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]