That article is a good read. While I like the Celtic from the West hypothesis, I don't think it's as good a theory as the null hypothesis. Although I admit that the null hypothesis; the Hallstatt theory of Celtic origins, leaves a lot to be desired. (The paper itself points out some of the particulars.) One that it only mentions off-hand, but which I've come to see as pretty important independently is that while our models have large, broad areas of developing language blocks, in every case where we have actual early written records, we have a much more patchwork and confusing scene. The Italian peninsula, for instance, is not just the area where the Italic language family developed; the written records include several non-Italic Indo-European languages (Greek being the most notable, from the Magna Grecia colonies), non-Indo-European languages altogether (Etruscan being the most prominent) and a strange patchwork of very early Italic languages, and languages who's affinity is highly suspect and nobody knows what they are. Messapic and Venetic and Ligurian (and Liburnian, although technically that's outside what is today Italy) are Indo-European, but otherwise have mysterious affinities. Lepontic appears to be an early Celtic. South Picene "appears" to be related to Osco-Umbrian, but neighboring North Picene is not. The old Sicel language, which gave the island of Sicily it's name, is also Indo-European, but what it's related to is unknown. Rhaetic may have been related to Etruscan and thereby been non-Indo-European.
Anyway, the point of all that is that imagining an early proto-Celtic that stretches back thousands of years and makes up the majority language of big material cultures like the Tumulus culture or the Urnfield culture is not consistent with the spread of Italic, and then again specifically Latin over what later became known as Italy; why would we expect Celtic to have been much more monolithic than what Italic was?
We have similar reasons to believe that the Iberian peninsula on the eve of historical records was similarly linguistically diverse, and we know that Anatolia in the Bronze Age was linguistically quite diverse. The spread of Greek over Greece is also fraught with concepts like Pelasgian, the Dorian invasion, and other things that hint at more linguistic diversity than which later emerged. The Balkans is also a big fat mess of languages, who aren't well enough known to be classified, but which seem to show more linguistic diversity than we'd have thought if Dacian or Thracian were similar to the theories of Celtic development. It's quite likely that the Bronze Age of Europe was much more linguistically diverse than we give it credit for, and that the origin of the languages that we know of (as opposed to those which disappeared anonymously without ever being written down) come from smaller and more recent sources than we expect. As the article linked above says in the introduction:
This explains the endless debates about the "homelands" and dates of Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Indo-European and other postulated proto-languages—debates further complicated when simplistic assumptions are made about prehistoric populations' archaeological, linguistic, ethnic and biological homogeneity. All too often, philologists have leant on outdated archaeological models, which in turn depended on outdated philological speculations—and vice versa. Such circularity is particularly evident in the study of Celtic ethnogenesis, a topic which can hardly be approached without understanding the chequered development of "Celtic philology", "Celtic archaeology" and their respective terminologies.
The term "Celtic" has been used in many conflicting senses. In this paper, "Celtic" refers both to the peoples whom Greek and Latin writers called variously Celts, Galatians, Gauls and Celtiberians and to their related languages, as known from inscriptions or inferred from place- and personal names. Applying a single term both to a population and to a language should never be done lightly, but in the case of the Celts they do seem, at least from the middle of the first millennium BC onwards, to constitute a valid "ethno-linguistic group". No single material "culture" can be associated with them, and there is no prima facie reason why we should expect one to do so. The relevant material "cultures" are so varied as to cast doubt on the coherence of ‘Celtic archaeology’ and "Celtic art". Old attempts at archaeological definition such as "The term 'Celt' designates with certainty the La Tène cultural complex from 400 BC on" now appear arbitrary; "Celtic" is rightly regarded as a misleading label for the central European Hallstatt and La Tène material "cultures" of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. The peoples of the first millennium BC who spoke the attested languages which meet the philological criteria for Celticity—certain unique divergences from reconstructed Proto-Indo-European—corresponded encouragingly well in their distribution to the historically attested Celts, Galatians, Celtiberians, and so on, while corresponding poorly to the "archaeological Celts" deduced from Hallstatt and La Tène archaeology.
Anyway, this means little other than that we should be careful of overly simplistic and pat models that rely on assumptions more than they do on actual evidence. Yes, this means that instead of having answers, we may well have questions that cannot be answered in this lifetime. But sometimes that's better than an answer that's wrong. And sometimes, as with this elegant Celtic from the Middle hypothesis, we can eliminate what evidence tells us is very unlikely or even impossible to be true, and therefore have more likely solutions left over to pick from.
Anyway, I now present a picture of "Hallstatt peoples" from superstar artist Angus McBride. In the past, and even in the present to most people, these would be considered Bronze Age Celts. I think we now we need to more cautiously call them Hallstatt Indo-European peoples who may or may not have been Celtic, or speakers some other Indo-European language altogether.
UPDATE: As a minor aside, if this theory is valid, then it offers up a fifth alternative to the discussion of Pictish to those listed on Infogalactic or Wikipedia. And to be fair, even the Celtic from the East default mainstream theory, allows for this proposal, since it also proposes an early Indo-Europeanization of the British Isles that is separate from the much later Celticization of the British Isles; i.e., the theory of Pictish as non-Indo-European is inferior in every way to the idea of Pictish as "anonymous pre-Celtic Indo-European" that is a local descendent of whatever Indo-European language stock the Bell Beaker invaders spoke. That doesn't mean that it rises to rival the prevailing view that Pictish was probably related to the Brythonic Celtic languages, but given that that theory is not super solid to begin with, the spectre of Pictish as non-Celtic remains viable. If it is non-Celtic, or if a hinterlands, backwater non-Celtic language still lingered, at least, then it was probably Indo-European rather than non-Indo-European. As an aside, the Rodway (2020) source from the paper linked above clarifies, the Pictish ogham script's assignment to Celtic is refuted, and it is now considered to be likely non-Celtic. It's not clear to me why non-Celtic seems to revert in most people's minds to non-Indo-European, when we also suppose that the Bell Beakers Indo-Europeanized the British Isles thousands of years before the first attestation of any Celtic languages.
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