No. First, by the sources that I had posted. Second because it is completely non-sense that Celtic disappears in Southern France, and suddenly "re-shows-up" in Iberia.
Yes it would seem, at first glance, to be nonsense. But it is a real phenomenon. The Celtiberian inscriptions from the upper Ebro and Duero river areas cannot be just explained away. In fact, however, you may have partially given the answer yourself:
- p.55 : "The issue can be summed up as follows: The Castro Culture has its origins in the Late Bronze Age, and there is evidence for continuity and an indigenous evolution throughout the Early Iron Age."
It stands to reason that Celtiberian was spoken on the Iberian penninsula before the iron age. In other words, the Atlantic Bronze Age must have been, in parts at least, been Celtic-speaking. While I disagree with what the Atlantic School says (because I do not believe that the Celtic languages originated in the Atlantic Façade), I still think that they do have a point:
- There is the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages, which is also Q-Celtic.
- The linguistic situation on the British Isles is somewhat more drastic and problematic than the Iberian penninsula because of the
complete absence of non-IE languages. This, in my opinion, speaks also in favour of an early Celticzation of Britain.
- Lepontic is attested from the 6th century BC onward, and it is already a P-Celtic language. Archaeologically, the Lepontii are part of the Golasecca Culture, which is separate from Hallstatt/La-Tene. This means the Q/P-split must have occured some time
before 6th century BC.
- From Pytheas (4th century BC) we also have the term "Pritennike" attested, thereby we know that Britain must have been P-Celtic by the 4th century BC as well. We do however know that Britain was Q-Celtic speaking originally because the cognate for the word "Britain" or "Pritennike" is attested in Irish as "Cruithne". The original stem of the word would have been "Qritani".
- Finally, there's the Lusitanian language to be considered, which is technically speaking a non-Celtic language since it doesn't conform to Celtic sound laws (notably, no loss of initial P, or the change from -ur- to -ru-), but it's nonetheless an Indo-European language that is closely related with Proto-Celtic. If the Lusitanians were indeed an even earlier wave of Indo-Europeans which arrived in the west of the Iberian penninsula (while the east and south of the penninsula still remained inhabited by non-Indo-Europeans), it would perfectly explain how this sudden "island" of a Celtic-speaking area could appear to us later. In fact, there's evidence in Gallaecia of a Lusitanian substrate over which Celtic occured later.
