John T. Koch

John Thomas Koch is an American academic, historian, and linguist who specializes in Celtic studies, especially prehistory, and the early Middle Ages. He is the editor of the five-volume Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (2006, ABC Clio). He is perhaps best known as the leading proponent of the Celtic from the West hypothesis.

Career
He is a graduate of Harvard University, where he was awarded the degrees of MA and PhD in Celtic Languages and Literatures in 1983 and 1985, respectively. He has also pursued studies at Jesus College, Oxford, and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has taught Celtic Studies at Harvard University and Boston College.

Since 1998, he has been senior research fellow or reader at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, University of Wales, where he has supervised a research project called Celtic Languages and Cultural Identity, the output of which includes the five-volume Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (2006), and An Atlas for Celtic Studies (2007).

He has published widely on aspects of early Irish and Welsh language, literature and history. His works include The Celtic Heroic Age (first published in 1994, 4th edition in 2003), in collaboration with John Carey; The Gododdin of Aneirin (1997), an edition, translation and discussion of the early Welsh poem Y Gododdin; and numerous articles published in books and journals. A grammar of Old Welsh and a book on the historical Taliesin are in the works.

In 2007, John Koch received a personal chair at the University of Wales.

In 2011, Koch was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Koch supervises (as senior fellow and project leader) the Ancient Britain and the Atlantic Zone Project (covering Ireland, Armorica, and the Iberian Peninsula) at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. In 2008, Koch gave the O'Donnell Lecture at Aberystwyth University titled People called Keltoi, the La Tène Style, and ancient Celtic languages: the threefold Celts in the light of geography. In 2009, Koch published a paper, later that year developed into a book, Tartessian: Celtic from the Southwest at the Dawn of History, detailing how the Tartessian language may have been the earliest directly attested Celtic language with the Tartessian written script used in the inscriptions based on a version of a Phoenician script in use around 825 BC. This was followed by Tartessian 2: Preliminaries to Historical Phonology in 2011, focused on the Mesas do Castelinho inscription.

Ideas
Koch has been a leading proponent of the Celtic from the West hypothesis, the idea that the Celtic languages originated as a branch of the Indo-European languages not in the upper Danube valley, from where they radiated westward, but rather that they arose in a part of Atlantic Europe, including Southwestern Europe (Western France and Northern and Western Iberian Peninsula), as a combination of a language descendant from Proto-Indo-European and native non-Indo-European Pre-Indo-European languages (related to Aquitanian, ancestor of Proto-Basque language, Iberian, and other unattested languages).

From there (in this scenario) they spread east to South Central Europe, including the Pannonian Basin, where early forms of the Proto-Italic already would have been developing independently from Proto-Indo-European. ''Working hypothesis 6: Non-IE influence in the West and the separation of Celtic from ItaloCeltic 1. The Beaker phenomenon spread when a non-Indo-European culture and identity from Atlantic Europe was adopted by speakers of Indo-European with Steppe ancestry ~2550 BC. 2. Interaction between these two languages turned the Indo-European of Atlantic Europe into Celtic. 3. That this interaction probably occurred in South-west Europe is consistent with the historical location of the Aquitanian, Basque, and Iberian languages and also aDNA from Iberia indicating the mixing of a powerful, mostly male instrusive group with Steppe ancestry and indigenous Iberians beginning ~2450 BC, resulting in total replacement of indigenous paternal ancestry with R1b-M269 by ~1900 BC. 4. The older language(s) survived in regions that were not integrated into the Atlantic Bronze Age network. ''¶NOTE. This hypothesis should not be construed as a narrowly ‘Out of Iberia’ theory of Celtic. Aquitanian was north of Pyrenees. Iberian in ancient times and Basque from its earliest attestation until today are found on both sides of the Pyrenees. The contact area envisioned is Atlantic Europe in general and west of the CWC zone bounded approximately by the Rhine.'' in KOCH, John T. "Formation of the Indo-European branches in the light of the Archaeogenetic Revolution" draft of paper read at the conference 'Genes, Isotopes and Artefacts. How should we interpret the movement of people throughout Bronze Age Europe?' Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, 13-14 December 2018. This language or languages also influenced early Pre-Proto-Germanic, the direct ancestor of Proto-Germanic, but not yet a fully Germanic proto-language, (possibly located in the southern coast of the Baltic Sea or other place of North Central Europe) and contributed to its rifting from the Balto-Slavic/Indo-Iranian dialect continuum (in the western Corded Ware Culture area).

This idea, the subject of three edited volumes in a series by Koch and Barry Cunliffe called Celtic from the West (2012–2016), is controversial.

Published books

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