The University is pleased to announce that a publication to which staff member Professor John Koch, Senior Research fellow at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (CAWCS), has contributed has been shortlisted for an award in the 8th annual Current Archaeology Awards.
Current Archaeology is the top monthly magazine devoted to British archaeology and has been in circulation for 40 years. The Current Archaeology Awards celebrate the projects and publications that made the pages of the magazine over the past year, and the people judged to have made outstanding contributions to archaeology.
The publication Celtic Art in Europe: Making Connections, for which Professor Koch wrote the first chapter, is amongst the nominations for Book of the Year.
This substantial collection of 37 papers, published in honour of the 80th birthday of Professor Vincent Megaw of Glasgow University and Flinders University of South Australia, brings together a truly international group of pre-eminent specialists in the field of Celtic art and Celtic studies. Tackling contentious issues such as the origins of the Celts, and considering whether our modern gaze and artistic mores hinder our interpretation of ancient art, the papers chart the history of attempts to understand Celtic art and argue for novel approaches in discussions spanning the whole of Continental Europe and the British Isles.
Professor Koch’s opening paper is entitled Once again, Herodotus, the Κελτοί, the source of the Danube, and the Pillars of Hercules. In his paper, Professor Koch discusses the two famous references to Κελτοί (Celts) in the Histories of Herodotus (considered the founding work of history in Western literature) and how both passages describes them inhabiting two locations far removed from each other. He proposes that even though the concept of the Celts has come under more critical scrutiny in recent years, these passages can be accepted as factually accurate in the light of new research. In fact, there were Celts in the 5th century BC in both the Alpine zone and on the Atlantic coast at the extreme south-west of Europe.
Speaking about the publication as a whole, Professor Koch said:
“As well as being an important collection for Celtic studies and art history, Celtic Art in Europe honours the leading scholar of Celtic art, Vincent Megaw, on his 80th birthday. Vincent and the late Ruth Megaw were strong supporters of CAWCS over the years. They supplied seminal contributions and unique illustrations to the 5-volume Celtic Culture encyclopaedia published in 2006, for which I was general editor. If the publication were to win, it would be a great way to honour a great scholar and friend of Celtic studies and the University of Wales.”
Each category winner is chosen entirely by the public, with voting now open online. Voting closes on 8th February 2016, and the winners will be announced at the special awards ceremony on 26th February at the 2016 Current Archaeology Live! Conference.
£60.00 | HB | ISBN: 9781782976554 | 400p, H280 x W216 (mm) b/w illustrations, 32pp colour illustrations
