Today it is widely accepted that the ancient Celts were among the early peoples to have arrived in the British Isles. In the British Isles, however, this notion dates only to 1706, when it was first published in an English translation of a French work on the peopling of Europe. Since that time, the ancient Celts have been defined by British researchers in a number of ways, including as a linguistic group, as a race with a particular head shape or skin color, and as the makers of a certain style of art and ornament. The changing definitions of the Celts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took place within the context of the development of the disciplinary traditions in which these researchers operated. The history of ideas about the Celts, then, serves to illuminate the development of many of the social science disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and art history. In the course of this history, the pattern of stagnation and reformulation recurs. As researchers with a particular understanding of and approach to the ancient Celts hit an impasse, other researchers would step in with new methods. By 1904, the year of publication of the first major book on Celtic art, all of the current categories defined by the term Celtic had been outlined. Though this word continues to be the subject of hot debates, the turn of the twentieth century marks the point when the major problems of migration versus diffusion and the relationship among art, language, and culture, were being discussed in terms recognizable today. The central legacy of studies of the Celts in the years 1706--1904 is that many of the different disciplinary traditions for which the Celts are a subject of research utilize different definitions of the ancient Celts, making interdisciplinary cooperation difficult.
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