The UK's First Inhabitants

[pconroy]

I'll have to get an account on Photobucket or somewhere else, as I don't have any photos online to link to, as of yet.

[Artemidoros]

Cerdic said:

The Greeks and Romans had a well developed cultural and literary concept of "otherness." They liked to make out foreigners as being as unlike themselves as possible.

Considering the volume of Greek and Roman literature there is not much relating to phenotype. Like you said the concept of "otherness" was mostly cultural. There are no references to racial differences with most Mediterannean nations, whether considered "barbarian" or not.

For example the Roman historian (he was ethnically Greek) Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Persians as having "eyes like those of goats." Now Ammianus was an officer in the Roman army and undoubtedly had seen many Persians (he probably knew at least one exiled Persian prince) how could he then describe them as having eyes with a horizontal slit pupil, like goats? The answer is that he was pandering to the Greco-Roman taste for characterizing foreigners as being as "other" as possible.
....
No concept of the physical characteristics of the Celts of the ancient world based on Classical writings can be relied upon. Any physical description of the Ancient Celts found in Classical texts is likely to be inaccurate and biased. All such writers wrote for a home audience and pandered to its prejudices and expectations.

I do not think a single 4th c. AD writer can justify your position. Especially as he had fought the Persians. War propaganda and bias are old concepts. I must admit I am not familiar with how he describes the Persians. I have read his description of the Huns though and I think it is colourful but reliable.

In his Geography, Strabo compares Celts and Germans. He says they were similar but the Germans were wilder, taller and blonder. He also compares the Britons with the Celts and he says that they shared cultural traits but had cultural differences as well. He also says the Britons were darker and taller than the Celts. Of course he might have been wrong, he was not an anthropologist and even modern antropologists might have different opinions on the matter. I do not see any bias though in comparing different groups of barbarians while grouping all Greek and Roman writers under the aphorism of unreliability is arbitrary and IMO shows bias on your part.

This also applied to the barbarians living to the north, though these people had a somewhat higher incidence of lighter colouring and taller stature than the Greeks and Romans they were udoubtedly not universally blond, blue eyed giants. Though the Greeks and Romans liked to portray them this way.

Stereotypes are as solid in Britain today as they were in the ancient Mediterannean. Italians are portrayed as dark for example, while many of them are fair. It is no reason to doubt every British man's assessment of another nation's phenotype.

So don't automatically assume that the Ancient Celts, or Germans were really like they were described! Or denigrate modern Celts for not looking like their supposed forebears.

I do not consider denigration what I said. My two children are 25% Irish and the Irish are the last people I would attempt to denigrate. If you have a problem with the diverse origins of the people of the British Isles suit yourself. My opinion is a lot of the dark elements in their phenotype are pre-Celtic. If you want to prove otherwise be my guest but do not accuse me of denigration.

[Vitor]

Gareth said:

A proved Gaelic custom was brightening and coarsening the hair with calc, giving it a spiky, barbarian look. What would be the reason of this if they all were of Nordic pigmentation anyway? Maybe it was to make them look uniformly because they were diverse.

I find it narrow-minded, that those Irish and Britains only speak of their own population, when they mention Kelts. I think the British Isles were only a sediment of the Keltic range. With those Atlantids, Dinarics and Vikings later around, those Insular "Keltic Nodics" probably are much more generalized and distant than the Keltic population was during the Ancient. Just yesterday I read of some American speaking of "pure Keltic Nordics". The continental mainland probably was populated by Dinarics and Alpines besides that Keltic Nords too. I just looked into a book about the Kelts and also found these phenotypes.

Here for example, a relief on a caldron from Denmark, Rynkeby showing a round-headed person with a long and beaky nose:


Go to some guy that studied nutrition science, he will tell you the opposite. Ever heard of skorbut?

btw., both of these guys did not eat meat recently before they died and were conserved in the moor:

www.king-ed.suffolk.sch.uk/curriclm/hums/history/yr9/bogbody/photos.htm
home.att.net/~edgrenda/pow/pow31.htm

True, everywhere humans went whole species of animals of the big mammals sort were eradicated within ten years. What happened to the forrests around the Mediterranean Sea and in the Middle East? Every human group in history overdrew it's possibilities untill the enviromental system collapsed and humans had to adapt to the worse situation. It may come similar with today's industrial world.

