Colin Renfrew Quotes

This hypothesis that early Indo-European languages were spoken in north India with Pakistan and on the Iranian plateau at the sixth millennium BC has the merit of harmonizing symmetrically with the theory for the origin of the Indo-European languages in Europe. It also emphasizes the continuity in the Indus Valley and adjacent areas from the early neolithic through to the floruit of the Indus Valley civilization.

When Wheeler speaks of “the Aryan invasion of the Land of the Seven Rivers, the Punjab,” he has no warranty at all, so far as I can see. If one checks the dozen references in the Rig Veda to the seven rivers, there is nothing in any of them that to me implies an invasion. . . . Despite Wheeler’s comments, it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley.

There are, in particular, some suggestions that the religion practised in the Indus valley may have had its effect on the later Hindu religion. The 'great bath' at Mohenjo-daro may well have had ritual purposes,' which reminds us today of the various Hindu ceremonies of purification. Among the few major stone objects from the Indus valley sites are shaped stones, which many observers have pointed out may hold a phallic significance,4 but they also resemble quite closely the lingam, the sacred stone dedicated to the Lord Shiva in modem Hindu practice. There arc other indications, for instance the seated figure, in yoga po&tion, seen on an Indus valley sealstone· has been equated by some with representations of the Lord Shiva himself. Of course, continuity of cult need not indicate continuity of language, but there is no inherent reason why the people of the Indus valley Civilization should not already have been speaking an Indo-European language, the ancestor of the Rigveda.

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).

[Supporters of Renfrew’s theory] “have tried to render the Indo-Iranian problem moot. They argue that the Indo-Iranian branch was somehow divided from the main body of Proto-Indo-European before the colonists brought agriculture to the Balkans. Greek and Indic are thus separated by millenniums of linguistic change - despite the close grammatical correspondences between them (... these correspondences probably represent shared innovations from the last stage of PIE).”

The linguistic designation of a category of “Indo-European/Aryan” languages is not the question here. However, the historical, and prevailing, use of the language designation is the issue. For two centuries, scholars concentrating on the South Asian data have described an Indo-European/Aryan migration/invasion into South Asia to explain the formation of Indian civilization. The conflating of language, people/culture, “race” to maintain the “myth of the Aryan invasion” continues, perhaps, as Leach so cogently notes, due to the academic prestige at stake. The distinguished scholar Colin Renfrew (1987) opts to distort the archaeological record rather than to challenge it. Failing to identify archaeological evidence for such a migration in the European post-Neolithic periods, Renfrew argues instead for an Indo-European/Aryan human migration associated with the spread of food production economies from Anatolia. In doing so, he ignores critical archaeological data from Southwest Asia and South Asia. The South Asian archaeological data reviewed here does not support Renfrew’s position nor any version of the migration/invasion hypothesis describing western population movement into South Asia. Rather, the physical distribution of prehistoric sites and artifacts, stratigraphic data, radio- metric dates, and geological data describing the prehistoric/proto-historic environment perhaps can account, in some degree, for the Vedic oral tradition describing a cultural discontinuity of what was an indigenous population movement in the Indo-Gangetic region.

Despite Wheeler's comments, it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley Civilization, which on this hypothesis would be speaking the Indo-European ancestor of Vedic Sanskrit. Certainly there are elements of continuity from the Indus Civilization onto its aftermath. The main disruption was the ending of urban life, but as Raymond Allchin has emphasized, the rural life of northern India, and what is now Pakistan, carried on little changed.

In this way it might be argued that, from the very earliest farming times, as represented by Mehrgarh and by other sites later, an early; lndo-European language was spoken in the Indus valley and in areas to the north and west.

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

[This] episode of elite dominance which brought the indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family to India (…) may have been as early as the floruit of the Indus civilization (…)

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

In the Indo-European field, linguists have been willing to follow the archaeological orthodoxy of nearly a century ago, while archaeologists have taken the conclusions of the historical linguists at their face value, failing to realize that they were themselves based upon archaeological assumptions which had not been questioned, yet which were not, in some cases, justifiable.

As far as I can see there is nothing in the Hymns of the Rig Veda which demonstrates that the Vedic-speaking population were intrusive to the area: this comes rather from a historical assumption of the "coming of the Indo-Europeans." .. Nothing implies that the Aryans were strangers there.

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

All the migrations postulated by Renfrew ultimately stem from a single catalyst: the crossing of Anatolian farmers into Greece… For all practical purposes, Renfrew's hypothesis disregards Tocharian and Indo-Iranian.