“Our Ancestors the Gauls” - Abstract
Dietler, Michael
1994. Our Ancestors the Gauls: Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe in American Anthropologist. American Anthropologist Association 96(3) 584-605. March 23, 2015.
Themes:
Archaeology is used to validate cultural heritage; something that can bring a nation together or tear it apart.
Depending on one’s interpretation of material culture, it can be argued that less of Europe descends from the Gauls/Celts.
My Reasoning:
I chose this article due to the fact that I am one, of few, within our Anthropological theory class with a heavy interest and focus in Archaeology. However, it is not just general archaeology that I am interested in, but rather Celtic and Native American archaeology. While before this article I was aware of the governmental circumstances involved with this field, I didn't realise that there was such a high level of controversy involved as well. It is rare for an article, I feel, to discuss that with each discovery in material culture, some part of the past is either validated or rewritten which can, in turn, cause an uprising in many cultures depending on which one occurs.
Abstract:
Rarely when one considers archaeology do they realise that the profession comes with a heavy duty that has nothing to do with the cultural artifacts found, but everything to do with what happens to those artifacts and how the message that they give shapes a culture. In his article Our Ancestors the Gauls, Dietler addresses this problem, along with discusses his area of expertise - The Celts/Gauls and how the war waged over acountry’s undying need to be descendant from that culture. He begins hisarticle with the discussion of the correlation between “archaeology and the construction of identity in modern communities” (Dietler 1994:584) and how a large portion of Europe today possess “tensions based [on] emotional charged appeals to ethnic heritage” (Dietler 1994:584) that everything to do with nationality of those countries involved. Archaeology, for the most part, has become a governmental job in almost all countries, typically being “conscripted frequently to establish and validate cultural borders and ancestry” (Dietler 1994:585) but this typically involved with “dangerous racist and nationalist mythologies” (Dietler 1994:585) that hold the power to tear a nation apart as much as pull them together. The study of Celtic ancestry, in particular, “has been such a widespread, diverse, and important force in recent European history and because its complex relationship to Iron Age archaeology has yet to be adequately explored (Dietler 1994:585), and while the Iron Age archaeology -with this Celtic focus - spreads across large portions of Europe, Dietler focuses mainly on France due to their constant wavering and battles that continue, to this day, to contribute to their questionable identity.
Before launching into a detailed account about the search for their French nationality, the overall definition of what exactly a Celt/Gaul is – a definition that even myself, with a heavy interest in Celtic archaeology, was surprised with. First of all, the term “Gaul” was one that I had never heard before, but perhaps that was due to the fact that the “Greeks generally called these people ‘Celts’ (Kelton), while the Romans preferred to call them ‘Gauls’ (Galli, Galatae)” (Dietler 1994:585). Dietler discusses the origin of these names and how they were eventually placed among the population of northwestern Europe and were, generally, a description of a general language type more than anything else (Dietler 1994:585-586). One topic of discussion that is followed throughout the article is what is known as La Tène, an example of a form of material art culture that many assume all cultures within the Iron Age exhibited. However, Dietler points out that “it is not possible to assume that all peoples represented within the archaeological record by La Tène material culture spoke Celtic languages” (Dietler 1994:586).This idea of La Tène material culture is mentioned throughout this article as an evaluation of one’s Celtic heritage – an evaluation that, as mentioned above, can be argued as false. The sudden upsurge of European need to be considered as part of the Celtic identity is, quite possibly, the “popularizing sense of pan-European unity, despite the claim that it is commonly agreed that all European cultures can trace their roots to Celtic origins” (Dietler 1994:596).
