Archaelogists
have found traces of a Celtic migration to Turkey that happened
in historic times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/science/social/25GORD.html
December 25, 2001
Archaeologists Find Celts in
Unlikely Spot: Central Turkey
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
In storybook histories, the
ancient city of Gordion is remembered only as the seat of King Midas,
he of the golden touch, and the place where Alexander the Great
struck a famous blow in legend and metaphor. Challenged to separate
the strands of an impossible knot, the Gordion knot, the conqueror
cut through the
problem, in the manner of conquerors, with one authoritative swing
of his sword.
After Midas and Alexander,
Gordion languished on the fringes of history, and until recently
archaeologists had taken little notice of its Celtic past. Yes,
European Celts - the Gauls of Roman times and the forerunners of
Bretons, Welsh, Irish and highland Scots - once migrated as far
east as what is now
central Turkey and settled in and around post-Alexander Gordion,
beginning in the early third century B.C.
Archaeologists say they have
now excavated artifacts and architectural remains dispelling any
lingering doubt that the Celts were indeed there, as a few classical
texts had recorded in passing. These people called themselves Galatai,
a Celtic name for tribal warriors, and became known to the Romans
as
Galatians. Their Christianized descendants were advised by the apostle
Paul, in the New Testament, that "whatsoever a man soweth,
that shall he also reap."
The remains of Galatian Gordion,
archaeologists conclude, reveal that the Celts, although they came
as mercenary soldiers, bringing along their wives and children,
were looking beyond warfare and pillage. They put down deep roots,
revived Gordion and created an ambitious, thriving society.
Above ruins of ordinary mud-brick
houses, they erected a monumental public building of cut-stone blocks
that was surrounded by a massive stone wall. Inside a workshop were
clay loom weights used in weaving, a possible clue to Celtic influence.
Not far away, excavators found a stone sculpture of a human with
faces in two directions, which replicates double-faced or "Janus"
figures from Celtic sites in central Europe.
But the most decisive discovery
was a grisly one: clusters of broken- necked skeletons and decapitated
heads of children and adults, some of them mixed with animal bones.
Ancient Celts had a reputation for ritual human sacrifice, but not
the contemporary Greeks and Romans or any of the indigenous people
of Anatolia, the central plateau region of Turkey.
In the current issue of Archaeology,
a magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America, Dr. Mary
M. Voigt of the College of William and Mary, a leader of the excavations,
and her colleagues wrote, "Such practices are well known from
Celtic sites in Europe and are now documented for Anatolian Celts
as
well."
Dr. Ronald Hicks, an archaeologist
and specialist in Celtic prehistory at Ball State University in
Muncie, Ind., agreed that this appeared to be the strongest evidence
yet for a permanent Celtic presence in Gordion.
"That certainly has the
Celtic look," said Dr. Hicks, who is not involved in the project.
"One of the Roman complaints about the Celts was that they
still practiced human sacrifice. They said the Gauls were known
for lopping off heads of men in battle, tying them to their belts
and bringing them back to display for all their friends at home."
Dr. Oscar White Muscarella,
an archaeologist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called the discoveries
"an extraordinary accomplishment." For the first time,
he said, "we are able to see and hold in our hands what the
Galatians did and can now talk about Galatians in Anatolia."
The excavations of Galatian
Gordion are part of research at the site, 60 miles southwest of
Ankara, being led by the University of Pennsylvania Museum in conjunction
with the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Dr. Voigt's co-authors
of the magazine report are Jeremiah R. Dandoy, a retired businessman
who has become a zooarchaeologist, and Page Selinsky, a doctoral
candidate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Gordion's Galatian period had
been neglected, Dr. Voigt explained in an interview, because archaeologists
had their eyes on bigger prizes. They dug through the layers of
Galatian ruins to get to the city as it was in Alexander's time,
332 B.C., and the even earlier city of Midas, ruler of Phrygia,
probably in the eighth century B.C.
Dr. Voigt said archaeologists
were also put off by the seeming impossibility of finding anything
distinctive to confirm the Galatian presence in the city. How do
you establish the ethnicity of an ancient population, especially
if the people were warriors who traveled light, carrying with them
little of their own material culture, and lived off the land?
"Historically, we knew
they were at Gordion," Dr. Voigt said, "but we didn't
know anything definitive about their way of life."
In one of the few sketchy accounts,
the Roman historian Livy noted that a king in Anatolia hired Celts
as mercenaries to re-enforce his own army. They arrived in 278 B.C.,
20,000 of them, including provisioners and merchants as well as
their families, in a caravan of 2,000 baggage wagons. But by this
time
the Celts had become somewhat Hellenized.
For an unknown number of years
since leaving their homeland, somewhere in central Europe near the
headwaters of the Danube, the Celts had passed through the Balkans
and paused in Greece to sack Delphi. In battle, they stood naked
before the foe. Along the way, they learned Greek and inscribed
some of their possessions in that language. Their ceramics and other
household wares were in the Greek style.
