According to Kuzmina, the fact that the essential equipment of the Indo-Aryan charioteers in the Mitanni kingdom and in India has no prototypes or analogies in either the Near East or Harappan India, but rather does show affinity with the items in the Sintashta- Petrovka burials mentioned earlier, "corroborates the hypothesis that locates the Indo- Iranian homeland on the Eurasian steppes between the Don and Kazakhstan in the 16th— 17th centuries BC." She adds, appropriately, that "to dispel all doubts we have only to find warrior burials similar to those of the steppes in Mitanni and in the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent" (Kuzmina 1994, 410). These have yet to be found.

Prior to the Turkic expansion, at the beginning of the Iron Age, Iranian spread from somewhere in the vicinity of Bactria, Sogdiana, and the eastern steppe to cover most or all of western central Asia and the entire steppe, much of the Near East at least to eastern Anatolia, and, at least intermittently, the Danube plain, where Slavic vocabulary and ethnonyms attest to a major Iranianization at about the fifth century AD, and where there is good archaeological evidence of a Scythian presence in the mid-first millennium BC...

We have found that the nature of material residues and the units of analysis in archaeology do not match or fit the phenomenon we wish to investigate, viz. Aryan migrations. The problem is exacerbated by the strong possibility that simultaneous with migrations out of Eurasia there were expansions out of established centres by metallurgists/prospectors. Last, when we investigate pastoral land use in the Eurasian steppe, we can make informed inferences about the nature of Aryan emigration thence, which is a kind of movement very unlikely to have had artefactual correlates.

Along the forest trajectory as well there is evidence of either an early Indie presence or undifferentiated Proto-Indo-Iranian or Proto-Indo-Aryan. Among the Indo-Iranian loans into early Finno-Ugric are some so phonologically archaic that they could well be Proto-Indo-Iranian... Iranian, but not Indo-Aryan, regularly reflects PIE s as h, so this Finno-Ugric form looks more Indie than Iranian. Abaev also cites some less well attested forms that could be specifically Indie... These borrowings would have taken place somewhere in the vicinity of the southern Ural Mountains. They were received from a steppe language and incorporated into Finno-Ugric as it began its spread along the forest trajectory. This linguistic evidence for an Indie or Proto-Indo-Iranian wave preceding Iranian on the steppe is weak but legitimate. In partial confirmation of it, Kuz’mina identifies the Andronovo culture of eastern Kazakhstan in the mid-second millennium BC as Indo-Aryan..... There is also evidence for Indo-Aryan along the steppe trajectory in the form of a set of Crimean place names which Trubač identifies as Indo-Aryan. This evidence is even weaker—place names in general have poor diagnostic value since they lack denotational meaning—but carefully researched and again legitimate. If Trubačv is right there is evidence for an Indie advance to the western steppe. Taken together, the Finno-Ugric and Crimean evidence are consistent with the assumption of a short-lived Indie or Indo-Aryan presence at the frontier of the Iranian spread on the steppe, in addition to the well-known Indie frontier in northeastern Mesopotamia and India.

Regarding the pastoral nature of the Indo-Aryans, Chakrabarti (1986) adds a further observation that "the inconvenient references to agriculture in the Rigveda are treated as later additions. The scholars who do this forget that effective agriculture is very old in the subcontinent, and surely no text supposedly dating from 1500 B.C. could depict a predominantly pastoral society anywhere in the subcontinent. Something must be wrong with the general understanding of this text" (Chakrabarti 1986, 76). In other words, if the Indo-Aryans were pastoralists, they must have always coexisted with agriculturists in India since agriculture predates the assumed date for their arrival by millennia. There could never have been a purely pastoral economic culture.

Nonetheless, those who do find die aforementioned linguistic exigencies compelling must find some way of getting the Indo-Aryans speakers into the subcontinent by some means or another. Mallory (1998) feels comfortable enough ascribing some form of Indo-Iranian identity to the Andronovo culture but admits that, "on the other hand, we find it extraordinarily difficult to make a case for expansions from this northern region to northern India . . . where we would presume Indo-Aryans had settled by the mid-second millennium BCE" (191). Referring to the attempts at connecting the Indo-Aryans to such sites as the Bishkent and Vakhsh cultures, he remarks that "this type of explanation only gets the Indo-Iranian to Central Asia, but not as far as the seats of the Medes, Persians or Indo-Aryans" (192). He points out that suggesting an Indo-Aryan identity for the BMAC requires a presumption that this culture was dominated by steppe tribes. However, "while there is no doubt that there was a steppe presence on BMAC sites, . . . this is very far from demonstrating the adoption of an Indo-Iranian language by the Central Asia urban population" (192).

Prior to the Iranian expansion, in the early Bronze Age, IE spread to cover the entire steppe and the Danube plain (and subsequently all of Europe), with substantial speech communities also in Anatolia (Hittite and congeners) and northern Mesopotamia (surviving in Armenian) and, in all probability, coverage of much or all of western central Asia (probably by ancestral Indo-Iranian). What is historically attested of the IE spread fits closely the pattern followed later by Iranian, Turkic, and Mongolian.

