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Why, beyond reasons of scientific curiosity, do we want to know about the past? And whose past is it anyway? …the past is big business…the past is politically highly charged, ideologically powerful and significant.

— Colin Renfrew

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More quotes by Colin Renfrew

The significance of the horse for the understanding of the distribution of early Indo-European has been much exaggerated.

Renfrew (1999)

It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley Civilization.

Certainly the assumption that the Aryas were recent ‘immigrants’ to India, and their enemies were ‘aborigines’, has done much to distort our understanding of the archaeology of India and Pakistan.

Many linguists have commented that these proposed dates of separation are 'too early,' but how . . . do they know this, or judge this?

Renfrew (1990)

As Renfrew put it in his archly-titled review of Mallory’s book – ‘They ride horses, don’t they?’ – the horse has assumed “an almost mythical significance in traditional Indo-European studies” (1989: 845).

Thomson, K (2009)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Colin Renfrew (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.