Customer Reviews

The Celtic World

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

The field of Celtic scholarship has made some remarkable advances in recent years, and these articles offer a wonderful glimpse into a realm of information too often confined to the pages of academic journals. The writing is scholarly, but each article often points the way toward other resources on the same topic. I was particularly intrigued by Peter J. Reynolds' account of a typical agricultural year in the Celtic world, based on his experience running a re-created Iron Age farm.

Four and a half stars.
A comprehensive work using some many recent archeological discoveries. It is a great work if somewhat pedantic and should have more footnotes than it does. Some readers may be annoyed too that some chapters use second hand sources. And like Kruta's book on the Celts some of the essays are somewhat uneven in their quality. Certain chapters focus too much on arcana while others are down right confusing. It is also uneven in presenting scant information on the Hallstatt period. It is not recommend for those studying Celtic art as it lacks any color photographs. It is not the type of book that one reads through in one sitting. Still it is a great reference work.

This book is chock full of information. The articles are organized according to subject matter. I like the book because it gives a wide discussion of many differing aspects of celtic historical research. I have used it extensively to flesh out characters and background in writing and discussion with others with same interests as myself in celtic history. I would reccommend it wholeheartedly to any scholar in this area of research.

This is an anthology of 41 essays concerning a wide number of topics concerning Celtic Studies, from the bronze age to Modern times. Religion, economy, boat-building, town structure, metalworking, art, and so forth are discussed in some depth. Celtic Christianity is further discussed as are the survival prospects for the current Celtic languages.

This is a mammoth tome-- the essays total over 800 pages of information, and while there is some variation in quality among the essays, this is to be expected.

More than this would not be possible in a book covering so much material. However, I will go into a little more detail on one specific topic that I found in this book: the implication of the arrival of the iron age. The typical historical narrative goes something like this: One day, our stone age ancestors discovered how to smelt copper. Eventually they learned how to mix it with other things to make harder alloys like arsenical and tin bronze. As they developed their technologies they learned how to smelt iron, and because iron is so much superior to bronze it quickly took over. There are some things that have bothered me for a long time about that theory, including the fact that we have small numbers of iron artifacts made by otherwise bronze-age cultures in the Pontic-Caspian Steppes (see The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World for more on that topic).

This essay introduces a few ideas which I think are crucial to solving that problem. Instead of discussing progressions of smelting techologies, the author addresses the economic impact and required technological changes in switching from bronze to iron. The detailed discussions of bronze vs ironworking techniques plus the discussions of general availability of iron vs copper and tin allow me to understand this shift as primarily economic rather than technological in nature (technological changes were required but they were more lateral changes than upgrades per se).

Every other essay in this book is similarly fascinating and thought provoking. I would certainly recommend it to anyone who already has a grounding in this area and is looking for more advanced reading material.

This is a scholarly work,which incorporates cutting edge research from top archeologists in the field. If you want to find out about celtic culture this is the closest you can get without going back in time.

This book is great it spans a large number of related topics while managing to be clear and understandable to most all readers. If you're an archaeology student or just interested in Celtic Studies this is a great place to start serious research.