Despite inviting linguists to reconsider the northern steppe hypothesis in favor of the southern route, it can be inferred from Jarrige and Hassan, as from the work of a number of archaeologists considering the problem of Indo-Aryan origins, that the Indo-Aryan- locating project exists solely due to linguistic exigencies: The development of original but closely interrelated cultural units at the end of the third and the beginning of the second millennium cannot be explained just by the wandering of a single group of invaders. The processes were obviously multidirectional in regions with strong and ancient cultural traditions. This does not preclude the fact that movement of population and military expeditions . . . may have played an important historical part but, as far as archaeology is concerned, there is nothing to substantiate a simplistic model of invasion to account for the complex economic and cultural phenomena manifest at the end of the third millennium in the regions between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. (164)

We may therefore hold this proposition firmly established , that Iran or Persia in its largest sense, was me true center of languages, and of arts; which, instead of travelling westward only, as it has been fancifully supposed, or eastward, as might with equal reason have been asserted , were expanded in all directions to all the regions of the world, in which the Hindu race had settled under various denominations.

The expansion of the kurgan culture over Europe, in three successive waves, is fairly well-attested archaeologically. About the supposed spread of the Indo-Europeans to India and Iran, Mrs. Gimbutas does not give details, and in the extant literature no archeaologically supported scenario of the Asian movement of the Indo-Europeans is available, the way we have mapped their spreading into Europe. On the contrary, when it comes to Asia, we find even the topmost indo-europeanists relying on the outdated theories à la Mortimer Wheeler, the chief proponent of the “Aryans destroyed Harappa” scenario, without fully checking the factual basis of these theories... While the Indo-European expansion in Europe is being researched thoroughly, their presence in Asia is still perceived through the misty glasses of outdated but uncritically accepted hypotheses, Much of current thinking on early Indo-European history in Asia is a projection of the better-known patterns of their expansion in the Balkan.

The Iranian family, which was next to sweep across the steppe and deserts, finds its region of greatest diversity in the central Asian mountains, and its ancestral Indo-Iranian family finds its own greatest diversity in the mountain region from central Asia to northern India (i.e. Bactria- Sogdiana and parts just south).

First, this hypothesis of a population movement from Iran and elsewhere to Peninsular India does not conform to the geographic framework suggested earlier in the present paper on the basis of documented political and economic records .... Second, almost all the suggested analogies are too general to be of any use in a valid and meaningful archaeological comparison .... Third, some of the analogies cited are positively misleading .... Fourth, the suggested West Asiatic analogies do not belong to any single cultural assemblage or even different assemblages of any specific period .... Finally, it should be pointed out that not a single demonstrably West Asiatic type fossil occurs in the cited Indian assemblages. . . . Moreover, the basic character of these Indian assemblages is very different from that of their supposedly parent [in Sankalia's hypothesis they are parent sites] West Asiatic sites, a difference which should be obvious to anybody who studies these assemblages without primarily looking for similarities.

This raises the immediate objection that if archaeology cannot trace any consistent material culture identifiable as Indo-Aryan arriving into the subcontinent from outside, it most certainly cannot identify any such culture emanating out. Accordingly, as far as archaeology is concerned, we have reached a stalemate (although from a Migrationist perspective there is, arguably at least, some kind of chronological sequence of archaeological culture that at least heads toward the general direction of the subcontinent, even if it does not penetrate it). Ultimately, however, the Aryans cannot be satisfactorily identified in the archaeological record as either entering or exiting. The trajectory of the Indo-Aryans, indeed the necessity of their very existence, is a linguistic issue that archaeology, as most archaeologists are well aware, cannot locate in the archaeological record without engaging in what, to all intents and purposes, amounts to special and often complicated pleading. On the basis of the present evidence, linguistics cannot decisively determine with any significant degree of consensus where the original home- land actually was. And archaeology can only hope to be productive in identifying the material remains of a linguistic group if linguistics has already done the groundwork of pinpointing its geographic area of origin with a reasonable degree of precision.

Three language trajectories are shown.., and these are contemporaneous but not equal in prominence or carrying power. The central one, henceforth the steppe trajectory, shows the east-to-west spread of languages across the Eurasian steppe, and is based on four spreads: that of IE to Europe in the Bronze Age, that of Iranian to (and occasionally into) Central Europe during the Iron Age, that of Turkic in the early centuries of this era, and that of Mongolian beginning in the Middle Ages. To the north of it is the almost equally extensive forest trajectory through the northern forests. This is the route followed by the Uralic language family in its spread from the central Urals (c. the fourth or fifth millennium) as far west as Norway and Estonia (by perhaps the first millennium BC). To the south of the Caspian and Black Seas runs the southern or desert trajectory that brought the Mongols to the southern Caucasus, and before that Turkish to Turkey, and before that Iranian languages to ancient Persia and northern Mesopotamia, and still earlier Armenian, Hittite and its sisters, and other early IE dialects to Asia Minor.