It is argued that current archaeological data do not support the existence of an Indo-Aryan or European invasion into South Asia at any time in the p… - Jim G. Shaffer

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.

Since stamp seals were not available to everyone in a social group, and because their inscriptions most likely reflect titles and/or personal names, it is reasonable to conclude that cattle were invested with social importance and cultural identity. Moreover, if seals were also a marriage talisman, as Fairservis argues, they suggest that cattle constituted a wealth category associated with forging important social relationships such as marriage. Furthermore, if cattle, as wealth, provided access to reproductive sources, they were probably also avenues to establishing, maintaining or breaking other important social, economic, political and religious relationships.

The modern archaeological record for South Asia indicates a history of significant cultural continuity; an intrepretation at variance with earlier eighteenth through twentieth-century scholarly views of South Asian cultural discontinuity and South Asian cultural dependence on Western culture influences.