With the help of the measurements and speculations of racial anthropology, a “Japhetic,” "Aryan,” or “Indo-European” race was gradually chiseled out.… - Stefan Arvidsson

It was surely no coincidence that when the idea of a European original home was presented for the first time, it was in the introduction to an edition of Tacitus's Germ ania from 1851. The author of the introduction was the an thropologist Robert G. Latham, who, as we have seen, criticized Miiller in the 1850s for talking about an "Aryan brotherhood” between the people of India and Europe. Lathams irritation over Indomania led him to radically reposi tion the homeland of the Indo-Europeans: it had been located not in India or the surrounding areas, but rather somewhere near todays Lithuania. 142

There are people who, independently of the debate about Dumézil, have main­ tained that the scholarly work on the Indo-Europeans is simply a collection of myths. So, for example, the historian Léon Poliakov titled his book on the Indo-European discourse Le Mythe Aryen. The British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has described the research on Indo-Europeans as “a modern myth,“ and Bruce Lincoln has argued, in a book analyzing the research about Indo- European mythology, that this research has been “mythology with footnotes.“9 The French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant also calls the nineteenth-century scholarship “a web of scientific myths.“ (5)

The sometimes interwoven traditions that have dominated the postwar period-personified by Dumezil and Gimbutas—have generally been considered to represent an objective, scientific body of research that contrasts sharply with the Nazis' misuse of the Indo-Europeans. But as we have seen in this chapter, there is no reason to stop critically analyzing the ideology of Indo-European scholarship. If Dumezil and Gimbutas have each represented a constructive research tradition, Bruce Lincoln can represent the tradition of ideological critique among scholars of Indo-European heritage (Arvidsson 2006, pp. 301-302).