Welsh Journals

REVIEWS CELTIC CIVILIZATION AND ITS HERITAGE. By Jan Filip. Publishing House of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and ARTIA-New Horizons series. Prague, 1962. Pp. 215. Figs. 52, Pis. XL. 8s. 6d. The Czech state publishing house has shown commendable enterprise in making available a cheap English edition of a work by its academician, Jan Filip, on Celtic civilization. Professor Filip, who occupies the Chair of Prehistory and Early History at the Charles University, Prague, published, in 1956, a detailed work on the Celts in central Europe (Keltove ve Stredni Europe) and followed it up, in 1960, with a shorter and more general work, which is now published in translation and in a format which compares not unfavourably, in value for money, with our Pelicans. In fact, Professor Filip's English readers may have an advantage over his Czech ones, for the book, though archaeologically sound, is written from a central European point of view with central European limitations, and deals with the eastern Celts more fully than the western. The English reader with general interests may therefore supplement Powell's excellent survey in Glyn Daniel's 'Ancient Peoples and Places' series with much central European detail at no great cost, but Czech readers will still not have a completely adequate idea of the achievements of Celtic civilization in western Europe. The bias of this book, which is certainly not ideologically inspired, arises, perhaps, partly from the natural tendency to deal more fully with material in south-central Europe which is most familiar and accessible to the writer, but partly also from the great handicaps which scholars in Slavonic countries have encountered since the last war in keeping in touch with research and publications in western Europe, especially the British Isles and the Iberian peninsula. This, no doubt, is the reason why, for example, the Celts are pictured as typically living in rectangular houses, often partly sunk into the ground, whereas as we well know in these islands, they were far more likely, on the Atlantic sea-board, to build circular ones. Here, indeed, the Celts were quite literally building on the foundations of their Neolithic and Bronze Age predecessors in the two respective areas. Similarly, our Czech reader would never learn that the greatest achievements of the Celtic military engineer (as opposed to the builder of town walls) are to be found in Britain. Those British works which Professor Filip cites in the bibliography must no doubt share the blame for certain of his statements which are not now acceptable. Thus the presentation of insular La Tène art as something transmitted by 'Marnians' to the eastern counties of England in the third century B.C. and not flowering further west until the first century B.C., is based upon a thesis evolved by Piggott and Fox, criticized by Jope on the grounds of clear evidence for an independent and early origin for