To take a single example here, some scholars decided that the Pirak culture, which emerged around 1800 BCE in the plains of Baluchistan, is the best … - Jean-François Jarrige

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To take a single example here, some scholars decided that the Pirak culture, which emerged around 1800 BCE in the plains of Baluchistan, is the best representative of the Aryan intrusion. However, Jarrige, who directed excavations in the region, found that none of the transformations happening there in the early second millennium BCE, including the introduction of summer crops such as rice and millets (especially sorghum or jowar, in addition to the traditional winter crops of wheat and barley), ‘can be explained in the context of invasions of semi-nomadic peoples coming from the [Central Asian] steppes. … How could this series of transformations be seriously attributed to Indo-Aryan invaders? … Nothing, in the present state of archaeological research … enables us to reconstruct convincingly invasions that could be clearly attributed to Aryan groups’ (Jarrige 1995, pp. 24, 21). Regrettably, such well-informed views have been brushed aside in the desperate but vain search for material traces of those ‘Aryan groups’.