Jim G. Shaffer Quotes

It is currently possible to discern cultural continuities linking specific prehistoric social entities in South Asia into one cultural tradition. This is not to propose social isolation nor deny any outside cultural influence. Outside cultural influences did affect South Asian cultural development in later, especially historic, periods, but an identifiable cultural tradition has continued, an Indo-Gangetic Cultural Tradition linking social entities over a time period from the development of food production in the seventh millennium BC to the present.

The previous concept of a Dark Age in South Asian archaeology is no longer valid....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...

A cultural tradition refers to persistent configurations of basic technologies and cultural systems within the context of temporal and geographical continuity. This concept facilitates a stylistic grouping of diverse archaeological assemblages into a single analytical unit, while limiting the need for establishing the precise nature of cultural and chronological relationships that link assemblages but imply that such relationships exist..

A diffusion or migration of a culturally complex ‘Indo-Aryan‘ people into South Asia is not described by the archaeological record.

The concept of an Indo-European or Indo-Aryan group of peoples has played a prominent role in interpretative studies of Old World history and archaeology. For almost 200 years, scholars and quasi scholars have attributed the linguistic, cultural, and racial affiliations of very disparate groups to a common Indo-Aryan heritage. In such widely seperated areas as Europe and India, many significant cultural changes recorded for the first and second millennia B.C. are attributed to an influx, or invasion, of Indo-Aryan peoples who shared a common cultural base and who were responsible for important socioeconomic and linguistic changes in the areas they invaded.

These factors suggest, given the increasingly arid savanna ecology of the Grea­ter Indus Valley after ca. 4000 B.C., that this continued preference for cattle was a deliberate cultural decision by the social groups in the area, and that cattle were objects of important cultural wealth.

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.

Given these characteristics, a preference for cattle, after 5000 B.C., undoubtedly influenced other social, economic and political rela­tionships, and suggests that cultural developments in South Asia did not simply parallel those in Southwest Asia, where groups did not have a comparable bias.

Shaffer (1993) refers to one set of data that undermines this simplistic portrayal of an apparent devolution and re-evolution of urbanization, which "has nearly become a South Asian archaeological axiom" (55). Although there appears to have been a definite shift in settlements from the Indus Valley proper in late and Post-Harappan periods, there is a significant increase in the number of sites in Gujarat, and an "explosion" (300 percent increase) of new settlements in East Punjab to accommodate the transferal of the population.

Most prior interpretations attributed significant cultural developments, except early hunting-gathering adaptations, to external factors such as ethnic intrusions or invasions, diffusing ideas and technologies developed outside the region, usually in the West. Current information, however, suggests that these earlier, still persisting interpretations cannot explain the cultural complexities now found in the archaeological record.

The Mehrgarh excavations near Sibri, Pakistan, changed our understanding of the origins of food production - the use of domesticated plants and animals in a neolithic context - in South Asia. Previously, food production and the entire “village way o f life” were perceived as a single complex, diffused from the W est sometime after 5000 B.C. They, in turn, were followed by the “idea” of civilisation only a few millennia later, then by the Aryan, Greek, Muslim and British invasions. The acceptance of one incidence of cultural diffusion/invasion made the others seem that much more reasonable.

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.

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.

This review of archaeological data demonstrates that a continued division of South Asian cultural history into discrete archaeological “cultures” or “sta­ges” such as non-Harappan, “early” Harappan, “mature” Harappan, Kot Dijian, “late” Harappan, Painted Gray Ware and others masks the existence of a long surviving cultural tradition, and distorts the processes responsible for the cultu­ral changes this variety of designations represents. Archaeological data indicate the existence of a long-term cultural tradition responsive to changing cultural and ecological contexts, with an ability to adjust to rapid, as well as long-term, changes.

Two conclusions may be drawn from the archaeological data. First, there is no connection between PGW culture and that of the Aryans. Second, if the "Aryan" concept is to have any cultural meaning, then such a culture (PGW) had an indigenous South Asian origin within the protohistoric cultures of the Ganga-Yamuna region. There was no invasion from the West. The current archaeological evidence suggests that the original reconstruction indicating the occurrence of an Indo-Aryan invasion mistakenly associated linguistic change with the migration of peoples. Linguistic changes and affiliations are brought about by a complex series of cultural processes, many of which do not involve the physical movements of social groups.