17 quotes
A diffusion or migration of a culturally complex ‘Indo-Aryan‘ people into South Asia is not described by the archaeological record.
Another aspect o f this regime is the important status of cattle as cultural wealth.
The Cultural Tradition and Paleoethnicity in South Asian Archaeology (1995)
A key to understanding the Indo-Gangetic cultural tradition's structure is its economic and cultural focus on cattle.
The Cultural Tradition and Paleoethnicity in South Asian Archaeology (1995)
The existing interpretative discussions postulating large-scale human “invasions” simply do not correlate with the physical, archaeological, or paleoanthropological, data.
South Asian archaeology and the myth of Indo-Aryan invasions (2005)
These emerging connections and relationships in the northern South Asian archaeological record indicate no significant cultural discontinuities.
The Cultural Tradition and Paleoethnicity in South Asian Archaeology (1995)
A cultural tradition refers to persistent configurations o f basic technologies and cultural systems as well as structure within the context of temporal and geographic continuity.
The Cultural Tradition and Paleoethnicity in South Asian Archaeology (1995)
While lacking fullest data, there is a growing consensus that the Harappan culture originated as a result of local cultural developments. "Mesopotamian" inventions are not needed to explain it.
“No material culture is found to move from west to east across the Indus”. [in the relevant time period]
The image of Indo-Aryans as nomadic, conquering warriors, driving chariots, may have been a vision that Europeans had, and continue to have, of their own assumed “noble” past.
South Asian archaeology and the myth of Indo-Aryan invasions (2005)
The previous concept of a Dark Age in South Asian archaeology is no longer valid.... [we have a] cultural continuum stretching from perhaps 7000 BC into the early centuries AD...
The Indus Valley, Baluchistan and Helmand Traditions: Neolithic Through Bronze Age (1992)
Lacking fullest data, there is, nonetheless, a growing consensus that Harappan culture is the result of indigenous cultural developments, with no “Mesopotamian” people or diffusions of Western inventions, by whatever means, needed to explain it.
South Asian archaeology and the myth of Indo-Aryan invasions (2005)
The shift by Harappan groups, and perhaps, other Indus Valley cultural mosaic groups, is the only archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of human populations in South Asia before the first half of the first millennium BC.
The Cultural Tradition and Paleoethnicity in South Asian Archaeology (1995)
The current archaeological and paleoanthropological data simply do not support these centuries old interpretative paradigms suggesting Western, intrusive, cultural influence as responsible for the supposed major discontinuities in the South Asian cultural prehistoric record.
South Asian archaeology and the myth of Indo-Aryan invasions (2005)
By the close of Period II, at ca. 4500/4300 B.C., not only was a distinctive, domestic animal subsistence pattern established, but other cultural traits were present that would characterise this region down to the Early Historic Period.
The Cultural Tradition and Paleoethnicity in South Asian Archaeology (1995)
Although the use of cattle as important cultural wealth declined in the first millennium B.C., their religious status remained high, or intensified, providing an im portant cultural link between the protohistoric and Early Historic Periods
The Cultural Tradition and Paleoethnicity in South Asian Archaeology (1995)
The numerous and substantial mud brick “granaries” built by the close of Period HA at Mehrgarh, in the first half of the 5th millennium B.C., suggest a concern, unparalleled in contemporary cultures, for surplus production irrespective of what was stored in them.
The Cultural Tradition and Paleoethnicity in South Asian Archaeology (1995)
Despite a plea by one South Asian scholar to be “. . . hopefully somewhat free from the ghosts of the past”, the legacy of a post-Enlightenment western scholarship concerning South Asian prehistory and history has been for the arguments to be repeated so often as to become dogma.
South Asian archaeology and the myth of Indo-Aryan invasions (2005)