"Celt" Conjecture

[Rumo]

Personal names attested (in some cases multiple times) in inscriptions: Celtillus, Celtilla, Celta, Celtus, Celt?, Celtea, Celtiatis, Celtiatus, Celtinus, Celtitanus, Celtis, Celtilia, Celtius, Celticus, Cetligun, Conceltus (meaning "Your Fellow Celt"), Arceltus (meaning "Great Celt"). The vast majority of these are from Gaul and Iberia (where these names were particularly popular).

What names I can trace from this list they show up in inscriptions dated after the Roman conquest (with recognizable Latin morphology and even derivation, e.g. Celticus), therefore this onomastic sample may be entirely irrelevant to pre-Roman identities. They could have get such names from the conquering Romans (I wouldn't be surprised if some of these Celts were freedmen), therefore it's no evidence they used that name for themselves prior to Roman conquest.

If such names occur mostly in Iberia, then the pre-Roman Celticity becomes even less plausible than before because we have now a even larger area with an allegedly Celtic identity. I somehow thought we're over that huge Celtic Europe, spanning from Iberian peninsula to Central Europe or even Anatolia.

Antonio Tovar has an interesting article on this, if you read Spanish

Sorry, it looks very unconvincing to me. Outdated perspective and outdated scholarship (well, the article itself was first(?) published in 1977).

And it confirms my position above. Those names are from the Roman period.