Knovíz

Northeast Europeans got two papers recently: on the Germans and on the Celts. I am mainly discussing the Celts.

By the time the Greeks noticed the great Rhône hinterland from their Massilia, it was a "Galatía". The paper's "3200-2800 BP" is the post-Bronze Dark Age; already the legendary past for the Massilia colonists, who as colonists cared more about Greek legend than about Gaulish. Although some Gauls did claim some Heracles-slept-here type of cross-cultural tropes.

That paper is noting the migrations which brought a common Gaulish to the Greek Riviera. A few decades ago, scholars tended to blur these, not having excellent dates and lacking genetics. Bell Beakers (formerly, battle axes) northwest; Corded Ware in the north, and something-or-other at Knovíz. About the only agreement was that the Germans won't show up until about the time Caesar shows up.

We are now finding that Knovíz, which looks a lot like La Tène (and, in north Italy, Urnfield), drove one final migration in that Iron Age. It would have been them - "Hallstatt C" - who took Britain 700s BC. They seem also to have crossed the Pyrenees into northeast Hispania/Iberia.

Ireland's conservative Goidelic remains unconstrained here, the paper simply noting that earlier papers are clustering around the same time as the Hallstatt C invasion of Britain. Irish myth remembers multiple arrivals, and maybe even the Halberd / Beaker divide; but we cannot pin dates to anything before the great Iona chronicles.

I expect earlier migrations had already fed Lusitanian into our Portugal, and Italic into you-know-where. At least the former had been primed toward Indo-European by the Bell Beakers; so shifting to (Lusato-)Italo-Celtic would have been like a shift between Tocharian dialects for them, or from Median to Imperial Persian. The great Gaulish push, likewise, would not have been drastic. Latin was effectively a back migration, so wasn't drastic either. Etruscan into Italy of course would have been drastic, even under Gaulish leadership; and on defence the Euskara are still refusing Romance.

As for later, a Celtic helm ended up in Łysa Góra. That's at Bagienice, later part of Old Prussia around where the Tolkien family came from. Tacitus is there translated/quoted: On the right coast of the Suebian Sea [the Baltic Sea] dwell the Aestian nations, whose customs and attire are the same as those of the Suebians, but their language more resembles that of Britain. As such the "Aesti" folk might share a name with the modern Estonia but a Finnic language is ruled out. Whether this be a holdover from "Hallstatt C" or from some British trade-colony: hard to say. If the latter, it doesn't look like a recent colony.