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J. P. Mallory Quotes

born 1945 United States

James Patrick Mallory (born 1945) is an Irish-American archaeologist and Indo-Europeanist. Mallory is an emeritus professor at Queen's University, Belfast; a member of the Royal Irish Academy, and the editor of the Journal of Indo-European Studies and Emania: Bulletin of the Navan Research Group (Belfast).

United States
Academics
Archaeologists

Also known as: James Patrick Mallory

Random J. P. Mallory quote

8 quotes

One linguist’s Indo-European names become another’s proto-Basque, or Caucasian or anything else.

For the present it will be better to hold all of these mutually conflicting theories in the backs of our minds and preclude no solution to the homeland problem.

If there are any lessons to be learned, it is that every model of Indo-European origins can be found to reveal serious deficiencies as we increase our scrutiny.

Will the 'real' linguist please stand up? It should be obvious that linguists have as much difficulty in establishing the chronological relationships between loanwords as any other 'historical science'" (98).

Mallory (1997)

Although [the domestic horse] has occasionally been recovered from Harappan sites, for example Surkotada and Kalibangan, no one would credit the earlier Harappan culture as exemplifying the horse-centred culture of the Vedic Aryans.

Mallory ended his overview of the “IE problem” (1973: 60) with this perceptive statement: “a solution to the problem will more than likely be as dependent on a re-examination of the methodology and terminology involved as much as on the actual data themselves.”

It is not easy to make a simple appeal to the Andronovo culture to resolve all the issues of Indo-Iranian origins... When the archaeological evidence becomes so opaque then our only refuge... is probability and a little intuition.

Elsewhere, Mallory (1997) complains that the "argument of archaeological continuity could probably be supported for every IE-speaking region of Eurasia where any archaeologist can effortlessly pen such statements as 'while there may be some evidence for the diffusion of ideas, there is no evidence for the diffusion of population movement'" (104).

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: J. P. Mallory (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.