land, Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Brittany became the geographic repositories of Celtic linguistic tradition surviving as Irish and Scots Gaelic--language being a core constituent of the oral transmission of Celtic musical tradition.
An important ethnographic marker of Celtic artistic tradition was the fate of the so-called La Tène culture, situated in Switzerland, which appears to have been the locus of contact between the Celts on the Continent and Greco-Roman and Etruscan cultures that were situated farther south. That culture, today associated chiefly with the stylized and characteristic serpentine and geometric artwork, jewelry, and decoration, was dispersed by migrations occasioned by the rise of Rome beginning about 400-300 BC, and the conflicts between German barbarians and Rome that persisted more or less through the period of the Roman republic and into the nascent years of the Roman Empire. It was in that period that whatever political or military power the Celts might have had in Europe was basically obliterated
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