In the past, humans had essentially less meat to eat than today. Hunting was not possible on a maximum extent (in the Middle Ages it was even forbidden). Fishing was a thing for the coastal inhabitants but who else? Apart from that the rich denizens of the Roman Empire might have bought things from everywhere. In Rome, a 35 meters high knoll of shards can be found, Monte Testaccio, near to the harbor to the Tiber. This shouldn't be overrated of course - it was not for everyone to buy some pickled fish from Italy (in Pompeji archaeologists found a manufactory of fish sauce. With their Ancient methods - it must have stunk there bestially).

The problem is that hunters didn't eat only meat, they gathered what they found.
And womans also provided with local captured food...
like shell fish, etc...

Womans Might be the ones who sustained the larger portion of food of those ancient population!

There is factual proofs...
people start getting smaller after the agriculture revolution...

Oranges (vitamin C against that illness), only arrived from china (I believe) not too long ago...2000-3000 years ago?

There was not that great diversity in food in the ealier days of agriculture.


About kelts...I really don't think they existed at all.
might be some Roman invention!
grouping many different populations...

[Cerdic]

Artemidoros said:

Considering the volume of Greek and Roman literature there is not much relating to phenotype. Like you said the concept of "otherness" was mostly cultural. There are no references to racial differences with most Mediterannean nations, whether considered "barbarian" or not.



I do not think a single 4th c. AD writer can justify your position. Especially as he had fought the Persians. War propaganda and bias are old concepts. I must admit I am not familiar with how he describes the Persians. I have read his description of the Huns though and I think it is colourful but reliable.

In his Geography, Strabo compares Celts and Germans. He says they were similar but the Germans were wilder, taller and blonder. He also compares the Britons with the Celts and he says that they shared cultural traits but had cultural differences as well. He also says the Britons were darker and taller than the Celts. Of course he might have been wrong, he was not an anthropologist and even modern antropologists might have different opinions on the matter. I do not see any bias though in comparing different groups of barbarians while grouping all Greek and Roman writers under the aphorism of unreliability is arbitrary and IMO shows bias on your part.



Stereotypes are as solid in Britain today as they were in the ancient Mediterannean. Italians are portrayed as dark for example, while many of them are fair. It is no reason to doubt every British man's assessment of another nation's phenotype.



I do not consider denigration what I said. My two children are 25% Irish and the Irish are the last people I would attempt to denigrate. If you have a problem with the diverse origins of the people of the British Isles suit yourself. My opinion is a lot of the dark elements in their phenotype are pre-Celtic. If you want to prove otherwise be my guest but do not accuse me of denigration.

There is enough Classical literature on the subject to take some inferences from it. In general prior writings were often used as templates, if Herodotus said that Thracians were gluttons then every later commentator would say the same, whether or not they had any first hand knowledge. Classical writers enjoyed stereotyping ethnic groups, and when appropriate, this included physical appearance. The Greeks suffered this at the hands of the Romans. The Romans had an acute case of a cultural inferiority complex in regard to the Greeks. In reaction to this they stereotyped them as: untrustworthy, effete, untruthful and unctuous. The abusive term Graeculus, "Greekling" was quite commonly used. Was this deserved, undoubtedly not, but it was very well established and continuously propagated.

The same is true of other ethnic groups.

Another example of this concerning a Mediterranean ethnic group and physical appearance is that of the Mauri. The Mauri or "Moors" were natives of the coastal districts of Algeria and Morocco, in Roman art they are always depicted with Sub-Saharan type woolly hair. Any cusory look at the people of this region today will reveal a very small incidence of woolly hair.

The Italic and Celtic language groups are very closely related, indeed they are both split into P and Q forms. If linguistics is any clue to ethnicity one would expect the peoples of Italy and of Celtic Europe to resemble one another.

What people seem to home in on are the Classical descriptions describing the Celts as blond giants, this type of description, I would assert, was greatly affected by the Graeco-Roman desire to maximise the otherness of foreign groups. Having said this people do not take on board that even the Ancients (perhaps those with more first had experience) were far from unanimous in their descriptions. As you point out the Britons were described as being darker and taller than the Gauls, Tacitus also describes one British Celtic tribe, the Silures, as being very Iberian-looking with dark curly hair.

I note that you do not comment on the revealing subterfuge of Caligula. Another example is that of the post-conquest Gauls, they were praised for their wonderful command of Latin rhetoric and that when bathed, shaved and toga-d they were hardly distinguishable from Italians. A remarkable transformation if they had been a uniform race of blond giants originally.

