VIII. THE ROUND-HEADS
There is, as we have already seen,[1889] sufficient evidence that round-headed immigrants had begun to appear in Britain towards the end of the Neolithic Age; but the majority of the prehistoric skulls of this kind undoubtedly belong to the Age of Bronze. Men of the same type were living in England at the time of the Saxon invasion;[1890] and their descendants may be recognized here and there at the present day.[1891] The prehistoric skeletons have been found not only in the round barrows of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Denbighshire, Man, and Orkney, and in secondary interments in long barrows, but also in Welsh caverns and graves and in the short cists of Scotland.[1892] The range of this people in Britain was, however, it need hardly be said, far wider than that which the discovery of a few skeletons has indicated.
The round-headed invaders are commonly described as physically finer men than the neolithic population whom in most parts of Britain they subdued;[1893] but the truth is that, both in respect of stature and of cranial form, they belonged to two utterly different groups, though, as might be expected, some exhibit characteristics of both.[1894] The average height of 17 brachycephalic men whose skeletons had been found in round barrows before 1865 would have been, according to Dr. Beddoe’s estimate, 5 feet 9 inches, or almost 1 metre 753; while the average height of 27 men of various cephalic indices, including the 17 just mentioned, whose skeletons (described in Crania Britannica) have been found in round barrows, would, according to the same authority, have reached 5 feet 9⅖ inches,[1895] or approximately 1 metre 763. Measurements of skeletons which have been discovered since the publication of Crania Britannica have yielded results virtually the same.[1896] On the other hand two groups of skeletons have recently been described which belonged to a much shorter race. Four, taken from round barrows in Glamorganshire, showed, according to Dr. Beddoe’s method, an average height of about 5 feet 5¾ inches;[1897] while 7 male skeletons, found in short cists in and near Aberdeenshire, ranged, according to Mr. Alexander Low, between 5 feet and 5 feet 7 inches, the average being only 5 feet 3 inches.[1898] The skulls of these skeletons will be presently described.
The cephalic indices of 103 male skulls, found before the year 1894 in round barrows or in other interments of the Bronze Age,[1899] ranged from 70 to 88, 55 of them exceeding 80; while those of 19 skeletons from round barrows in which no bronze was found ranged from 68 to 88, six of them exceeding 80.[1900] In both series a large proportion of the skulls whose indices fell short of 80 belonged, wholly or in part, to the Long Barrow race. Other skulls, however, which have since been described and of the characteristics of which Dr. Beddoe, the compiler of this list, may have been ignorant, yielded indices higher still.[1901]
But it is not enough to describe the invaders of the Bronze Age as brachycephalic: they shared that characteristic with peoples who were otherwise markedly different from them. Let us first consider those which belong to the so-called characteristic type, which, until a recent date, received more than its share of attention,—that which is seen only in the taller skeletons. Their foreheads, says Rolleston, were ‘sometimes ... especially in cases where the whole skull and skeleton are marked by great strength and even ruggedness, markedly sloping’.[1902] Their supraciliary ridges were often extraordinarily prominent. ‘The eyebrows,’ says the same authority, ‘must have given a beetling and probably even formidable appearance to the upper part of the face, whilst the boldly outstanding and heavy cheek bones must have produced an impression of raw and rough strength.... Overhung at its root, the nose must have projected boldly forward.’[1903] These men were, in some instances, extremely prognathous:[1904] their teeth were often extraordinarily large;[1905] and, to quote Thurnam, ‘the prominence of the large incisor and canine teeth is so great as to give an almost bestial expression to the skull.’[1906] The reader who scans the illustrations in Crania Britannica and in Canon Greenwell’s British Barrows will, however, see that the brachycephalic skulls even of the taller skeletons are not all of the same type. Moreover, some few of the Round Barrow skulls combine the contour of the characteristic brachycephalic skull of the British Bronze Age with dolichocephaly;[1907] and this is one of the facts which tend to prove that in certain parts of England the brachycephalic invaders intermarried with the people whom they found in possession. In the East Riding of Yorkshire, indeed, it would seem that the old race and the new were as completely intermingled as the modern population. Dr. William Wright tells us that in a collection of 80 skulls, taken from round barrows and preserved in the Mortimer Museum at Driffield, ‘almost all the varieties of cranial shape met with in Europe are represented.’ Their cephalic indices ranged from 69 to 92; and, says Dr. Wright, ‘it is doubtful if it is possible to find a materially more mixed series of skulls in a community of to-day.’[1908] Dr. Wright, however, does not believe that the skulls of apparently hybrid form prove intermarriage between the invaders and the old neolithic population, or that the former were purely brachycephalic. ‘To grant this,’ he argues, ‘one must believe that a pure round-headed race could have made its tardy progress across Europe unmixed,—an assumption which to my mind is incredible.’[1909] Has the doctor forgotten that ten male skulls, found in short cists in and near Aberdeenshire and evidently assignable to the end of the Neolithic or the beginning of the Bronze Age,[1910] were all brachycephalic, and that nine of them belonged to the same pure type.[1911] Has he forgotten that the round barrow skulls of Wiltshire were mainly brachycephalic? Has he ever walked over the mountains of Auvergne? Very likely the round-headed race which he has in mind did not make its way across Europe unmixed; but the mixture did not greatly diminish the roundness. Very likely when it reached Britain it included a few long-heads; but the contrast between the uniformity in Wiltshire and the diversity in East Yorkshire suffices to disprove the doctor’s theory.
Some of Dr. Wright’s brachycephalic specimens belonged to a type which is quite different from the ‘characteristic’ Round Barrow type, and is also common to almost all the short Welsh and Scottish skeletons mentioned above.[1912] These skulls are generally broader than those of the other kind. The ten found in Aberdeenshire and its neighbourhood ranged between 80.8 and 92.3, their average index being 85.39;[1913] while those of Glamorganshire ranged between 81.7 and 86, and yielded an average of 84.2.[1914] Not one of these skulls is prognathous:[1915] all are high as well as round and broad: the supraciliary ridges are only slightly developed: the cheek bones are not prominent: the face is both broad and short; and the lower jaw is small.[1916]
Who were the brachycephalic people of the round barrows and the short cists, and whence did they come? Those who have attempted to solve these problems have generally had in mind only the tall round-heads, whether their skulls belonged to the characteristic type or showed signs of crossing with the other. Wherever the short people came from, their ethnical affinities are certain: they belonged to the so-called Alpine type of Central Europe, of which the French Grenelle race were a branch. Let us for the present confine our attention to the others. To the questions which I have asked at least six different answers have been given:—that they were Goidelic Celts; that they were Belgae; that they were Finns; that they came from Denmark or the Scandinavian peninsula; that their original home was Dalmatia; and, lastly, that they may be traced back to the valley of the Rhine.[1917] But the view which has been repeated by almost every recent writer is that they were Goidels.[1918]
1-2. The Goidelic theory and the Belgic (which I ought perhaps to apologize for noticing) may be considered together; for if any argument tells in favour of the latter, it tells as much or more in favour of the former.
Thurnam, who does not trouble himself about the distinction between Goidelic and Brythonic Celts, points out that ‘extremely brachycephalic skulls have been exhumed from many of the French chambered tumuli’;[1919] that seven skulls with cephalic indices of 80 and upwards from a dolmen near Senlis, which is in the territory that was occupied by the Belgae, ‘have much resemblance to those from the round barrows’;[1920] and that three skulls with indices of 80, 80, and 85 respectively from a sepulchral grotto in the Belgic department of the Oise are ‘very similar in general character to the short skulls from the round barrows’.[1921] He argues that of the cranial types represented by the peoples of the long barrows and the round barrows respectively ‘one at least must be Celtic’:[1922] he points out that in the cremation interments which have been discovered in round barrows ‘the appearances are consistent with what we are told of the funerals of the Gauls ... by Caesar and Pomponius Mela’;[1923] and his general conclusion is that the Round Barrow people were ‘an offshoot through the Belgic Gauls from the great brachycephalic stock of Central and North-Eastern Europe’.[1924] Finally, Professor Rhys maintained in 1890[1925] (it would be rash to assume that his opinion is unchanged) that the Round Barrow race belonged to the Brythonic group, who, he asserted, being comparatively broad-headed, were less pure than the Goidels.
