Four years have elapsed since The Portugal News published my work “A Misty History of Paleolithic Portugal”. This partly referred to the major influence of Celtic culture which dominated the Iberian Peninsula for about six hundred years before the advent of the Romans. Within this short period, the application of Artificial Intelligence to research has enabled a re-assessment of both academic archeology and its variance with myth and political invention.

As recounted in Chapter 3 of my work, the Celtic Urnfields tribes (of Indo-European ethnicity) entered north-east Iberia in the earlier years of the first millennium BCE. They were succeeded a century later by others of Hallstatt origin whose large family groups spread across the northern regions until they reached the Atlantic. There they set up a national territory which now forms Galicia and northern Portugal by conquest of the settlements known as “castros”. These were hill-top fortifications which had been built by indigenous tribes who thereafter became servile. A smaller group moved south to the Lower Alentejo and occupied an enclave situated on both banks of the Guadiana River.

The archeological investigation of the castros and other settlements in Portugal by has not had a happy history due mainly to a lack of funding and of trained personnel using antiquated equipment which has often done more harm than good. Their work has also been hampered by treasure hunters using metal detectors and by the extraction of stone for building purposes.

The Franco/Salazar regimes both found it politically convenient to identify the Celts as being the ethnic stock from which the first Spaniards and Portuguese were descended and encouraged the narrative of a courageous and cultured non-Barbarian social group.

In recent years, this has been echoed by a travel industry which organizes tours in collaboration with municipalities eager for the financial gains to be made from tourism. Festivals are now common-place where song, dance, art, clothing and magic are celebrated as being of genuine Celtic origin. Even gold-panning competitions are held and the first tourist village of reproduction Iron Age round-houses with restaurant and spa has been opened.

Most of these commercial innovations have been opposed by the “arrogant archeologists” who consider such practices to be demeaning. However, a movement has been initiated by Professor Ruiz Zapatero, President of the Spanish Society for Archeological History, which seeks a fusion of all interests in order to promote a truthful basis for the intelligent appreciation by both tourists and the present populace of how this important community evolved at the end of national pre-history.

by Roberto Cavaleiro - Tomar 27 January, 2025