I would heartily agree with your comment on the physical diversity of the people of the British Isles. However, I would go much further than this and positively assert the physical diversity of the Ancient Celts. At no time were the Celts a homogenous physical type, physical remains from various Celtic cultural contexts confirms this, therefore to contrast the modern Celts with some mythical original race is a fallacy.


Moreover I think that doing so robs people of their ethno-cultural heritage. "The Irish are Celts, but not real Celts." As you may have noticed this approach really irritates me.

[Artemidoros]

Cerdic said:

There is enough Classical literature on the subject to take some inferences from it. In general prior writings were often used as templates, if Herodotus said that Thracians were gluttons then every later commentator would say the same, whether or not they had any first hand knowledge. Classical writers enjoyed stereotyping ethnic groups, and when appropriate, this included physical appearance.

You are generalizing. While it is true that in some cases writers drew heavily from existing texts there are many cases of disagreement. One that I can remember is that of the Garamantes, who are refered to as Ethiopians and non Ethiopians (probably because they shared Caucasoid and Negroid traits).
The ancient Greeks also used names such as Leucoaethiopes (white Ethiopians), Libyoaethiopes (Libyan Ethiopians) etc to distinguish African populations.
We have some great examples of Roman art giving a realistic picture of North Africa, with both Caucasoid and Negroid types.

The Greeks suffered this at the hands of the Romans. The Romans had an acute case of a cultural inferiority complex in regard to the Greeks. In reaction to this they stereotyped them as: untrustworthy, effete, untruthful and unctuous. The abusive term Graeculus, "Greekling" was quite commonly used. Was this deserved, undoubtedly not, but it was very well established and continuously propagated.

I believe the initial use of the term (it is still in use in ... Greece of all places) was to castigate Romans who aped the Greeks and not the Greeks themselves.

Another example of this concerning a Mediterranean ethnic group and physical appearance is that of the Mauri. The Mauri or "Moors" were natives of the coastal districts of Algeria and Morocco, in Roman art they are always depicted with Sub-Saharan type woolly hair. Any cusory look at the people of this region today will reveal a very small incidence of woolly hair.

I disagree with the notion they were exclusively coastal. Got any links btw?

Here Jews are depicted as pygmies. It does not mean Jews were considered pygmies.

The Italic and Celtic language groups are very closely related, indeed they are both split into P and Q forms. If linguistics is any clue to ethnicity one would expect the peoples of Italy and of Celtic Europe to resemble one another.

Precisely, it is no more than a clue. Language has a lot to do with ethnicity and very little with race.

What people seem to home in on are the Classical descriptions describing the Celts as blond giants, this type of description, I would assert, was greatly affected by the Graeco-Roman desire to maximise the otherness of foreign groups. Having said this people do not take on board that even the Ancients (perhaps those with more first had experience) were far from unanimous in their descriptions. As you point out the Britons were described as being darker and taller than the Gauls, Tacitus also describes one British Celtic tribe, the Silures, as being very Iberian-looking with dark curly hair.

The point I am trying to make exactly, in defending the honour of ancient historians and geographers. They did not all copy each other, neither had they political considerations always in mind.
I do agree there was no single racial Celtic type. Tribes and individuals differed greatly. Please re-read my first post in this thread. I do insist though that Celts were on average lighter than the Romans and the Greeks.

I note that you do not comment on the revealing subterfuge of Caligula.

I do agree that the Celts were generally darker than the Germans and accept the validity of the point. Since you asked, I have to say it also proves they were on average lighter than the Romans.
Stereotypes have their uses too.

Another example is that of the post-conquest Gauls, they were praised for their wonderful command of Latin rhetoric and that when bathed, shaved and toga-d they were hardly distinguishable from Italians. A remarkable transformation if they had been a uniform race of blond giants originally.

The Italians were phenotypically diverse too. I am sure many individuals would have been "interchangeable".

I would heartily agree with your comment on the physical diversity of the people of the British Isles. However, I would go much further than this and positively assert the physical diversity of the Ancient Celts. At no time were the Celts a homogenous physical type, physical remains from various Celtic cultural contexts confirms this, therefore to contrast the modern Celts with some mythical original race is a fallacy.


Moreover I think that doing so robs people of their ethno-cultural heritage. "The Irish are Celts, but not real Celts." As you may have noticed this approach really irritates me.

