Beakers to Celts

Davidski has made the plausible little chart showing a progression of genetics.  It needs some further development, but I think there's something to it that's very, very likely.

Single Grave > Rhenish Beakers > Czech and Hungarian Beakers > Urnfield culture > Hallstatt culture > La Tene culture > Celts

Anyway, one must be very cautious in applying linguistic and ethnic identity to material cultures.  Linguistics, archaeology and genetics all work together to help us untangle history where no written history exists, but it can also occasionally lead us astray.  For one thing, there's not a lot of consensus on when you can talk about Celtic in a linguistically meaningful sense, although Chang's philogeny suggests that Italic and Celtic split sometime more recently than 2,000 BC.  This puts the notion that the Bell Beakers spoke some kind of very early Celtic down pretty authoritatively, but even before Chang's article, hardly any linguist seriously still entertained that.  But archaeologists and geneticists are blithely assuring us that Celtic arrived in Britain with the Bell Beakers, for instance.  No, that makes no sense, it obviously can't be true.

I've reattached a smaller version of the phylogeny, but you can click on it to get the larger version.  But given those dates, the split probably started happening as the Unetice culture was evolving into the Urnfield culture; but if that's so, where did the Italic languages go and what material cultures do they belong to?  Or should they be considered part of the Urnfield culture too?  For that matter, just because the phylogeny suggests a split between Celtic and Italic more recent than 2,000 BC doesn't mean that we're suddenly talking about Celtic languages.  There is a lot of evidence that para-Celtic languages which are today not attested existed in the past, by which I mean languages that are related to Celtic and/or Italic, but belonging to neither exactly.  Venetic, Lusitanian, Ligurian, etc. are often proposed to be para-Celtic languages.  There's a lot of stuff that could have happened even after that split (assuming that the date is good in the first place) before we end up with something that we can say is ancestral to Celtic and only Celtic.

For that matter, the Hallstatt material culture is often presumed to be the fully formed common Celtic material culture from the late Bronze Age.  On the other hand, the Iron Age spread of the La Tene culture is also often given that status.  How well do these two work?  Hallstatt itself, in it's western zone, is right about where and when we'd expect to find proto or archaic Celtic languages spoken, since we find shortly afterwards that the Romans and Greeks talk about Celts living in the area where the Hallstatt culture was found.  The requisite links to areas where the Celtiberians later appear, as well as the southern shores of the British Isles are a bit spotty; it looks like there was some link, but whether it's sufficient to effect a language shift from whatever was spoken before to Celtic is hardly an agreed upon given consensus.  However; it's also associated with some para-Celtic and even non-Celtic (unless one is to propose that Illyrian is actually a para-Celtic language) languages in its eastern zone.  So Hallstatt can't simply be Celtic, although maybe an early form of Celtic is represented in the west, and peoples who shared a very similar material culture and probably were in some kind of intense contact relationship of some kind but who spoke different languages made up some of their southern and eastern portions.

Hallstatt warriors on Hallstatt Lake

The La Tene has to be Gallic, though, because it corresponds in time and place with actual historically attested Celts.  And, the La Tene emerged out of (at least a portion of) the Hallstatt culture without showing any breaks in continuity.  On the other hand, regionally that's too simplistic a thing to say; there were certainly some areas where the Hallstatt > La Tene transition was more notable and represents a discontinuity of sorts.  But La Tene is really quite late, and whatever language La Tene spoke (which was no doubt Celtic) it also no doubt grew out of the language of the Hallstatt areas where the La Tene was first manifested.  So, if La Tene is Celtic, then at least the Hallstatt areas which spawned La Tene had to have been some kind of archaic Celtic too.  What about the rest of Hallstatt?  How much of Hallstatt can be said to be Celtic?  Not just the fact that La Tene evolved out of Hallstatt, but so did the Celtiberians, who clearly spoke a Celtic language but which do not have links to La Tene specifically, and which in fact predate them.

Probably more than just the specific areas where La Tene was formed.  And when La Tene spread, it may have introduced a leveling effect; prestige dialects from the La Tene area superimposing themselves over closely related Celtic languages in other areas that were already archaic Celtic of some form or other.  And no doubt Celtic superimposed itself on areas where non-Celtic languages were previously spoken too as it expanded.

This is the really interesting thing.  We have some historical records that show us the spread of Latin-derived and Greek derived languages across Europe over areas that previously spoke a different kind of Indo-European (such as the installation, if you will, of proto-French in what was Gaul.)  We also have the spread of Germanic and Slavic languages fairly well historically attested.  We can almost but not with much precision, see the same thing happening with Celtic just prior to the historic age, and some of the expansions of Celtic we actually can attest historically, although some of them did not remain (such as the Galatians in Anatolia.)  I wonder how many other such expansions of one group suddenly growing at the expense of another we would find in the prehistorical record if it were actually recorded?  And although we can make some pretty good guesses, especially when we triangulate evidence from all three disciplines: archaeology, linguistics and genetics, there are still all kinds of nuances that may have been incredibly significant that we will never be able to detect, only speculate about.  For instance, see this notion from "zardos", which I quite like, but which certainly isn't every likely to be falsifiable:

That is my pet theory actually, because it seems that Eastern raiders might have founded Hallstatt culture and created an elite way of life which was very much about Mediterranean ways and luxury goods. The social stratification was remarkable and this elite lived detached from the common people in their fortresses. 

La Tene in comparison looks much more like a mass culture of common warriors and their are signs of revolt and that old customs were discarded at the end of Hallstatt period. 

The later Eastern influence is evident in the Celtic ornamental style and horse cult also.

There's obviously some kind of elite dominance during the Hallstatt period that is absent from La Tene. What this means about Celtic is uncertain.  Could the common people of the western Hallstatt zone have spoken an archaic Celtic, but the common people further east spoke Illyrian, or something else, and the elites spoke something else entirely?  Or did the elites speak Celtic?  Or both, at least in some regions?  Elite dominance does suggest that maybe the Hallstatt culture was not as monolithic as it appears to be, though—it probably represents warriors/traders who dealt in luxury Mediterranean goods and imposed themselves politically on the common people in their own area initially.  These elites may have expanded into other areas where other languages were spoken, but someone, at least, in the Hallstatt culture spoke a language that was Celtic which was associated with the La Tene expansions.

"zadros"'s theory suggests that maybe the elites aren't the Celts, though, but rather the Western common people.