According to Professor Boyd Dawkins, the Round Barrow race must have been Goidels, and not Wends, Finns, or Slaves, because the latter would not have subsequently retreated eastward ‘against the current of the Celtic, Belgian, and German invasions’;[1926] while the late Canon Isaac Taylor[1927] affirmed that the skulls of the well-known ‘Sion type’, which by some anthropologists are believed to have belonged to the Celtic Helvetii, resembled those of the round barrows.
Now the view that the tall brachycephalic people of the round barrows were the Belgae is so utterly absurd that it is difficult to conceive how writers who posed as authorities on ethnology could ever have entertained it.[1928] If some benighted classical scholar had ascribed the Copernican system to Ptolemy, one may imagine how he would have been derided by scientists; yet such a blunder would not have been different in degree from that which Thurnam committed and Huxley approved. For the Belgic invasion began, at the earliest, in the third, and, as Professor Rhys himself maintains,[1929] in the second century before the Christian era; and the first invaders of the Round Barrow race landed in Britain, at the latest, about 1400 B.C.,[1930] and probably several centuries earlier. The argument which Thurnam bases upon the alleged similarity between Round Barrow skulls and some which have been exhumed from French dolmens has no weight. To begin with, the theory that any Celtic-speaking people invaded Gaul in the Neolithic Age is contrary to historical and archaeological evidence;[1931] and, assuming that they did, the resemblance between the skulls to which Thurnam refers and most of those of the tall Round Barrow skeletons is purely superficial. Any one may convince himself of this who will take the trouble to compare the illustrations of Round Barrow skulls in Crania Britannica with those in Crania Ethnica; and Thurnam himself in more than one passage[1932] admits, indeed emphasizes, the distinction. Even Broca[1933] denied that there was any physical affinity between the tall brachycephali of the round barrows and the [so-called] ‘real Celts of Gaul’; and, as we shall see presently, by the latter he simply meant the brachycephalic people, descended from neolithic ancestors, that formed the substratum of the population whom Caesar called Celtae. Similarly Dr. Beddoe truly says that the [characteristic] Round Barrow skulls resemble those of Borreby in the Danish island of Falster, rather than those of Broca’s Celtae.[1934] It is true indeed, as we have seen, that some of the Round Barrow skulls resemble some of the neolithic French skulls; but, speaking generally, the former are far more rugged and in every way more strongly marked than the latter.[1935]
More striking, however, than the contrast between the skulls of the characteristic Round Barrow skeletons and those of the French brachycephalic neolithic race is the discrepancy in stature. The average height of the former was, as we have seen, on the lowest computation, 5 feet 8⅖ inches; that of the latter was very little over 5 feet.[1936] Moreover, while the brachycephalic Finns and Danes and the few modern brachycephalic inhabitants of England are generally tall or moderately tall and fair, those of France and Central Europe are generally not only short but dark.[1937]
The argument that since the Long Barrow skulls were pre-Aryan, those of the round barrows must have been Celtic, begs the question. As we shall see presently, there are other skulls in museums, which belong to neither type, and which undoubtedly are Celtic. What reason is there to deny that the earlier brachycephalic invaders who were buried in round barrows may, as Mr. C. H. Read[1938] reasonably suggests, have been pre-Aryan? The British Celts of the later Bronze Age were doubtless cremated; and therefore their skulls are not forthcoming. And if the resemblance between the cremation interments of the round barrows and those described by Caesar proved that the former were all Celtic, it would also prove that they were Greek![1939]
In answer to Professor Boyd Dawkins it may be said that if the tall Round Barrow race were not Finns or Slaves, it does not follow that they were Goidels. And supposing that they were Finns or Slaves, why should it be necessary to assume that they ‘subsequently retreated eastward against the current of the Celtic, Belgian, and German invasions’? Or that they retreated eastward at all? The ‘Iberian’ immigrants certainly did not retreat ‘against the current’ of the Round Barrow invaders: they retreated, if at all, to the remoter parts of Britain. The argument that the Round Barrow skulls resemble those of the Sion type is disposed of by merely comparing the measurements and the illustrations of the two series. The Sion type, as Rolleston[1940] says, ‘corresponds to many of our long-barrow skulls,’ and is not brachycephalic but dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic:[1941] there is no proof that it was that of the Helvetii;[1942] and, as I have pointed out elsewhere,[1943] there is strong reason to believe that the Helvetii did not appear in Switzerland before the Iron Age.
