Rethinking the Ancient Druids: An Archaeological Perspective by Miranda Aldhouse-Green (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Ancient Druids: An Archaeological Perspective by Miranda Aldhouse-Green Rachael Maxon Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Rethinking the Ancient Druids: An Archaeological Perspective (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021), xvii + 188 pp., 55 ills. The Druids have long stood as one of the great mysteries of the distant past. Faced with a lack of written records and scant archaeological remains, scholars have had to contend with the testimonies of late Greek and Roman writers, such as Julius Caesar, Lucan, Tacitus, Diodorus Siculus, and Cassius Dio, in order to understand these perplexing figures. Instead of accepting these foreign writers at face value, Aldhouse-Green critically engages with their testimonies and places them in context with the archaeological record in order to investigate the veracity of the ancient claims against the physical evidence. As a companion to Nora Chadwick’s 1966 monograph The Druids, Ald-house-Green’s Rethinking the Ancient Druids engages with recent archaeological excavations in Britain and Wales that show clear evidence of people with religious knowledge, that are associated with religious objects, or sites that show remains of organized ritual behavior. While Andrew Fitzpatrick also uses this approach of combining the textual and the archaeological record, Aldhouse-Green’s approach to who was considered a Druid is much broader and includes not only “those who called themselves Druids, but also those whose communities recognized them as such, as well as those who simply held religious knowledge and spiritual skills” (2). This broader definition allows her to attribute more archaeological material to the Druids. Rather than reanalyze old evidence with her new methodology, Aldhouse-Green uses the latest evidence from recent [End Page 200] archaeological investigations in Britain, Gaul, and Wales. She includes Wales even though it usually gets left out of traditional discourses, because she believes it has similar archaeological evidence to that of Britain and Gaul, and therefore should be included in discussions about the Druids, as she shows throughout the book. Two major arguments run throughout the book. The first is that the Druids may have left more traces of their existence in the archaeological record than we have come to believe. Aldhouse-Green believes that by shifting our perspectives on the available archaeological remains, we might find more traces of the Druids at sites across Britain and Wales. The second argument is that Wales had a “pivotal rather than peripheral role in a religious leadership usually portrayed as a primarily Gallic phenomenon” (3). This, she argues, can be seen once Welsh mythological texts such as the Mabinogion are combined with the Welsh archaeological record, a claim she supports primarily in chapter 5. By including the finds from Wales alongside those of Britain and Gaul, she argues that new patterns may emerge that shed light on the elusive Druids. The book is divided into nine chapters and arranged thematically. Expertly weaving texts with archaeological finds, Aldhouse-Green discusses some of the main areas of interest in Druidic studies, such as religion, sacrifice, afterlife ideologies, social organization, and art. Despite the ethereality of many of the topics to the archaeological record, she remains undaunted in her pursuit of answers, posing a number of questions and possibilities for future studies to explore when more evidence comes to light. Aldhouse-Green inaugurates her study by reviewing the classical authors who write about the Druids. Using these writers as a textual foundation for analysis, she begins each chapter with a quote illustrating the topic for that chapter. She begins chapter 1 with a discussion of Julius Caesar, who she relies on heavily throughout the book. This is because she believes his account to be one of the most reliable approaches to the Druids, as he spent nearly ten years in Gaul and befriended Diviciacus, a ruler of the Aedui who may have been a Druid. She continues the chapter by introducing other writers, such as Lucan and the famous Scriptores Historiae Augustae and placing them in a historical context so that their contributions on the Druids can be better understood. Chapter 2 interrogates the accuracy of the classical writers concerning the Druids. The chapter investigates not only what these writers say about the religious nature and hierarchy of...