Waves of settlement

I've spoken before about the mystery of the origin of the Celts. We all know that they existed; heck, there are still some Celtic nations today; the Irish, the Scottish, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Bretons, etc. although compared to the vast hordes of the Celtic nation that the ancient Greek and Roman authors regaled us with, they seem to be the smallest of rump states remaining, using a generous definition of "state." In the British Isles in particular, the really massive turnover of population genetics; i.e., the old people were literally replaced by the new people; either dying in plagues of violence, or something else happened at the arrival of the Bell Beaker culture. The people before the Bell Beaker arrival were EEF type people, and they were the culture responsible for the megalithic construction both in the Isles and the Continent; most famously, they build Stonehenge and other henges. Long before that, the EEF were themselves a significant population replacement over the original WHG population, which has a Paleolithic-Mesolithic origin and were literally the first recorded people in the Isles. When the Bell Beakers had their population turnover, it was the third major wave of migration to the Isles, and both it and the one before that led to massive turnover; the Bell Beaker ancestry makes up 90% of the Britons who remained; the prior people were almost completely wiped out, for one reason or another.

However, although from a genetic perspective it's a little bit harder to see subsequent migrations, we know that they happened and they were significant. The Romans are genetically invisible, but they had a profound effect on the Island. The Saxons are easier to spot, although they did assimilate many Brythonic peoples into themselves rather than flat-out replace them altogether. The arrival of the Scoti and the Vikings are also locally visible, but not as much as one might think given what we know of their impact historically, linguistically and culturally.

And between the Bell Beaker and the Romans were, of course, the arrival of the Celts. Some rather sloppily assume that the Bell Beakers were proto-Celtic, but that's linguistically absurd; from what we know of the oldest known Celtic languages, they were way too similar to have split from each other more recently than about 1300 BC with the advent of the Urnfield culture, and the Bell Beakers arrived a thousand years earlier than the earliest part of that range. (It should be noted that there are some linguists who believe it possible to stretch proto-Celtic back further than that. Chang's family tree split shows that the Celtic and Italic branches split from each other shortly after 2000 BC, although that's a somewhat dubious type of dead reckoning and should be used for only very directional guesstimates. And many linguists don't accept that even 1300 is late enough; suggesting that a recognizable Celtic can't be dated any earlier than 800 BC! This is further mixed up with the possibility of "para-Celtic" languages that were part of the Italo-Celtic branch, but not Italic and not Celtic necessarily, but dead ends when it comes to the development of Celtic proper.)

So, I find this kind of stuff fascinating, even though it's difficult to sort out in real life. For DH5 and the Hill Country, of course, I can just always make it up.

So what is the settlement pattern of the Hill Country? Who settled it, in what order, and what happened to them as new waves moved in?

