In their environmental settings, subsistence economies, and material cultures, the Andronovo and the Bactrian Margiana complex could not be more diff… - C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky (ed.). Archaeological thought in America. 357 pages, 35 illustrations. 1989. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press; ISBN 0-521-35452-8 hardback £35 & $39.50

Increasingly, however, the concept of a single homogeneous culture covering 3 million square kilometers and enduring for over a millennium has become untenable.

In the context of a renewed fashion of relating archaeology, culture, and language it is well to remember that neither sherds nor genes are destined to speak specific languages, nor does a given language require a specific ceramic type or genetic structure.

Sarianidi (1990) advocates a late-2d-millennium chronology for the Bactrian Margiana complex, describes it as the result of a migration from southeastern Iran, and identifies it as Indo-Iranian,.. There is absolutely no doubt, as is amply documented by Pierre Amiet (1984), of the existence of Bactrian Margiana material remains at Susa, Shahdad, and Tepe Yahya, but there is every reason to doubt that these parallels indicate that the complex originated in southeastern Iran. The limited materials of this complex are intrusive in each of the sites on the Iranian Plateau as they are in sites of the Arabian peninsula (Potts 1994).