Celtic constructs : heritage media, archaeological knowledge and the politics of consumption in 1990s Britain.

Over the past ten years, the academic archaeological community has begun to come to terms
with some of the implications of the archaeological're-thinking the Celts'. Yet, what can we say
about the ways in which images of an archaeo-historic Celtic cultural package are circulated in
heritage media, and invested with meaning by the consumers (i.e. us all) of those media? Despite
the academic critique of the potentially dangerous conflation of race and politics which
characterizes Celticentric heritage media, very little work has been done on the forms that these
media take, and on the actual mobilization of Celtic images in the everyday.
This dissertation represents an attempt to chart the landscapes of Celticentric heritage media
in English-speaking Europe of the 1990s, and the ways in which those landscapes are mobilized
in our lives. From in-depth interviews with visitors to two Welsh spaces of Celtic representation
- Castell Henllys Iron Age Hillfort and Celtica - I go on to suggest that while it is a mistake to
reduce such consumption to a value-free leisure activity, neither should we uncritically assume
that representations of the Celtic automatically reproduce racist and nationalist discourses via an
unproblematic relationship between 'text' and 'reader'. Rather, we need to look at the specific
circumstances of active visitor engagement in order to begin to understand the ways in which
these physical representations of Celtic culture are' good to think' the politics of identity in late-
1990s Britain.
From this work I am able to suggest creative ways forward for those presenting media
narratives of pastness. The key is to rethink our own professional attitudes towards monolithic
notions of 'the public' and the meanings which are invested in the communal consumption of
images of a Celtic past.