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clearest evidence for the coincidence of both Celtic people and celtic languages in early classical times. 7 Collis reviews a number of classical sources which refer to Celts in Iberia. These mention mainly Celtiberians, who appear in the texts as a hybrid product of invading Gauls from France and indigenous Iberians, who battled at first, then buried the hatchet and joined cultures. Other Celtic groups are referred to as being in Iberia, such as the Celtici. 8
    The record of Iberian inscriptions shows Celtiberian as a major Continental branch of celtic languages. This evidencecomes from around seventy inscriptions totalling around a thousand words dating from the third to the first century BC . These were mostly written in the Iberian script but sometimes also in Roman script. The outstanding ones are three major texts on bronze tablets found at Bottorita, near Zaragoza in north-central Spain. The longest and most famous inscription is a
tessera hospitale
(a written promise of hospitality), written in Celtiberian on both sides. From the existence of four rock inscriptions in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula, Lusitanian has also been suggested as an ancient celtic language. But this attribution has nothing like the quality of written evidence that Celtiberian has ( Figure 2.1b ). 9
    The archaeological evidence does indicate a specific Celtiberian cultural area coincident in time and place with the inscriptions in north-east central Spain to the west of the River Ebro. There is also extensive and overlapping textual, place-name and personal-name evidence for a Celtic presence throughout the north-westernmost two-thirds of the Iberian Peninsula ( Figure 2.1b ). 10 Tribes known as the Celtici on the western Atlantic coast of the peninsula seem well attested, 11 which is consistent with evidence from place-names.
    The use of evidence derived from place-names to suggest a celtic-linguistic origin has been criticized. In some cases, the arguments for derivation from celtic appear circular, self-fulfilling and even deliberately misleading. More recently, stricter linguistic criteria have been applied in order to reduce dubious attributions, particularly to celtic. 12 From the distribution of names with the ending -
briga
(‘-hill’), one celtic element that does seem to have consistency and common specificity with place-name evidence elsewhere, 13 it appears that the Celtici andother putative Celtic tribes, such as the Gallaeci and Lusitani, spread up the rivers from the coast, deep into the hinterland of northern and western Spain ( Figure 2.1b ).
    That apart, the place-name evidence for celtic languages much east of the Rhine or in other parts of Northern Europe is not convincing. A recent workshop was convened by linguists to establish just what proportion of European place-names on Ptolemy’s famous map of the second century AD could be reliably identified as celtic. 14 Several broad conclusions emerged. Numerically, the centre of gravity and greatest diversity of forms for Continental celtic place-names were in France south of the Seine, Spain and northern Italy, as predicted by the distribution of early celtic inscriptions. There were very few celtic place-names much east of the Rhine or north of the Danube. There is a similar paucity of celtic place-names in the southern Balkans, Romania and Hungary, to the south-east. 15
    Archaeologist Colin Renfrew comments on the circularity of linguistic arguments based on ‘evidence’ for Celtic populations in Eastern Europe: ‘Very often the claims for a Celtic population in those areas are backed up by discussion of objects found there which are in the La Tène art style.’ 16 Clearly, the La Tène art style is not linguistic evidence of Celticity, and its Celtic connection is based only on the Central European Celtic homeland theory, thus creating a circular loop of association. There is also a possibility that the Celtic invasions into Greece and beyond into Anatolia (in