"It used to be hard to
detect the Galatians at Gordion," said Dr. Keith DeVries, a
University of Pennsylvania archaeologist and former director of
the Gordion excavations. "There was not a single artifact that
was absolutely demonstrable as Celtic. Some began to think the literary
sources must be misleading us."
Livy described Galatian Gordion
as a trading center and a fortified settlement in the early second
century B.C., a judgment now supported by archaeologists. Artifacts
like a small bone lion, probably used as inlay, suggested the Galatians
enjoyed some affluence. Traces of a few substantial buildings -
with tile roofs, many rooms, paved floors, stone benches and generous
courtyards - seemed to attest to a city with a social and political
hierarchy. This was more than a simple crossroads farming settlement,
as some scholars once suspected.
A Roman army destroyed much
of the city in 189 B.C., but excavations showed that it was soon
rebuilt and eventually became part of the Roman province of Galatia,
though with a continuing Celtic imprint.
In more than a decade of meticulous
excavations, archaeologists were struck by the juxtaposition of
Greek and Celtic customs in Gordion. Ruins of a workshop yielded
figurines of Greek deities presumably used in household rituals.
Nearby, in the lower town, five skeletons were strewn across the
ground of what had been an outdoor area, and another four had been
thrown into a deep pit.
Even though the date of the
buried skeletons is in some doubt, Dr. Voigt's team said, "their
treatment is undoubtedly linked to ritual practices that began in
third-century Gordion and would represent continuity of Celtic traditions"
after the town became part of a Roman province.
Nearly all these people appeared
to have met violent ends, with strangulation by hanging or garroting
the most usual cause. Several had broken necks and spines. A woman,
probably 30 to 45 years old, had a fractured skull, and was also
strangled. Below her lay the bones of a younger woman, who seems
to have been done in by the two heavy grinding stones weighing down
her upper body. In the same pit, the bones of two young children
were mixed in an apparently deliberate way. Among other switches,
the jaw of an older child was placed with the cranium of the younger
one.
Archaeologists concluded that
all of these people were presumably "sacrificed." They
might have been war captives. Traces of wood in the base of a skull
suggested that a person's severed head had been mounted on a pole
for display. Some victims might have been killed as part of Celtic
divination rituals. Texts recount that Celtic religious leaders,
the druids, were prophets who killed humans in order to discern
the future as revealed by the dying victims' movements.
In another part of the lower
town, archaeologists came upon the largest bone deposit, holding
more than 2,000 animal bones and those of a few dismembered humans.
Three individuals - a man of about 40, a woman of 35 and a child
under 8 - might have been a family. This might have been the scene
of a feast associated with the Celtic celebration of Samhain, around
Nov. 1. Based on their age at death, the animals were probably slaughtered
in the fall, the time for culling herds before winter. Some humans
could also have been cooked for the feast.
"It may not be too far
a stretch to associate Bone Cluster 3 with this Celtic festival,
which we still celebrate as Halloween," Dr. Voigt and her colleagues
wrote.
The discoveries at Gordion
have already contributed to changes in views of Galatian culture
in Asia Minor. The Celts as politically and socially primitive barbarians
who lived on raids and plundering had considerable basis in fact,
which had been stressed in Greek and Roman texts. But at least in
Anatolia, the
new excavations suggest, the Celts succeeded in settling down, marshaling
resources and labor for building and operating a prospering city
- not the behavior of primitives.
In an article last year in
the British journal Anatolian Studies, English and Turkish scholars
said the Galatian
communities established in the third century B.C. constituted "a
new, significant and increasingly important geopolitical entity
within Asia Minor" and this "can hardly be attributed
to a marginal, and politically, socially and economically unsophisticated
people." On the contrary, they wrote: "The fact that their
polities survived to be incorporated into the Roman empire would
indicate the existence of highly developed social
structures bound together by shared value systems. The European
Galatians successfully adapted to their new environment, changing
it and being changed by it."
The authors of the article
are Dr. Gareth Darbyshire of the Oriental Institute in Oxford, England;
Dr. Stephen Mitchell of the University of Wales in Swansea, and
Dr. Levent Vardar of the Turkish Department of Monuments and Museums
in Ankara.
But they and other researchers,
including Dr. Voigt and her colleagues at Gordion, concede that
the Galatians and their culture remain poorly understood. And no
one can be sure what happened to those European settlers in the
city of Midas and Alexander.
Through intermarriage with
indigenous people, the originally tall and blond Galatians probably
blended in with others around them. "I don't know how Celtic
they would have looked, even in the time of Paul," said Dr.
Hicks, the Celtic specialist.
But the Galatians were still
speaking a form of the Celtic language for several centuries after
Paul. In the fourth century, St. Jerome observed that the Galatians
used a dialect similar to one spoken in the Gallic town of Trier,
back in the Europe they had left in the third century B.C.
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