1. Computer Upgrade and Some Confusion
We have just re-formatted and attempted to upgrade our Computer.
Everything seems OK but there is some confusion,
some files misplaced, etc,.
Some recent e-mail letters sent to us may have been lost.
Expect some temporary dislocation on our part.
We are in the process of putting out new publications
and in other ways are attempting to renew our general presentation.

2. Stephen Oppenheimer and Some New Ideas Concerning British Origins

Brit-Am Note: We do not agree with the article below whatsoever.
Nevertheless it is worth reading and possibilities are raised possible
worth
further study from a Brit-Am perspective.
Some of the points raised when seen in correct perspective strengthen
the Brit-Am understanding of Ancient history as detailed in our works
"The Tribes" and "Lost Israelite Identity".

Some of the points made by Oppenheimer are:
British largely homogeneous
Contribution of Outside incursions: Ireland 12%, Wales and Cornwall 20%,
Scotland 30%, southern
and eastern England more than. 33%
Hoards of Celtic LaTene jewellery in ireland
Celtic place-names rare east of the Rhine
Celtic languages traced to Anatolia (Turkey) through Italy, Spain,
France,
to British Isles
British Isles received major migrations via Spain.
Related to Basques (since debated by others) of Northwest Spain
Southern English more similar to Belgians than to Frisians and North
Germans [new conclusion?]
The Catuvellauni in East England were Celtic-speaking whereas the Belgae
were Germanic.
Enlish language from Belgae (?)
Scandinavian influence in North and East dates from Neolithic and Bronze
Age.
Angles were Scandinavian
Old English split from Germanic before Roman invasion

Myths
of
British
ancestry

Stephen Oppenheimer

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=3D7817

Extracts

Celtic languages and the people who brought them probably first arrived
during the Neolithic period. The regions we now regard as Celtic
heartlands
actually had less immigration from the continent during this time than
England. Ireland, being to the west, has changed least since the
hunter-gatherer period and received fewer subsequent migrants (about 12
per
cent of the population) than anywhere else. Wales and Cornwall have
received about 20 per cent, Scotland and its associated islands 30 per
cent, while eastern and southern England, being nearer the continent, has
received one third of its population from outside over the past 6,500
years. These estimates, set out in my book The Origins of the British,
come
from tracing individual male gene lines from continental Europe to the
British Isles and dating each one..

The orthodox view of the origins of the Celts turns out to be an
archaeological myth left over from the 19th century. Over the past 200
years, a myth has grown up of the Celts as a vast, culturally
sophisticated
but warlike people from central Europe, north of the Alps and the Danube,
who invaded most of Europe, including the British Isles, during the iron
age, around 300 BC.

Central Europe during the last millennium BC certainly was the time and
place of the exotic and fierce Hallstatt culture and, later, the La
T=E8ne
culture, with their prestigious, iron-age metal jewellery wrought with
intricately woven swirls. Hoards of such jewellery and weapons, some
fashioned in gold, have been dug up in Ireland, seeming to confirm
central
Europe as the source of migration. The swirling style of decoration is
immortalised in such cultural icons as the Book of Kells, the illuminated
Irish manuscript (Trinity College, Dublin), and the bronze Battersea
shield
(British Museum), evoking the western British Isles as a surviving
remnant
of past Celtic glory. But unfortunately for this orthodoxy, these
artistic
styles spread generally in Europe as cultural fashions, often made
locally.
There is no evidence they came to Britain and Ireland as part of an
invasion.

Many archaeologists still hold this view of a grand iron-age Celtic
culture
in the centre of the continent, which shrank to a western rump after
Roman
times. It is also the basis of a strong sense of ethnic identity that
millions of members of the so-called Celtic diaspora hold. But there is
absolutely no evidence, linguistic, archaeological or genetic, that
identifies the Hallstatt or La T=E8ne regions or cultures as Celtic
homelands. The notion derives from a mistake made by the historian
Herodotus 2,500 years ago when, in a passing remark about the "Keltoi,"
he
placed them at the source of the Danube, which he thought was near the
Pyrenees. Everything else about his description located the Keltoi in the
region of Iberia.

