Peoples of BritainIntroductionThe story of early Britain has traditionally been told in te
Peoples of Britain
Introduction
The story of early Britain has traditionally been told in terms of waves of invaders displacing or annihilating(消灭) their predecessors. Archaeology suggests that this picture is fundamentally wrong. For over 10,000 years people have been moving into—and out of—Britain, sometimes in substantial numbers, yet there has always been a basic continuity of population.
The gene pool of the island has changed, but more slowly and far less completely than implied by the old "invasion model", and the notion of large-scale migrations, once the key explanation for change in early Britain, has been widely discredited.
Before Roman times "Britain" was just a geographical entity, and had no political meaning, and no single cultural identity. Arguably this remained generally true until the 17th century, when James I of England sought to establish a pan-British monarchy.
Throughout recorded history the island has consisted of multiple cultural groups and identities. Many of these groupings looked outwards, across the seas, for their closest connections—they did not necessarily connect naturally with their fellow islanders, many of whom were harder to reach than maritime neighbors in Ireland or continental Europe.
It therefore makes no sense to look at Britain in isolation; we have to consider it with Ireland as part of the wider "Atlantic Archipelago", nearer to continental Europe and, like Scandinavia, part of the North Sea world.
First Peoples
From the arrival of the first modern humans—who were hunter-gatherers, following the retreating ice of the Ice Age northwards—to the beginning of recorded history is a period of about 100 centuries, or 400 generations. This is a vast time span, and we know very little about what went on through those years; it is hard even to fully answer the question, "Who were the early peoples of Britain？", because they have left no accounts of themselves.
We can, however, say that biologically they were part of the Caucasoid(高加索人种) population of Europe.
The regional physical stereotypes familiar to us today, a pattern widely thought to result from the post-Roman Anglo-Saxa and Viking invasions—red-headed people in Scotland, small, dark-haired folk in Wales and lanky blondes in southern England—already existed in Roman times. Insofar as they represent reality, they perhaps attest the post-Ice Age peopling of Britain, or the first farmers of 6,000 years ago.
Before Rome: the "Celts"
the end of the Iron Age(roughly the last 700 years B.C., we get our first eye-witness accounts of Britain from Greco-Roman authors, not least Julius Caesar who invaded in 55 and 54 B.C. These reveal a mosaic of named peoples(Trinovantes, Silures, Cornovii, Selgovac, etc.), but there is little sign such groups had any sense of collective identity any more than the islanders of AD 1000 all considered themselves "Britons".
However, there is one thing that the Romans, modern archaeologists and the Iron Age islanders themselves word all agree on: they were not Celts. This was an invention of the 18th century; the name was not used earlier. The idea canto from the discovery around 1700 that the non-English island tongues relate to that of the ancient continental Gauls, who really were called Celts. This ancient continental ethnic label was applied to the wider family of languages. But "Celtic" was soon extended to describe insular monuments, art, culture and peoples, ancient and modern: island "Celtic" identity was born, like Britishness, in the 18th century.
Archaeologists widely agree on two things about the British Iron Age: its many regional cultures grew out of the preceding local Bronze Age, and did not derive from waves of continental "Celtic" invaders. And secondly, calling the British Iron Age "Celtic" is so misleading that it is best abandoned.
A．Y
B．N
C．NG
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