• Skraelings were the first wave of settlers to the area that are known. Refugees from Atlantis before Atlantis even sank, they were rebels, renegades and escaped slaves from that benighted country, but that isn't to suggest that they were any less iniquitous, wicked, or savage. Known to themselves as Wendaks, only a few remain still in very isolated pockets deep in the wildernesses, especially the forests such as the Haunted Forest and the Wolfwood, which they prefer. 
• The kemling Empire of Baal Hamazi passed over the area next, and they built colonies and Marchland baronies. While the kemlings themselves ruled Baal Hamazi, the majority of the people that they brought with them were simply people, the ancestors of the Drylanders as they are known today. The kemling empire only ruled over this territory for a relatively short while; probably less than a full century before it started pulling back and settlements were slowly but surely abandoned, but their ruins dot the territory, giving it a sinister feel, and of course, the Drylanders remained. Kemlings have returned to the Hill Country, but they are usually newer arrivals from the Plateau of Leng where their homeland is rather than lingering Baal Hamazi colonists. The kemlings and drylanders persecuted the skraelings and drove them into the forests from all over parts of the Hill Country, although the spread of plagues through the skraeling population may have made that much easier than it otherwise might have been.
• The jann also extended their empire over the Hill Country, conquering it from the kemlings, and remnants of their epic battles fought in the Boneyard can still be found. That said, they never settled here in large numbers, and mostly only maintained the cities at the edge of the Rudmont Escarpment, which still linger although they are now politically independent city-states, and are not connected with any empire anymore. From here, the jann claimed a territory that was only lightly patrolled by their soldiers, never properly colonized or settled, and was largely depopulated. Bands of proto-Drylanders wandered the territory, left from the battles between the kemlings and the jann, but they built no cities or settlements to speak of, and were not very numerous. Even the skraelings had a rebound of sorts of their population.
• During the reign of the jann over the area, small numbers of even more savage peoples crept into the area, often secretly, and have proven impossible (or perhaps undesirable) to dislodge in the years since. The Wolfwood got its first woses and thurses, which put the skraelings of that forest into decline, and the orcs and goblins of Shurkul settled in small numbers on the shores of Lake Byewick. It's also probable that the cursed established Daikos Colony at this time, although rather than turning southward into the Hill Country, those who moved beyond that colony turned eastward into Timischburg instead, settling there in a number of pockets.
• The jann didn't exactly leave, but as their imperial polity fell apart, those left in the cities of Simashki and Vuukrat and Sinjagat simply turned their faces from the Hill Country and no longer patrolled it or attempted to make anything of it. They were content to maintain their territory along the escarpment spread more to the extreme southwest of the area, in the Indash Salt Sea (which although it shows on the map, is really outside of the Hill Country proper.) The Hill Country had never really rebounded population wise since the great kemling-jann wars of the past, but following the withdrawal of even nominal and token jann claims on the territory, the population fell even further as various tribes of drylanders fought the remaining skraelings, and more to the point, each other. Many peoples were wiped out as coherent ethnic groups during this time, and following long centuries of bloodshed, raiding, and ethnic purges, more plagues swept through the area. 400 years ago, the Hill Country was almost depopulated again, with the exception of small bands of skraeling hunters in the Haunted Forest (and rumored even smaller and fewer bands in the Wolfwood), wandering nomadic pastoralist drylanders across the unwooded territory, and the small settlements of orcs, cursed and growing populations of woses in the Wolfwood. At this point, the Old People came from the north and settled the territory, making it their own, claiming the largely empty lands, and driving out the remnants of the Drylanders; they actually got their name during this time as they were forced out of the karst hills and the wold and into the Boneyard, where they were forced to subsist on drier pasturage than they had. The Old People established numerous homesteads and hill fortresses and were more numerous than any people who had before settled the Hill Country.
• Following another outbreak of plague which tore apart the social order of the Old People in the Hill Country, the final wave of settlers came in, and it is they who now rule the territory. They brought with them a new language, new customs and new social structure, but they were less dissimilar to the Old People than to any other people who had been in the Hill Country before or since. For the most part, the Old People who were left after the plague gradually assimilated into this new population and the people of the Hill Country no longer claim any Old People heritage except in the vaguest sense; even though their genetics do linger in most of the people who live here. There are a few exceptions, and some homesteads and small baronetcies where the Old People language, dress and culture are promoted. Otherwise, the people generally acknowledge the folklore of the Old People, but consider themselves the New People, or Hillmen, who's origins are mostly to the North.
• The Old People are like the Celtic inhabitants of Britain--the Welsh and the Cornish and maybe even the Scottish here and there, and while the Hillmen are, of course, English. While the English today are, of course, Anglo-Saxon in culture, language and tradition, they recognize that there is a Brythonic substrate that contributes to who they are in ways that are more subtle, and of course, the Scottish, the Cornish and the Welsh still consider themselves to be non-English altogether in most respects. The same is true of the Hillmen.

This is a little bit simpler than that of England. I don't really have anything like the Danelaw and Viking settlement, or Cnut the Great's making of the British Isles a portion of his North Sea Empire, nor do I have anything like the Norman conquest. This isn't meant to be England per se, just something that is sufficiently like a combination of Ivanhoe and Robin Hood's England with the settlement of Texas and the rest of the American West that it feels at home culturally to Americans. But I actually think that having these layers of settlement laid out gives me some context with which to be able to work in this territory better.