The late 19th-century French historian Marie Henri d'Arbois de
Jubainville
decided that Herodotus had meant to place the Celtic homeland in southern
Germany. His idea has remained in the books ever since, despite a
mountain
of other evidence that Celts derived from southwestern Europe. For the
idea
of the south German "Empire of the Celts" to survive as the orthodoxy for
so long has required determined misreading of texts by Caesar, Strabo,
Livy
and others. And the well-recorded Celtic invasions of Italy across the
French Alps from the west in the 1st millennium BC have been
systematically
reinterpreted as coming from Germany, across the Austrian Alps.

De Jubainville's Celtic myth has been deconstructed in two recent
sceptical
publications: The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention by
Simon James (1999), and The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions by John
Collis (2003). Nevertheless, the story lingers on in standard texts and
notably in The Celts, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in February.
"Celt"
is now a term that sceptics consider so corrupted in the archaeological
and
popular literature that it is worthless.

This is too drastic a view. It is only the central European homeland
theory
that is false. The connection between modern Celtic languages and those
spoken in southwest Europe during Roman times is clear and valid. Caesar
wrote that the Gauls living south of the Seine called themselves Celts.
That region, in particular Normandy, has the highest density of ancient
Celtic place-names and Celtic inscriptions in Europe. They are common in
the rest of southern France (excluding the formerly Basque region of
Gascony), Spain, Portugal and the British Isles. Conversely, Celtic
place-names are hard to find east of the Rhine in central Europe.

Given the distribution of Celtic languages in southwest Europe, it is
most
likely that they were spread by a wave of agriculturalists who dispersed
7,000 years ago from Anatolia, travelling along the north coast of the
Mediterranean to Italy, France, Spain and then up the Atlantic coast to
the
British Isles. There is a dated archaeological trail for this. My genetic
analysis shows exact counterparts for this trail both in the male Y
chromosome and the maternally transmitted mitochondrial DNA right up to
Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and the English south coast.

Further evidence for the Mediterranean origins of Celtic invaders is
preserved in medieval Gaelic literature. According to the orthodox
academic
view of "iron-age Celtic invasions" from central Europe, Celtic cultural
history should start in the British Isles no earlier than 300 BC. Yet
Irish
legend tells us that all six of the cycles of invasion came from the
Mediterranean via Spain, during the late Neolithic to bronze age, and
were
completed 3,700 years ago.

Anglo-Saxon ethnic cleansing?

The other myth I was taught at school, one which persists to this day, is
that the English are almost all descended from 5th-century invaders, the
Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from the Danish peninsula, who wiped out the
indigenous Celtic population of England.

The story originates with the clerical historians of the early dark ages.
Gildas (6th century AD) and Bede (7th century) tell of Saxons and Angles
invading over the 5th and 6th centuries. Gildas, in particular, sprinkles
his tale with "rivers of blood" descriptions of Saxon massacres. And then
there is the well-documented history of Anglian and Saxon kingdoms
covering
England for 500 years before the Norman invasion.

But who were those Ancient Britons left in England to be slaughtered when
the legions left? The idea that the Celts were eradicated=ADculturally,
linguistically and genetically=ADby invading Angles and Saxons derives
from
the idea of a previously uniformly Celtic English landscape. But the
presence in Roman England of some Celtic personal and place-names doesn't
mean that all ancient Britons were Celts or Celtic-speaking.

The genocidal view was generated, like the Celtic myth, by historians and
archaeologists over the last 200 years. With the swing in academic
fashion
against "migrationism" (seeing the spread of cultural influence as
dependent on significant migrations) over the past couple of decades,
archaeologists are now downplaying this story, although it remains a
strong
underlying perspective in history books.