So much for the arguments which have been adduced in favour of the popular theory. There are facts which absolutely disprove it. First, there is no evidence that the brachycephalic people who built round barrows ever reached Ireland, at least in appreciable numbers; for not a single skull of the characteristic Round Barrow type has ever been found there, and only four brachycephalic skulls which can be referred to prehistoric times.[1944] Yet it is needless to say that since a time long anterior to the Roman invasion of Britain Ireland has been one of the principal abodes of the Goidelic stock. Secondly, it is, as we have seen, in the highest degree probable, if not certain, that the Round Barrow race first invaded Britain in the Neolithic Age. Let us, however, for the sake of argument, accept Professor Boyd Dawkins’s assumption that their advent synchronized with the beginning of the British Bronze Age. Now, according to Professor Montelius, the Bronze Age in this country began about 2000 B.C.; according to Sir John Evans,[1945] six centuries later. It is impossible to fix with certainty the date of the earliest Celtic invasion of Britain; but such historical evidence as we possess points to the conclusion that it was not earlier than the seventh century before the Christian era.[1946] M. Salomon Reinach has argued that a Celtic-speaking people appeared in North-Western Gaul in the ninth century,—the earliest date which has ever been proposed by any scholar; but his view is based on the mere conjecture that κασσίτερος,, the Greek word for tin, which occurs in Homer, is of Celtic derivation.[1947] M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, indeed, who adopts this conjecture,[1948] supposes that the Celts actually landed in Britain as early as the ninth century before Christ; but even if we accept his chronology, we are confronted with the fact that the very earliest date that has been assigned on historical or linguistic grounds for the first Celtic invasion[1949] is four or five centuries later than the latest, ten or eleven centuries later than the earliest date which has been assigned by archaeologists for the commencement of the Bronze Age in Britain. Yet anthropologists and antiquaries will go on repeating the dogma that the builders of the round barrows, who, at the latest, began to arrive in Britain at the commencement of the Bronze Age, were Goidelic Celts. The moral is that anthropologists and antiquaries would not be worse equipped if they enlarged the sphere of their studies.
Again, the view that a Celtic-speaking people invaded Britain at the close of the Neolithic or the beginning of the Bronze Age implies that Celtic and Latin, the nearest of kin in the Aryan family of languages, had become differentiated long before the Neolithic Age came to its end. Would any philologist who knew the rudiments of archaeology sanction a theory so preposterous?[1950]
The foregoing arguments apply equally to the short men whose remains have been found in the greatest purity in North-Eastern Scotland. The race to which they belonged began to arrive in Gaul very early in the Neolithic Age:[1951] they themselves landed in Britain before its close. Whoever they may have been, they were neither Goidels nor Belgae nor Brythons of any tribe.
Finally, although I am aware that I am about to tread upon thorny ground, I affirm that there is not the slightest reason to doubt that the Celtic invaders of Britain, in so far as they were descended from the Celtic-speaking people who conquered Gaul, were not a brachycephalic but a dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic people. I have already argued in favour of this thesis in a dissertation on ‘the Ethnology of Gaul’,[1952] and I will now adduce fresh evidence in its favour. But first let me make my meaning perfectly clear. I do not mean that the Celtic invaders of Britain were all of the same type. On the contrary, I assume that the dominant race had intermixed and intermarried, before they embarked from the Continent, with descendants of the neolithic stocks. I do not mean that even the invaders who introduced the Celtic language into Gaul, even those who beat the Romans on the Allia, were homogeneous. Dr. Beddoe, as I have remarked elsewhere,[1953] warns us not to believe that there was ever a period when, for example, all the Caledonians were red-haired. I only mean that among the Celtic-speaking conquerors of Britain dolichocephaly, as well as tallness and fairness, was a prevailing characteristic.
