What aspect of ancient celtic civilization is most distinct?

Question

hiya, i have to do a report about some aspect of pre-roman celtic society that for my archeology class. I just want to know what aspect of celtic society would i find the most info about easily? i basically dont want to pick an aspect and suddenly find myself not able to find info about it.

Answer 1

their religion, you will find tons of info on that im sure.

Answer 2

Judging from my reading, you could use gender roles as a topic.  The evidence is far from conclusive but it appears that men and women were not necessarily assigned typical gender roles.

The other aspect you could probably find a lot of material on is trade and trade routes.  Pre-Roman Celtic goods have been found as far away as Palestine, and the Celts appear to have had an extensive network of roads for travel and trade by cart.  They had mines and traded both raw material and manufactured goods.

Answer 3

I suppose you could focus on Druids, the oral history of the Celts, their Gods, poetry, trade and warfare.

Answer 4

What I find most interesting about the Celts is that they were the ancient occupiers of a HUGE territory that included the British Isles, France, Northern Italy (Po Valley), Spain, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, parts of the Balkans, central Turkey (The Galatians from the Bible) and they have even found mummies of Celts in China!

Their territories were eventually conquered by the Romans, Greeks, Germans and others.  Their strongest cultural influence in modern times is in the British Isles particularly Ireland and Scotland as well as Brittany in France.  Other than that their culture has largely disappeared.

It is particularly difficult to study the Celts because they were not literate.  They had a simple form of writing (Runes) but it was confined to religious text was extremely limited, nothing like the phonetic alphabets of today.  Therefore we have no native sources.  What we do have is passed down from the Romans and Greeks and is obviously very biased against the  "barbarian" Celts.

Another fun fact is that the Celts sacked and burned Rome in 390 BC when Rome was still relatively young and only controlled a portion of central Italy.

Answer 5

The Druids come to mind.