John T. Koch

John Thomas Koch (born 1953) 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.

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 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. 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.

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