Thurnam[1954] asserted that ‘we may ask in vain for a series of ancient dolichocephalic skulls which, on satisfactory archaeological grounds, can be assigned to the immediately pre-Roman, and therefore to the Celtic period, either in England or in France’. Let us consider England first. Now it happens that the skulls of the ‘Late Celtic’ period, or Early Iron Age, which have been found in this country are almost all either dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic.[1955] Canon Greenwell,[1956] it is true, explains this fact by the assumption that ‘the intruding round-headed people ... were gradually absorbed by the earlier and more numerous [Long Barrow] race’. ‘In this way,’ he says, ‘it appears to me that we may account for the skull type of the Early Iron Age without the necessity of requiring any immigration into Britain or its conquest after the time of the presumed occupation by the bronze-using round-headed people,’ &c. But that necessity is imperative. Had Canon Greenwell momentarily forgotten his Caesar? The immigration of the Belgae took place, at the earliest, in the third century B.C., many centuries after the ‘occupation by the bronze-using round-headed people’. It is true that some of the British skulls which belong to the Late Celtic period are of the same type as those of the Long Barrow race:[1957] but this only proves that the Long Barrow race survived; and others are of a type which, as Rolleston says, is ‘entirely wanting ... in the series from the long barrows’.[1958] Unfortunately, however, the Late Celtic skulls which have been found in Britain are comparatively few;[1959] and hardly any of them can be assigned with certainty to the Brythonic invaders.
In France, on the other hand, the skulls of the corresponding period are very numerous; but few of them have been measured. Those few, however, confirm my argument. They belonged with very few exceptions to tall mesaticephalic or dolichocephalic men; and two of them may be seen in Salles IX and X of the Musée de St. Germain, near Paris, the former having been buried with his war-chariot, iron helmet, and long iron sword. The mean index of twenty-seven adult male skulls of this type, found in tumuli of the Early Iron Age in the department of the Marne, was 78.49; but Broca, who has described them, maintains that the index of skulls of the purest ‘Kymric’ (or, to use the term which is now in vogue, ‘Galatic’) type would be considerably lower; for, he argues, as the Gauls of the Marne lived very near the frontier of the Celtae, they must have intermarried with the brachycephalic people who formed the great majority of that group of tribes.[1960]
Again, in a recent article on tumuli of the Early Iron Age in the department of the Côte-d’Or, Dr. Hamy points to the noteworthy fact that two brachycephalic skulls, belonging to descendants of an earlier race, were found ‘among the dolichocephali who predominated in that population’;[1961] and in a paper which he has just published on the earliest Gallic invaders of the Iron Age he shows that the cephalic indices of the available skulls from the Châtillonnais and the arrondissement of Beaune range between 73.1 and 76.59, while the average stature was 1 metre 75.7, or just over 5 feet 9⅛ inches.[1962]
The prevalent view in this country is, I am aware, that the Celts were a brachycephalic people; but it is begotten of sheer confusion of thought. Professor Ripley[1963] remarks that ‘there is practically to-day a complete unanimity of opinion among physical anthropologists, that the term Celt, if used at all, belongs to the brachycephalic darkish population of the Alpine highlands’; and he adds that the only dissentient is M. G. de Lapouge.[1964] But Dr. Beddoe,[1965] whom he counts among the professors of the orthodox faith, has emphatically recorded his opinion that, at the time of the Roman conquest, the Celtic-speaking people of Southern Britain ‘partook more of the tall blond stock of Northern Europe than of the thick-set, broad-headed dark stock which Broca has called Celtic’; and the ‘unanimity’ (which is far from being ‘complete’) upon which Professor Ripley pins his faith is due partly to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of Broca’s famous essay, Qu’est-ce que les Celtes, partly to the desire of establishing a uniform connotation, and partly to the fact that some physical anthropologists have neglected to supplement their scientific researches by the study of classical texts. Broca found the term ‘Celt’ used in a multiplicity of senses, and he attempted to put an end to confusion by attaching to it one limited, conventional, and, as we shall see, misleading signification. When, in the essay to which I have just referred, he endeavoured to prove that the Celts were