Some geneticists still cling to the genocide story. Research by several
genetics teams associated with University College London has concentrated
in recent years on proving the wipeout view on the basis of similarities
of
male Y chromosome gene group frequency between Frisia/north Germany and
England. One of the London groups attracted press attention in July by
claiming that the close similarities were the result of genocide followed
by a social-sexual apartheid that enhanced Anglo-Saxon reproductive
success
over Celtic.

The problem is that the English resemble in this way all the other
countries of northwest Europe as well as the Frisians and Germans. Using
the same method (principal components analysis, see note below), I have
found greater similarities of this kind between the southern English and
Belgians than the supposedly Anglo-Saxon homelands at the base of the
Danish peninsula. These different regions could not all have been waiting
their turn to commit genocide on the former Celtic population of England.
The most likely reason for the genetic similarities between these
neighbouring countries and England is that they all had similar
prehistoric
settlement histories.

When I looked at exact gene type matches between the British Isles and
the
continent, there were indeed specific matches between the continental
Anglo-Saxon homelands and England, but these amounted to only 5 per cent
of
modern English male lines, rising to 15 per cent in parts of Norfolk
where
the Angles first settled. There were no such matches with Frisia, which
tends to confirm a specific Anglo-Saxon event since Frisia is closer to
England, so would be expected to have more matches.

When I examined dates of intrusive male gene lines to look for those
coming
in from northwest Europe during the past 3,000 years, there was a
similarly
low rate of immigration, by far the majority arriving in the Neolithic
period. The English maternal genetic record (mtDNA) is consistent with
this
and contradicts the Anglo-Saxon wipeout story. English females almost
completely lack the characteristic Saxon mtDNA marker type still found in
the homeland of the Angles and Saxons. The conclusion is that there was
an
Anglo-Saxon invasion, but of a minority elite type, with no evidence of
subsequent "sexual apartheid."

The orthodox view is that the entire population of the British Isles,
including England, was Celtic-speaking when Caesar invaded. But if that
were the case, a modest Anglo-Saxon invasion is unlikely to have swept
away
all traces of Celtic language from the pre-existing population of
England.
Yet there are only half a dozen Celtic words in English, the rest being
mainly Germanic, Norman or medieval Latin. One explanation is that
England
was not mainly Celtic-speaking before the Anglo-Saxons. Consider, for
example, the near-total absence of Celtic inscriptions in England
(outside
Cornwall), although they are abundant in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and
Brittany.

Who was here when the Romans came?

So who were the Britons inhabiting England at the time of the Roman
invasion? The history of pre-Roman coins in southern Britain reveals an
influence from Belgic Gaul. The tribes of England south of the Thames and
along the south coast during Caesar's time all had Belgic names or
affiliations. Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had
replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the
hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large
Celtic
tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the home counties north of the
Thames.
Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul "the language differs but
little."

The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but
was
similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic
people,
as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could
already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman
invasion.
In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary)
evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental
colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and
continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages,
and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic
language before the Roman invasion.

Apart from the Belgian connection in the south, my analysis of the
genetic
evidence also shows that there were major Scandinavian incursions into
northern and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia, during the
Neolithic
period and before the Romans. These are consistent with the intense
cultural interchanges across the North sea during the Neolithic and
bronze
age. Early Anglian dialects, such as found in the old English saga
Beowulf,
owe much of their vocabulary to Scandinavian languages. This is
consistent
with the fact that Beowulf was set in Denmark and Sweden and that the
cultural affiliations of the early Anglian kingdoms, such as found in the
Sutton Hoo boat burial, derive from Scandinavia.

A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and
northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite
additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same
places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of
Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly
conquered indigenous subjects.

So, based on the overall genetic perspective of the British, it seems
that
Celts, Belgians, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all
immigrant minorities compared with the Basque pioneers, who first
ventured
into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets.

Note: How does genetic tracking work?