I certainly do not wish to irritate you further.
I consider myself blessed with the ability to reconcile in myself the belief, that my people (the Greeks) are not unmixed descendants of the original Greek speakers of the Balkans 4,000 years ago, while at the same time believe we are true Greeks.
Think about what I say and share my good fortune

[Melnorme]

Arthur Kemp will get a kick outta this one.

[Cerdic]

Artemidoros said:

You are generalizing. While it is true that in some cases writers drew heavily from existing texts there are many cases of disagreement. One that I can remember is that of the Garamantes, who are refered to as Ethiopians and non Ethiopians (probably because they shared Caucasoid and Negroid traits).
The ancient Greeks also used names such as Leucoaethiopes (white Ethiopians), Libyoaethiopes (Libyan Ethiopians) etc to distinguish African populations.
We have some great examples of Roman art giving a realistic picture of North Africa, with both Caucasoid and Negroid types.



I believe the initial use of the term (it is still in use in ... Greece of all places) was to castigate Romans who aped the Greeks and not the Greeks themselves.



I disagree with the notion they were exclusively coastal. Got any links btw?

Here Jews are depicted as pygmies. It does not mean Jews were considered pygmies.


Precisely, it is no more than a clue. Language has a lot to do with ethnicity and very little with race.



The point I am trying to make exactly, in defending the honour of ancient historians and geographers. They did not all copy each other, neither had they political considerations always in mind.
I do agree there was no single racial Celtic type. Tribes and individuals differed greatly. Please re-read my first post in this thread. I do insist though that Celts were on average lighter than the Romans and the Greeks.



I do agree that the Celts were generally darker than the Germans and accept the validity of the point. Since you asked, I have to say it also proves they were on average lighter than the Romans.
Stereotypes have their uses too.



The Italians were phenotypically diverse too. I am sure many individuals would have been "interchangeable".



I certainly do not wish to irritate you further.
I consider myself blessed with the ability to reconcile in myself the belief, that my people (the Greeks) are not unmixed descendants of the original Greek speakers of the Balkans 4,000 years ago, while at the same time believe we are true Greeks.
Think about what I say and share my good fortune

By Roman art, and I should have been more precise, I meant metropolitan Roman art. The art produced in the African provinces would reflect reality more closely. All of the monumental sculpture in Rome showing Numidians, or other Moors, shows them with woolly hair (Trajan's column for example).

Yes the term Graeculus was used about Romans who were seen to ape Greek manners, but it was also used in reference to Greeks themselves - I have a memory of a pedagogue (they were almost exclusively Greek) being so described.

The modern states of Algeria and Morocco have vast southern hinterlands, by coastal I meant the Atlas Mountains and coastwards from there.

I would still maintain that the Ancient writers often pandered to the expectations of their readership and exaggerated the physical as well as the cultural and moral differences of foreigners. A good example of this is the Gauls. They start out as strange, huge-limbed, blond savages. Then, when suitably Romanised, they are hardly different to Italians and outshine them in Latin rhetoric. Within two generations of the Roman conquest there were Gauls in the senate. However, after hundreds of years of Roman civilisation, when in the 350s AD the emperor Julian (or possibly one of his philosophical clique - Libanius?) wants to praise the fighting qualities of the Roman soldiers of Gaulish origins, all the old " huge-limbed" literary cliches are trotted out again. You might, rightly, say that Julian and his friends were deliberately seeking an archaic timbre to their writings to fit in with Julian's ultra-conservative designs in bringing back state polytheism, but even so I think it is symptomatic of a general tendency in Roman letters.

I think I may have apprehended your original comments as being more in opposition to my views than was the case; I regret any archness in my replies.

We do not really have any incontrvertable evidence of the colouring of ancient peoples. Perhaps when ancient DNA techniques improve this may be rectified. In the light of this and the less than perfect reliability of contemporary descriptions I always react against assertions that some ancient group was uniformally of one colouring or another. I do not subscribe in any way to view that races or ethnicities were once "pure" and have become "mixed" subsequently.

Something that recently annoyed me was the reconstruction of the appearance of a 6th C AD Anglo-Saxon woman who was buried with some very high-status artifacts. They gave the woman flaxen hair, because she was "Anglo-Saxon" and they were uniformally blond of course! This doesn't really fit all that well in country where it is estimated that only 4% of the adult population is naturally blond. The legacy of all those 19th century pseudoscientific anthropologists (wankers)has taken too long to be eradicted from the collective psyche.