a dark brachycephalic people, he expressly limited the term ‘Celts’ to the population of that part of Gaul which, according to Caesar,[1966] was inhabited by ‘a people who call themselves Celts and whom we [the Romans] call Gauls’. ‘There is no proof,’ he insists, ‘that the existence in the British Isles of a people bearing the name of Celts has ever been authoritatively affirmed’:[1967] according to him, the invaders of Britain who spoke the so-called Celtic languages were the Belgae,[1968] for he knew nothing about Goidels or pre-Belgic Brythons; and, although he allowed himself to be persuaded that the tall Round Barrow race spoke Celtic, he denied ‘that there is any other affinity except that of language between the brachycephali of the round barrows and the real Celts of Gaul’.[1969] When he insisted that ‘the Celts’ were a dark brachycephalic people, he did not mean that darkness and brachycephaly were characteristic of the conquerors who introduced the Celtic language into Gaul: he meant that they were characteristic of the great mass of the mixed population whom Caesar called Celtae,[1970] who were in the main descended from neolithic invaders, and whose uppermost stratum, so to speak, consisted of invaders whom Broca, speaking as a physical anthropologist rather than a philologist, called ‘Kimris’.[1971] That the name Celtae did not belong to the people of Gaul until it was introduced by these Celtic-speaking ‘Kimris’ is evident from the fact that it belongs to the Celtic tongue:[1972] in other words, the Celts, anthropologically speaking, were originally identical with the invaders who introduced the Celtic language first into Germany and then into Gaul.[1973] These invaders were tall and mesaticephalic or dolichocephalic; and the Celtic-speaking conquerors of Britain belonged to the same stock.
‘The radical errors in Broca’s definition of the “Celts of history” [so I wrote some years ago[1974]] are these:—first, he calmly assumes that no classical writer’s testimony, except Caesar’s, is of any value; and secondly, he fails to see that Caesar, by saying that the people who called themselves “Celts” were called by the Romans “Gauls”, makes it as clear as noon-day that for him and for his countrymen, as for Polybius and Pausanias, the words “Celt” and “Gaul” were synonymous. Broca admits that the older population of Gallia Celtica was conquered by men of the same race as the Gauls or Celts who captured Rome. Therefore it is absolutely certain that the Celtae of Transalpine Gaul were called after their conquerors. The truth is that Broca, while he aimed at putting an end to confusion, only made confusion worse confounded. Moreover, throughout his discussion, he simply ignores the Helvetii, who, according to Caesar, were included among the Celtae.’
Since the foregoing paragraph was written, I have lighted upon a passage[1975] in which Broca himself justifies my argument and uses the word ‘Celt’ in the sense which I attach to it. The Celtae of Gaul, he remarks, ‘were already mixed before the arrival of the Kimris [or Gallo-Brythonic invaders], since the name [Celtae] under which they appeared for the first time in history had been imposed upon them by the conquering race of the Celts properly so called, which, like the Kimris and the Germans, came from the east, and, like them, was dolichocephalic.’[1976]
Professor Ripley appeals to the German ethnologist, Johannes Ranke,[1977] whose arguments, he insists, are ‘decisive’. But any one who will take the trouble to read the chapter which Ranke devotes to the Celts will see that his argument does not support Professor Ripley’s contention. Virchow, he reminds us, has pointed out that wherever the Celts are known to have penetrated dark peoples are now to be found. But, as he fully admits, Virchow himself said, ‘I am not on that account inclined to assume that the original Celts were ... dark,’ and reminded his readers that the ancient writers described the Celts as fair. Ranke points out, further, that wherever the Celts originally dwelled in Central Europe we now find the people not only dark but also brachycephalic; but at the same time he warns us to bear in mind that in certain Celtic districts of Britain dolichocephaly is unmistakable, and that there is evidence that on the Continent the Celtic invaders found a dark brachycephalic people in possession. In other words, Ranke does not commit himself to any theory as to the physical characters of the Celts properly so called,—the invaders who introduced the Celtic dialects into Germany, Gaul, Britain, and other countries which they subdued. The reader will also bear in mind that the writers who identify the tall brachycephalic Round Barrow race with the Goidelic Celts unanimously maintain that they were fair.