The greatest advances in genetic tracing and measuring migrations over
the
past two decades have used samples from living populations to reconstruct
the past. Such research goes back to the discovery of blood groups, but
our
Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA are the most fruitful markers to
study
since they do not get mixed up at each generation. Study of mitochondrial
DNA in the British goes back over a decade, and from 2000 to 2003
London-based researchers established a database of the geographically
informative Y-chromosomes by systematic sampling throughout the British
Isles. Most of these samples were collected from people living in small,
long-established towns, whose grandparents had also lived there.

Two alternative methods of analysis are used. In the British Y-chromosome
studies, the traditional approach of principal components analysis was
used
to compare similarities between whole sample populations. This method
reduces complexity of genetic analysis by averaging the variation in
frequencies of numerous genetic markers into a smaller number of
parcels the principal components of decreasing statistical
importance. The newer approach that I use,
the phylogeographic method, follows individual
genes rather than whole populations. The geographical distribution of
individual gene lines is analysed with respect to their position on a
gene tree, to reconstruct their origins, dates and routes of movement.

Stephen Oppenheimer Interview BBC Radio

<<The other suggestion is that DNA supports the theory of the arrival of
Norse
and Germanic peoples into eastern Britain long before the Roman
period, which is contrary to the traditional view of historians. I
would not call his exposition a hypothesis so much as a presentation
of the hard evidence of DNA which pretty well blows previous theories
of migration and cultural spread out of the water. I think
Oppenheimer is very confident in his findings, and don't think he is
looking for much help or advice. His data is derived from the
research of other specialists as well as his own and all is fully
acknowledged. >>

Stephen Oppenheimer: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Oppenheimer
Genetic evidence suggests that the division between the West and the East
of England does not begin with the Anglo-Saxon invasion but originates
with
two main routes of genetic flow =AD one up the Atlantic coast, the other
from
neighboring areas of Continental Europe.
Classical sources differentiate between Gallic/Celtic and Belgae. Some
sources suggest the Belgae have a German origin. Various archaeological
and
linguistic evidence make for a weaker case for Celtic presence in Belgic
and Eastern England than in Gallic/Celtic or western Britain.

(b) First Literary Reference to Celts: A Hidden People
The first literary reference to the Celtic people, as keltoi or hidden
people, is by the Greek Hecataeus in 517 BC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_genetics_of_the_British_Isles

3. Jewish and Israelite Replacement Theology
This space was originally occupied by a letter and the Brit-Am reply to
it.
The letter was entitled "Jewish Replacement Theology".
It complained that the Jews consider themselves the Chosen People
and pay no recognition to "Joseph".
Consciously or unconsciously the letter had a slightly anti-Semitic tone
and repeated
the old grudge against the Jews that they were the Chosen People whereas
the
Gentiles were not.
Here is part of our reply:
>
You are saying as I understand it that Judah is not recognizing the
existence of the
Lost Ten Tribes and that Judah receives recognition as the sole
representative of
Israel.
That is true but there is some justification for it.
Possession is nine-tenths of the Law and Judah possesses an Israelite
identity.
Even though some sick minds try to claim that the Jews are not Judah
and Brit-Am devoted some space to proving that they were
http://britam.org/judah.html
This was not really necessarily, or it should not have been.
The Jews did not get lost.
This was part of the Divine Plan.
The Ten Tribes did lose themselves and were lost in the eyes of others.
The Jews kept the law which is an identifying sign of Israelite
nationality.
They are part of the Chosen People of Israel and they are the only part
whose identity
is known and acknowledged.
They suffered for it and lived with it.
They bear witness to the Law of Moses and the Law bears witness to them.

In continuation we wish to point out
if someone accepts the Brit-Am message they should help Brit-Am spread
it.
No change can or should be expected in the eyes of anybody until the
Brit-Am message has become widely known.
Without the spread of Brit-Am awareness nothing can be honestly expected.