The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention?

Simon James' The Atlantic Celts, published by British Museum Press in 1999, is a scholarly critique arguing that the modern idea of a unified ancient Celtic people spanning the Atlantic fringe of Europe is substantially a modern construction rather than a category the ancient inhabitants of Britain and Ireland used of themselves. James is an established archaeologist. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed argument engaging directly with the archaeological and linguistic evidence usually cited for a unified Celtic identity. Its limit is that it represents one influential position in an ongoing scholarly debate over Celtic identity, so a claim treating either the traditional or the revisionist view as settled consensus should be checked against the wider literature.