That the Celtic-speaking invaders of Gaul and Britain were commonly dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic is not only attested by the skulls of warriors of the Iron Age, but is either attested or at least not disproved by the results of modern observations of existing Celtic-speaking peoples[1978] and of the country which was formerly inhabited by the Gallic Belgae.[1979] When Sergi[1980] tells us that the Gauls who captured Rome were ‘composed of brunet Celts and blond Teutons’, he makes an assertion which, as it is absolutely unsupported by any evidence, calls for no refutation; and it would be useless to ask him who were the ‘blond Teutons’ who were the ancestors of the red-haired Gauls of the Perthshire Highlands.[1981] As Dr. Beddoe[1982] puts it, the Gauls of Scotland are probably descended from ‘Iberians’ crossed with ‘a long-faced, harsh-featured, red-haired race, who contributed the language and much of the character’.[1983]
3. The late Mr. Charles Elton,[1984] referring to Professor A. H. Sayce’s Science of Language,[1985] affirmed that ‘a Finnish idiom has been traced in several of the British languages’, and inferred that the tall builders of the round barrows were Finns. The idiom in question may, for aught that I know, have been traced by some philologist who had determined to find it, but not by Professor Sayce nor by any one to whom Professor Sayce refers. Mr. Elton’s argument is as obsolete as that which Professor Rhys founded upon his imaginary tracing of Basque in the language of the Picts.
4. Much may be said for the theory of the late Professor Rolleston, that the tall people of the round barrows came from Denmark or some of the adjoining islands, if it be duly modified. On the coast near Flamborough Head are remains of earthworks, which, as has been demonstrated by General Pitt-Rivers, who excavated them, were erected by invaders fighting their way inland; and, as he remarks, ‘it is unlikely that any but Northmen should have landed in this spot.’[1986] Thurnam himself admits that there is ‘a great resemblance’ between the characteristic Round Barrow skulls and those from ‘the Giants’ Chamber at Borreby [in the island of Falster], and from other Scandinavian megalithic tombs’;[1987] and his testimony is confirmed by Rolleston[1988] and Dr. Beddoe.[1989]
Dr. A. H. Keane[1990] argues, in opposition to Rolleston’s view, that if any of the Round Barrow invaders had come from Scandinavia, ‘they must have spoken some Low German dialect, of which there are no clear traces in the tribal and place-names of the Bronze Age.’ The answer is, first, that, as Mr. C. H. Read[1991] suggests, they may have spoken not a Low German but a pre-Aryan dialect; and, secondly, that we know absolutely nothing about either the tribal or the place-names of Britain in the Bronze Age. Assuming that Low German tribal or place-names existed in Britain before the Celtic invasion, they would for the most part have been superseded by Celtic names, just as the Celtic invaders of Gaul generally substituted their own tribal and place-names for those of their predecessors, and just as in certain parts of Scotland Celtic names of rivers gave place to Norse names.[1992]
5. Messrs. J. Gray and J. F. Tocher infer from their observations of the physical characteristics of the population of West Aberdeenshire that ‘a tall, broad-headed, dark-haired, light-eyed people’, whom they regard as ‘the descendants of the men of the Bronze Age’, formerly inhabited Aberdeenshire, but were driven inland by later blond immigrants, who were shorter and had narrower heads, and whom they identify with North Germans.[1993] The resemblance of the tall dark people to modern Dalmatians[1994] is, they say, ‘significant when taken in conjunction with the fact that bronze first came into the British Isles from South-East Europe.’
