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Can anyone direct me to a source that tries to estimate the population of Celtic tribes. In wiki I have found a series of articles that includes a very long list of tribal names, some with links to articles about the tribes, but none of those are concerned with population estimates.

Then there are all the battles with Rome that give number of warriors. So, maybe I could say this is approx 50% of the male population, then I could estimate tribal population that way. Is 50% too high, I wonder. Celts are supposed to be warlike, but those too young, or too old would be left behind, with perhaps a portion of other warriors for security purposes.

I did find a site that states in a single line that some tribes were as small as 20,000 persons, but others might be as large as a quarter of a million men, women and children. No other information was provided, nor sources given.

I suppose one could design a bell curve with 20,000 at one end and say 300,000 at the other end. What would the most likely result be though? IIRC 80,000 Galatians invaded Greece but that is the warriors from multiple tribes, three IIRC.

And we might just as well only consider warriors, being wargamers.

Maybe something like this:

2d6: # Warriors: 2         5,000 3         10,000      4         20,000 5         30,000 6         40,000 7         50,000 8         60,000 9         80,000 10       100,000 11       120,000 12       160,000

Or maybe one could consider population density, and take the area of the tribal lands and apply a multiplier per square kilometer?
As an example, I see Lombardy has a area of 23,844 sq km. If I used the above bell curve, and knocked off three zeroes, would that be a reasonable multiplier?

Answer: no. It seemed too high for me. After playing around with a few different number progressions I ended up with that below, which for my hypothetical Lombardy Celts this gives:

2d6: multiplier:   # warriors: 2        0.2            4,769 3        0.4            9,538 4        0.8           19,075 5        1.2           28,613 6        1.6           38,150 7        2.2           52,457 8        2.8           66,763 9        3.6           85,838 10      4.4           104,914 11      5.4           128,758 12      6.4           152,602

Does this look like it gives a reasonable number of warriors for a typical Celtic tribe?

Oh, another numbers thread :)

To estimate tribal populations from Roman warrior counts presumes, of course, that those counts are accurate. Unfortunately, they probably aren't, at least not always - exaggerating enemy numbers is a universally popular pastime, and if you add up, say, the numbers of Gauls Caesar claims to have vanquished you're either going to conclude he was exaggerating or that the Gauls were supreme logisticians.

Not much, but:

The historiography and demography of Caesar's gallic numbers (https://www.persee.fr/doc/adh_0066-2062_1998_num_1998_1_2162#:~:text=Viewed%20conspectively%20then%2C%20we%20find,lion%20to%20forty%2Deight%20million.)

The Population of Cisalpine Gaul in the time of Augustus (https://cgeh.nl/sites/default/files/Ligt_Population.pdf) - bit late and post-tribal maybe

Urbanization in Iron Age Europe (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-017-9107-1) - a bit on numbers, not too much

Thanks!  :)

Howard, you may find this thread http://soa.org.uk/sm/index.php?topic=4509.0 interesting, if you've not already read it.