Another aspect o f this regime is the important status of cattle as cultural wealth. - Jim G. Shaffer

Unfortunately, there is an “academic status” associated with studying ancient states. Therefore, it is likely that either the “state” will be rede­fined to fit the “mature” Harappan pattern, or that “mature “Harappan culture will be moulded to the contours o f existing definitions, at the expense of exploring alternative explanations.

The academic investment in this hypothesis [i.e. AIT] is so great that the distinguished scholar Colin Renfrew (1987) opts to distort the archaeological record rather than to challenge it... The South Asian archaeological record reviewed here does not support Renfrew's position or any version of the migration / invasion hypothesis. Rather, the physical distribution of sites and artifacts, stratigraphic data, radiometric dates and geological data can account for the Vedic oral tradition describing an internal cultural discontinuity of indigenous population movement.

Given the meticulous archaeological efforts to identify culture patterns for the geographic areas described, and with the relative and radiometric chronologies established for the archaeological record, it seems that there is no “Vedic night” separating the prehistoric/protohistoric from the early historic periods of South Asian culture history. Rather, these data reinforce what the site of Mehrgarh so clearly establishes, an indigenous cultural continuity in South Asia of several millennia.