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Documentary, The Celts - Episode 2 of 2
#TheCelts #Documentary
#TheCelts #Documentary
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00:00They were the masters of Iron Age Europe.
00:06Their leaders were men and women of legend.
00:10King Arthur of the Britons, the warrior queen Boudicca, and Vercingetorix the Gaul.
00:16They had powerful priests called druids who practiced human sacrifice to their gods.
00:21They were bloodthirsty headhunters who fought naked in battle against spears and armor.
00:34But it all ended in tragedy.
00:36Their vibrant culture was wiped out of Europe.
00:39They were driven to the Atlantic fringes by the legions of Rome.
00:43They became the eternal victims, the romantic underdogs of history.
00:47Yet, 2,000 years later, their character still casts a spell.
00:52They were the people we call the Celts.
01:04But how much is myth and how much is true?
01:10I'm Richard Rudgley, and I've made it my business to delve into our history,
01:14to try to find out what makes us who we are today.
01:19Previously, I've traveled back to the Stone Age
01:21and discovered that we were just as clever then as we are now.
01:27And I've explored the Dark Ages
01:29and found that our pagan ancestors were not primitive savages.
01:35Now, I want to add another piece to our historical puzzle.
01:38I want to explore that elusive part of our past that we call Celtic.
01:49I'm on a journey to uncover the ancient Celts,
01:53to bring them out into the light after 2,000 years of myth-making.
01:57I found the earliest known Celtic town, not in the British Isles, but in Germany.
02:02And I followed the Celts on their journey through history.
02:07At Elysia in France, I stood on the spot
02:10where Vercingetorix the Gaul was conquered by Julius Caesar.
02:14His defeat marked the end of the Celtic world.
02:18Or did it?
02:20Today in Britain and Ireland,
02:22many people think they're the descendants of this race of ancient Celts,
02:25the last remnants of an ethnic group,
02:28pushed to the margins of Europe as the Romans advanced.
02:32But does the evidence support this?
02:35My first problem is,
02:37the Romans never called the people of Britain Celts,
02:40although they did say that the ancient Britons spoke a similar language
02:43to the Celts of Gaul.
02:46What about in Scotland,
02:48a nation we think of as Celtic today?
02:50I've come north to the Shetland Islands to explore one of the largest
02:55and most mysterious monuments of Iron Age Britain.
02:59It looks like a modern cooling tower, but this is an ancient broch.
03:04The ruins of more than 500 survive in Scotland today.
03:08They're the most dramatic evidence left by the people who lived here in the Iron Age.
03:13Moosa Broch is the only one still intact.
03:16Good to see you.
03:17This is amazing, isn't it?
03:19This is the best broch in the world.
03:21And in our Shetland Islands,
03:25this is the equivalent of the Great Wall of China.
03:29This is our most stupendous archaeological monument.
03:33This amazing stone tower is over 40 feet high
03:37and built without an ounce of mortar.
03:40This is a dry stone building.
03:42It stood here for 2,000 years.
03:44You can imagine the gales that have afflicted it during that period.
03:50So what was the purpose of the broch then?
03:53For the past 25 years, archaeologists have imagined that these buildings were farmhouses.
04:00I don't believe a word of it.
04:02This is a fortification.
04:04Oh, wow, look at this.
04:06It's even more impressive from inside, isn't it, than out?
04:09Yeah.
04:10They've had its own timber furnishings.
04:13It wouldn't have looked bare and unfinished in the way that it does today.
04:19It's only when you get to the top of the stairs that you realise what the building was for.
04:25You can imagine how commanding this building would have looked to anybody who was arriving from offshore.
04:31Absolutely.
04:33They must have had a great view.
04:34They could survey the whole area.
04:37They could see attackers coming from a long way off, prepare themselves.
04:40Yeah.
04:42And they certainly left their mark.
04:43They are by far the biggest things that were built here until the 20th century.
04:50The Brochs were built long before the Romans defeated the Celts in Europe.
04:56Were they built by Celtic migrants to Scotland?
04:59It looks to me as if the people who built these things were an Iron Age people, presumably a Celtic people, who made their presence felt in a big way in the north of Scotland.
05:13Whether they called themselves Celts, of course, is an entirely different matter.
05:18This in itself is a real feat, but when you add on all the hundreds of others, you realise that some big cultural construction is going on here.
05:30Someone's building themselves a culture, and a very enduring one at that.
05:35But were the Broch builders Celts?
05:40Brochs only exist in the north of Scotland, and there is nothing on the continent remotely like them.
05:46Surprisingly, the evidence from England, like the Battersea Shield and the Wetwang Chariots, seems more Celtic than Scotland.
05:55In fact, there's no evidence in Scotland at all to suggest waves of Celtic migrants from Europe settled there in large numbers.
06:02So what about Wales?
06:06There's plenty of archaeology in Wales that enables us to reconstruct what daily life would have been like in the Iron Age for ordinary people.
06:14It should be possible to see if there are anything in common between Celtic culture and the culture of Britain BC.
06:22Castle Henlis is an Iron Age hillfort, and these roundhouses have been rebuilt on their ancient foundations.
06:29These are attempts to reconstruct what was here originally. The most important thing about that to me is that when you go into them, you get a sense of place, a sense of sharing space with the people who lived there before.
