Apart from the time-space expectations, there is not much in the archaeological material that could be taken as tags for tracing the Indo- Iranians/ … - Henri-Paul Francfort

" "

Apart from the time-space expectations, there is not much in the archaeological material that could be taken as tags for tracing the Indo- Iranians/ Indo-Aryans [...] no one of these archaeological correlates is beyond question [...] Briefly, not only have they nothing strictly Indo-European or Indo- Iranian or Indo-Aryan in them, but if we look closely at them in their general cultural context, they appear to be selected isolated traits not always compatible with each other [...and] are attested in various cultural contexts, not all necessarily Indo-European... [the whole process is based on] the simple linguistic space-time argument for locating the speakers, in which case a study of the archaeological record is useless since anything goes [...] there is no factual evidence apart from the linguistically reconstructed time-space predictions [...] There is no point in trying to illustrate ethno-linguistic theories by irrelevant or uninterpretable archaeological material.... [the material culture cited] proves nothing about the language of their owners. Otherwise we would have to admit that the Bronze Age Chinese were Indo-European.