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REVIEWS EVERYDAY LIFE OF THE PAGAN CELTS. By Anne Ross. Batsford, 1970. Pp. 224, 101 figs. f 1-30. Among the books which helped to form this reviewer's boyhood interest in archaeology many years ago were the Quennells' 'Everyday Life' series which Messrs. Batsford are now expanding. The old volumes were simple in style and clearly aimed at the young; they dealt chiefly with material culture. Anne Ross has now contributed to this popular series a volume on the everyday life of the Pagan Celts which is very different from its predecessors in style and content. Its main purpose is to describe pre- Christian Celtic society, as we know it from classical sources, compared with what has been preserved of the earliest Celtic oral tradition by the mainly Irish early Christian writers of the early Middle Ages, and illustrated by archaeological evidence drawn almost entirely from the prehistoric Iron Age of the British Isles and the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures of the Continent. The author acknowledges her debt to her archaeologist husband, R. W. Feachem, who has contributed many attractive line drawings. Since the original Quennell books have been reprinted, it was no doubt deliberate policy of the publishers to place emphasis in the new book upon the literary sources for Old Celtic culture, and they could not have chosen anyone better qualified to expound this side of the subject for the type of general reader who nowadays approaches it from an interest in archaeology: her larger volume on Pagan Celtic Britain makes this clear, and explains why the author, in her new book, has dealt most fully with the social organization and religious life of the Pagan Celts. It is, naturally, this part of the Pagan Celts which is most successful; the author handles the comparative quotations from classical and early medieval literature with great skill and shows, in a most interesting way, the real continuity of Celtic culture, between the early days of contact with the Greeks near the Mediterranean coast and the Dark Age on the shores of the Atlantic. Such continuity, however, though clear enough in the field of spiritual and intellectual life, is not always so easy to demonstrate in that of material culture, and most archaeologists will be uneasy about the well-nigh exclusive use, in this book, of archaeological illustrations derived from the pre-Roman period. To give one example, Anne Ross quotes more than once passages in the Irish literature which refer to the use of combs as part of the feminine 'hair-do', without informing her readers that, archaeologically, this must reflect Dark Age rather than prehistoric Iron Age practice, since hair-combs only become common on British sites in the late-Roman period, as a result of Germanic influences.