The split of French history and culture identity can be traced between three separate strands that are each seen as being a prevalent force of power during different points in history. “Each of these [were] invoked in the struggle for power by which the French nation was formed and transformed” (Dietler 1994:587) and through the analysis of these times and people, one can truly infer which is the heaviest in the weight of the formation of French national identity (Dietler 1994:587). The first focus involves the namesake of France - the Franks. Through lineal tracings, and “the fact that [Frankish King] Clovis converted to Christianity [providing] the monarchy with convenient connections to the church and divine sanction of its rule” (Dietler 1994:587) the Frank “nobility were able to assert the legitimacy of their rule through its supposed origin in the right of conquerors over the mass of subject commoners” (Dietler 1994:587). However, this dichotomy between the nobility and the commoners proved to cause quite a rift between the country of France, especially when on realised that there was a creation of only “two races of people:the nobility, who were the descendants of the Franks, and the Third Estate, who were descended from the Gallo-Romans” (Dietler 1994:587). It was not until the Revolution of 1789 that this class dichotomy created an obvious counterattack, and the idea of a Celtic identity came back to bite the Franks. It formed as a way to “oppose the nobility in a revolution represented as a racial conflict and... unifying them in the new process of popular nationalism” (Dietler 1994:587). Once defeated, many of the French government became modeled after the Romans, but the idea of Celtic identity created a much larger emotional connection within the community.
Another part of the article that is seen in numerous places is that of the figure of Vercingetorix - becoming prevalent due to the increase in tension between the Celtic and Roman identities caused by the “return of the French Empire under Napoleon III in 1852″ (Dietler 1994:588). This rise in tensions between the two was caused through the personalizing of this tension “through the focus on the two dominant characters in the historical drama of the Roman conquest: Vercingetorix and Caesar” (Dietler 1994:588). This idea of Gauls and Celts as barbaric is one that Napoleon enforced, even going so far as to argue that “the Gauls had sufficient intelligence to understand that civilization is better than barbarism” (Dietler 1994:589), implying that through Roman invasion they were saved from their barbaric waves and shown the true way of life through civilization. Despite his known position as the one who united the Celts against the Romans, it was during this time that Vercingetorix became promoted in power as a key figure for nationalism in France. He even appeared in schoolbooks, which followed the transition from the Roman nationalistic state of mind to the idea that the French ancestry was that of the Gauls - but a form that had been given the light of civilization by the Romans. It was later that many of the bronze statues of this Celtic hero were melted down, “implying that [the Vichy government] came to regard the symbol as a threat” (Dietler 1994:592).
Dietler then goes on to briefly discuss the idea of Celtic heritage in Brittany, as well as the decline and influence of the Breton language. In fact, Dietler states that the decline of the Breton language was brought about due to the “combined effects of Francophone educational policies, the stigma of rural backwardness as Brittany became more integrated into the French economy, and the demand of the national bureaucracy for competent French speakers” (Dietler 1994:594). And while many within the region of Brittany claim a heavy descent from Celtic ancestors, “the archaeological evidence for or against the idea of a massive migration of insular Celts to Brittany is rather meager and ambiguous” (Dietler 1994:595). He then goes on to discuss the rest of Europe as a whole, even going so far as to point out that “it remains to be seen how effective such appeals to Celtic identity will be in constructing and popularizing a sense of pan-European unity” (Dietler 1994:596).
Dietler concludes his article by, once again, discussing the correlation of archaeology and the construction of cultural identity, using the idea of Nazi Germany as an example and reason to use caution when cultural artifacts are found and analysed (Dietler 1994:599). It is certainly startling to realise that by either confirming or destroying one’s idea of cultural identity, a group of people may be in danger of both losing their heritage and their lives.
This article is an interesting one in my opinion because it really does do an excellent job of showing that archaeology is as much about history and culture as it is about the finding of cultural artifacts. The idea of a country’s nationalism and how they got to where they are now is deeply rooted in the cultural remains of those before them that can typically be found either underneath that land or in a path leading up to it. However, a large portion of these cultures exhibit a national pride that is constantly shoved to the edge depending on scholarly interpretation and historical evidence, meaning that archaeology is just as much about these interpretations as it is about one’s moral obligation to report what is being found.
