Just ordered me a tribe...but which Celts?

[Leigh]

Hurrah and all that.

The interesting thing is that there are several potential Barbarian army lists that I can think of, and want to make sure my army is fairly interchangeable between them. I'm kind of guessing that these will have been designed with Ancient Britons in mind.

My period of personal preference (PPP) is the Punic wars era, and I've got the WAB book for this. I reckon I'll be able to do both Early Gallic armies and Ligurians too, but am not sure about Celt-Iberians. Obviously I'm not sure of the range of decorations on the models at this stage, but can anyone with more knowledge than I think of any reasons why they couldn't represent several different Celt armies?

My own POV is that armies should look the part, but I don't ever count buttons or anything like that.

Great website BTW.

Cheers,

Leigh

[Paul @ Warlord Games]

Hi Leigh,

Thanks for the kind comments about the site - kind of amusing seeing as it's nowhere near what we want it to be - you'll see much more in the next month or so!

Cheers,

Paul

[Draegath]

Maybe you could green stuff up some helmets and weapons - the celt-iberians have never really had an awful lot written about the way they dressed, but I am sure that tribes from the most thoroughly celticised regions would share similar dress habits - ie, tatts and a torc.

A few years ago another wargaming company in Nottingham released a series of heads for a certain american football inspired game, for use with a team of undead mummies. the helmets , when removed from the skulls, would make fantastic helmets for the celt-iberian leaders. Along the same line of thinking, the celt-iberians had a distinctive shape to their weapons which inspired the romans to produce their gladius blades - I am sure you could use a gladius with one side of the blade hollowed out to get a good looking weapon on your warriors, not to mention bits for the bits box if you got the gladii from the roman plastic box set

Draegath

[Paul @ Warlord Games]

Cracking ideas, Draegath!

This is exactly the sort of thing I love about this hobby - creativity and plastics will help people to think outside to the box (so to speak!).

Cheers,

Paul

[Noble]

As Draegath said, I just wanted to say, that the Celtiberian short sword that inspired the Gladius Hispaniensis had a leaf shaped blade with both sides hollowed out. The iconical iberian weapon would be the Falcata, which had a reverse curve - hollowed out at one side. I'm not sure which one Draegath meant, though I'm sure the Celtiberians will have used both.

As far as Celts go, the early british celtic tribes were very similar to the mainland (gallic) Celts - all Celts of western europe go back to a couple of common roots, supposedly Urnfield Culture, and more influential La Tene Culture (see also Hallstatt Culture) - just to give some names for research.

I think the models can cleanly be used for Ancient British as well as Gallic Celts - Celtiberians are a slight other branch but possible with modifications (see Draegath). I'm not fluent on Ligurians, but like anything else in and around the alps they were intermixed with Celts over the time…

[Leigh]

Thanks, everyone. I'd forgotten about the Spanish swords being prototypes for the Romans'.

Might have to paint a few swans here and there for Ligurians, thinking about it.

I figured Celtiberians might have been pushing it a bit, but hey I've got plenty coming, so will have to try some conversions.

Cheers,

Leigh

[Draegath]

Technically speaking, British Celts are only descended from Hallstat and La Tene in a dispersal of culture sense, so physically the differences 2000+ years ago would have have reasonably similar to the difference today between British and Northern Spanish today, but culturally they were probably far more similar than they are today.

Archaelogy shows us that it is unlikely that the process of acculturation is also a process of military mgration - usually it is a case of new ideas being adopted by people whose blood is basically the same as it always was.

That being said, it is very difficult to tell two ethnically and culturally different Northern Europeans apart just by looking at their skeletons. Culture is extremely important as a signifier for archaeologists, after all, its assumption based on culture which have led to many of the great confusions of history. In a nutshell, even today, with modern migrations on top of old migrations from the last few thousand years, it is estimated that British (including Irish) are between 70% and 90% similar ethnically to the neolithic farmers who migrated there after the last ice age ended and the British Isles emerged again from under the ice.

[Leigh]

Draegath said:

Technically speaking, British Celts are only descended from Hallstat and La Tene in a dispersal of culture sense, so physically the differences 2000+ years ago would have have reasonably similar to the difference today between British and Northern Spanish today, but culturally they were probably far more similar than they are today.

Archaelogy shows us that it is unlikely that the process of acculturation is also a process of military mgration - usually it is a case of new ideas being adopted by people whose blood is basically the same as it always was.

That being said, it is very difficult to tell two ethnically and culturally different Northern Europeans apart just by looking at their skeletons. Culture is extremely important as a signifier for archaeologists, after all, its assumption based on culture which have led to many of the great confusions of history. In a nutshell, even today, with modern migrations on top of old migrations from the last few thousand years, it is estimated that British (including Irish) are between 70% and 90% similar ethnically to the neolithic farmers who migrated there after the last ice age ended and the British Isles emerged again from under the ice.

---

I will respond to this with the phrase:

"It's all good, baby. Yeah!"

Seriously, though, that's interesting stuff. I think my wargames table will just have lump it.

[Draegath]

I'm thinking about carefully shaving all the sides of the warriors heads, giving them a mohawk type thing... but I'm envisaging that may require a LOT of greenstuff ears if I'm clumsy