06:46This is as close as you can get to life as it was lived in Iron Age Britain in the centuries before the Romans.
06:52Don't try and mess around with it too much, otherwise it'll just fall on.
06:57To build around a house like this, you need lots and lots of resources. So the person who lived up here would be an important person, locally important.
07:05Now, I'm going to give him the blessing of one of our gods before he goes into battle, and he's going to be blessed by Tyrannus, the god of thunder.
07:15There are plenty of echoes here of the way European Celtic society was structured. Tribal groups, each with their own local identity, living in hillforts and fighting each other.
07:28Just like their continental cousins, they had formidable defences.
07:31We call those a cheveux de frise. And basically, it's a series of small stones that are set up on end, almost like a sort of Iron Age tank trap.
07:41Well, your horse wouldn't want to come through here, would it? No, no. Well, you wouldn't want to run through here either.
07:50If you did manage it, you'd get another nasty surprise. A slingshot horde was found by the main gate.
07:55Slingstones. Every man's weapons. These are found by the thousand on hillforts. Here, there was over 2,000 in one cache.
08:08Just like in Celtic Europe, the people here were warriors.
08:12A hole in one. There it goes. Well done.
08:16But they were also farmers, just like in Gaul, and they were using new iron tools, ones that we still use today.
08:22So, really, the Iron Age was an industrial revolution, in a sense.
08:26Very much so. Once you start to produce tools exactly for the job, the styles don't change.
08:31We've got a couple of examples here, for instance. It's a digging tool for cultivating ground, preparing seed beds.
08:37Harvest tools, for instance, everybody recognises that one, sickle.
08:42The tool shape is identical, right the way for now 2,500 years.
08:46They grew wheat, barley, peas and beans. Farming became more efficient because of the new iron tools.
08:55The food production went up enormously, to the point we were exporting.
09:01So they were exporting grain to where?
09:04To Gaul, of all places. The Romans were buying it for the Roman Empire.
09:07Trade brought the people of Iron Age Britain into contact with tribes hundreds of miles away, even across the sea in Europe.
09:17So all this effort to reconstruct the past, what has it taught us?
09:22Well, it's taught me that the people who lived here in the Iron Age, sophisticated people.
09:27They had high skill levels, far more than most of us have today.
09:31So would you say they were Celts?
09:34I wouldn't, no, because I think the person who lived here wouldn't have probably have heard of the word Celt.
09:41The Roman sources suggest that the tribe for this area is called Demetai.
09:48But there are so many individual forts close together that that would suggest that there probably isn't any sort of centralised leadership.
09:56So we're talking about clan-based societies rather than full blibes?
10:02Yeah, I think so. I think so.
10:06Is it right to call the people of Britain, BC, Celts?
10:10I haven't found evidence of mass migration of European Celts to Britain.
10:14But what I have found in the British Isles is a culture that had very many similarities with the Celtic culture I discovered on the continent.
10:22And there's something else that connects Wales to European Celtic culture.
10:27I mean, I feel Celtic as a Welshman, but I don't feel that that Celticity can be drawn from the Iron Age necessarily.
10:36If you're going to sort of draw any relationship between present day population of Wales and the Iron Age, you'd say that language is the key.
10:46Today, two million people in Britain and Ireland speak a Celtic language. The greatest number are Welsh.
10:55If we listen hard, can we hear a distant echo of Britain talking 2,000 years ago?
11:04I've come to Aberystwyth to find out if the Welsh language can help me make an even stronger connection between the peoples of the British Isles and the Celts of Europe.
11:17Richard, this is a map showing the Roman period and before tribal names and place names across Europe.
11:30Here's the British Isles.
11:31Yeah, Boudicca and so on, yeah.
11:32Over here there's Demetai.
11:33And again, Cásteaf Henllys.
11:34Yeah, Cásteaf Henllys is there. Up here you've got the corn owy, right in the north. That's a horn of land and corn means horn in Welsh. Of course the same corn you get in Cornwall, another horn of land.
11:52Before the Romans, there were many different tribes in Britain,
11:55but there was a common language that stretched from the brooch builders of Scotland down to Cornwall.
12:01You've got one language being spoken in slight varieties over the whole of Britain,
12:06but it carries on over into France as well.
12:09You can see that some of the tribal names actually recur.
12:13For example, here you've got the Atrebatis. They're on your side somewhere.
12:18Over here, yeah. That's right.
12:19Then we've got, up here in Yorkshire, the Parisii.
12:25OK, this is the wet wing.
12:27The same name as Parisii around Paris.
12:30Now, some of these names may be the same without meaning it's the same.
12:49Good luck.
12:52There are many different types of people who have had the same number of people here.
12:55So I'm glad that we have seen skin, very beautiful, very beautiful.
12:59And I'm really glad that we've got to get some blackと思atzas.
13:03I see one of those two different perspectives of the Greek group.
13:05I'm glad we're with the Greek group.
13:07And I'm glad that there are many different characters.
13:09And I was just glad that this is a part of the secret from the Greek group.
13:12I'm glad that we're all about the Greek group.
13:14But I've always been blessed to think about it.
13:16I think that they were chosen by the Greek group.
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