithic fathers probably mainly came from the Levant, if the DNA and mDNA are anything to go by.Defining oneself as Celtic, whether by choice, geographical birth, living place, or language, threatens no-one, except maybe those who used to define themselves as anglo-saxon.Speaking as a mongrel, it's all good stuff, so long as we protect ourselves as a nation from ethic rivalries, and that as a political goal is best done by good fair representative government and management of national life, not by attacking the Celtic idea.

Forty plus years of intense interest in Dark Age and Sub Roman Europe hadn't prepared me for this tendentious nonsense I had imagined from the title we were to consider Tartessos and the Atlantic Fringe Culture , the antiquity of Q Celtic , instead the author seems to build his dreary misconceptions , brutally equating ethnicity (?) with culture ...his preface gives the game away ...separatist con men with their dangerous and bogus Celtic particularism endangering the Greater England of good old reality .....why don't they give it rest ?....hmmmmmn