‘The fact!’ But is it the fact? Archaeology has certainly shown that Britain, in the Bronze Age, was commercially connected with Northern France, which, as Mr. C. H. Read[1995] says, was ‘supplied to a certain extent from Italy’. But no archaeologist supposes that bronze was carried all the way from Italy, still less from Dalmatia, into Britain or even into Northern France by Italians or Dalmatians. It came through the methods of primitive commerce. Moreover, as we have already seen,[1996] ‘the men of the Bronze Age,’ by whom Messrs. Gray and Tocher mean the tall brachycephalic people of the round barrows, were still in their Stone Age when they began to invade Britain. A direct immigration from the coasts of the Adriatic into West Aberdeenshire or even Southern Britain is inconceivable; and if it had taken place gradually across the Continent, we should find that the immigrants had left traces of their presence on the way, which is not the case. Notwithstanding the thoroughness with which Messrs. Gray and Tocher conducted their investigation, I fear that it throws no new light upon the ethnology of Ancient Britain. After the successive invasions and immigrations, the internal migrations, and the intermarriages of 3,000 years, it is utterly impossible to establish by dint of even the most elaborate census of a living population the fact that the people of the Bronze Age even in West Aberdeenshire were ‘tall, broad-headed, dark-haired, and light-eyed’; and if they were, why only in West Aberdeenshire?
6. The Honourable John Abercromby maintains that the brachycephalic invaders, or some of them, came at the beginning of the Bronze Age or in the period of transition between the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age from the neighbourhood of the middle Rhine or from some intermediate district between it and Britain.[1997] Remarking[1998] that ‘the recorded finds of the last hundred years are sufficient to establish the fact that the beaker [or drinking-cup] is the oldest form of fictilia in the Bronze Age of this country’, he argues that the immigrants who introduced the oldest drinking-cups of the kind which Thurnam designated as ‘type β’ must have belonged to a tribe who at one time lived in the valley of the Rhine, because between British and Rhenish specimens of this type ‘there is a substantial agreement’ both in form and ornament, which ‘seems too great to be the result of pure accident’; and he points out[1999] that ‘the type exists not only in the central Rhine, but also near its mouth’, though the intermediate stages cannot be traced. The Rhenish cups belong to the Neolithic Age; and it seems impossible to prove that the earliest British examples were not made before any objects of bronze were manufactured in or introduced into Britain:[2000] but Mr. Abercromby has certainly established a very strong probability in favour of the locality to which he refers their origin.[2001]
The great mistake that has been made in discussing the question is the not uncommon assumption that the brachycephalic immigrants who buried their dead in round barrows arrived in Britain at one time and came from one place. Some of them certainly appeared before the end of the Neolithic Age: others may have introduced bronze implements or ornaments; others doubtless came, in successive hordes, during the course of the Bronze Age. Some of those who belonged to the Grenelle race, who certainly came from Eastern Europe and possibly from Asia,[2002] and whose centre of dispersion was the Alpine region,[2003] may have started from Gaul;[2004] others could have traced their origin to some Rhenish tribe; and I am inclined to believe that those who belonged to the characteristic rugged Round Barrow type crossed over, for the most part, from Denmark or the outlying islands. That the first Celtic-speaking invaders landed in Britain before the end of the Bronze Age I do not deny; and if they came from that part of Gaul which was inhabited by the Celtae, I have no doubt that many of them were brachycephalic. But it is nevertheless certain that among these invaders the dominant element, who were Celtic in blood as well as in speech, and whose physical type was that described by the ancient writers, were not brachycephalic but mesaticephalic or dolichocephalic. And if I am asked where the Celtic skulls of the later British Bronze Age are to be found, I answer, Nowhere: they were reduced to ashes by cremation.[2005]
It is interesting to find that, according to Huxley, of the skeletons that were found in the famous Heathery Burn Cave, near Durham, which was inhabited in the closing period of the Bronze Age, not one belonged to either of the brachycephalic types, but all to ‘the same race of rather small and lightly-made men with prominent superciliary ridges and projecting nasal bones’[2006] which is represented by the river-bed skulls of England and Ireland.[2007]