archaeology

"Much prime settlement land from 20,000 BC to 5,600 BC is now underwater. Archaeological concentration on land gives a distorted picture of life before the Flood."

"The national museum in Kabul which was inaugurated in 1924 and the most important repository of the excavated material from Afghanistan, has been systematically looted. To put this looting in its proper perspective we have to consider some recent events of Afghan political history. The Soviet troops were in Kabul in 1979 to protect the pro-Communist government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. In late 1988 or early 1989 these troops went back to Russia, after fighting a losing war against the Afghan rebel groups or the Mujahideen who were liberally supported by Pakistan and the USA. The Islamic State of Afghanistan was established in April 1992, but there was no love lost among the rival factions of the Mujahideen. Kabul witnessed considerable fighting, and in the ensuing chaos the museum was looted, perhaps on several occasions. In an article (museum under siege’) in Archaeology in 1996 Nancy Dupree (1996), a well-known American scholar on Afghanistan, offered a list of the important looted material. This amounts to about 70 per cent of the museum’s material comprising most of its vast gold and silver coin collections, stone statuaries and ivories and also the famous Islamic metalwork of the Ghaznavid dynasty."

"While I have seen a few museum pieces for sale in Afghanistan, there are a number of artifacts on the market that have recently been dug up in Afghanistan. Mujaheedin commanders in all parts of the country are involved in this illicit activity, most notably in the east near the Hadda museum. An important Buddhist pilgrimage site in the second through seventh centuries, Hadda has been totally stripped of its exquisite clay sculptures in the Gandhara style, which combines Bactrian, Greco-Roman, and Indian elements. Looted artifacts from Faryab and Balkh provinces in the north allegedly include jewel- encrusted golden crowns and statues, orbs (locally described as ‘soccer balls’) studded with emeralds and all manner of exotic ephemera, as well as fluted marble columns similar to those found at Ai Khanoum in the northeastern province of Takhar. These are being carted away to embellish the houses of the newly powerful, according to witnesses."

"The unsettled political conditions apparently encouraged clandestine diggings, and it seems that the ancient Bactrian region, centred in the Oxus valley which lies to the north of the Hindukush range, has been a good source of trade in illicit antiquities. In fact, the looted Bactrian graves, or rather, their antiquities surfacing in the western market, have been the major factor behind the postulate of an Oxus Civilization from the second half of the third millennium BC to about the middle of the second millennium BC."

"Dupree’s analysis clearly suggests that ‘the museum was not plundered by rampaging gangs of illiterate Mujahideen’. The looters in 1993 were discriminating in what they took and apparently had both the time and the knowledge to select the most attractive, saleable pieces. For example, they removed from wooden display mounts only the central figures (depicting voluptuous ladies standing in doorways) of the delicate Begram ivory carvings. It is also telling that although some 2000 books and journals remain in the library, volumes with illustrations of the museum's best pieces are missing."

"You have to remember that the items that have been stolen from the Museum or have been plundered, are not owned by only one person and usually not only by Afghans. It is usually one or two Afghans with five or six Pakistani partners. And the underground stolen art business in Pakistan is just as well organised and it is just as dangerous as the drug business. In fact, I have heard some people say that as far as the end-result is concerned, it’s even more profitable than drugs."

"Reliance upon migrations as the principal agent of social change has been typical of Russian archaeological interpretations, along with a blurring of the distinction between ethnic, linguistic, racial, and cultural entities, the isolation of racial/ethnic groups by the craniometric methods of physical anthropology, and the use of linguistic paleontology to reconstruct the development of cultural groups."

"A cultural tradition refers to persistent configurations of basic technologies and cultural systems within the context of temporal and geographical continuity. This concept facilitates a stylistic grouping of diverse archaeological assemblages into a single analytical unit, while limiting the need for establishing the precise nature of cultural and chronological relationships that link assemblages but imply that such relationships exist."

"Archaeological cultures should not be viewed as homogeneous or growing like plants from single seeds; they are always heterogeneous and constantly in the making."

"Legitimization of the colonial state became bound up with the intertwining of archaeology, anthropology and the Aryan theory of linguistic and racial origins."

"Contemporary methodologies, linguistic or archaeological, for determining the spoken language of a remote archaeological culture are virtually nonexistent. Simplified notions of the congruence between an archaeological culture, an ethnic group, and a linguistic affiliation millennia before the existence of texts is mere speculation, often with a political agenda. Archaeology has a long way to go before its methodology allows one to establish which cultural markers, pottery, architecture, burials, etc., are the most reliable for designating ethnic identity."

"The palaeoanthropologists of the early twentieth century were thus able to put together a view of human evolution which can be seen as an extension of the cyclic or rhythmic theory of progress advocated throughout the Victorian era. Despite its emphasis on struggle as the means by which higher types displaced their primitive antecedents, this was no product of Darwinian gradualism. Most of its supporters rejected natural selection as the motor of progressive evolution, preferring to invoke some vaguely defined creative force in the central Asian heartland. The fact that both the concept of progress through cycles and the fascination with Asia as the centre of development survived well into the twentieth century reveals the power these Victorian ages had to shape the imagination. The echoes of Max Muller's account of Aryan migrations can still be heard in the theories of human origins by archaeologists and anthropologists committed to the idea of continuous evolution. But once the faith in continuous progress was undermined by growing militarism in the age of imperial rivalries, the model of progress through conquest emerged from the wings to extend its influence over ideas on human origins. The early twentieth century merely extended the sense of racial destiny that had been growing throughout the Victorian era."

"Almost all anthropologists working on the Indian material have been having these archetypes ' before their mind , with the result that each skull has been taken singly and compared with one of the hypothetical racial types. If the comparison shows a closeness to a type , the skull has been regarded as belonging to that particular race . If , on the other hand , the resemblance is less exact , the skull has been relegated to a mixed group . It may very often happen that a single skull shows features that belong to two or more hypothetical types ; in such cases , the skull has been immediately considered to have been the result of mixture of these races . Sometimes , the most likely racial types ' have been considered in the skulls from a particular area , so that the conclusions could generally confirm a conventional story of invasion or migration put forward in history . Since the individual variability in physical characteristics is very great , it has not been difficult to find the type suitable in a particular situation from a collection of skeletal material."

"When first I whispered words of love, When first you turned aside to hear, The wingèd griffin flew above, The mammoth gaily gamboll’d near; I wore the latest thing in skins Your dock-leaf dress had just been mended And fastened-up with fishes' fins— The whole effect was really splendid."

"In the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage For food and fame and woolly horses’ pelt. I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man, And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt. * * * * * * * Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose And the reindeer roamed where Paris roars to-night:— ‘There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, ‘And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right!’"

"A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain."

"The stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil."

"One of the main reasons why such hard proof or hard circumstantial proof is missing from ancient Indian studies is that our writings were generally inscribed on palm leaves or birch leaves and such writings have not survived. We seldom wrote on perish- able materials like clay which, once burnt, became well-nigh imperishable. This is how so much of the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian literature has survived whereas the surviving Indus civilisation corpus of writing is amazingly incomplete. This must be the reason why the administrative archives of ancient India have not survived. Some inscriptions do, in fact, imply that there were administrative store houses of documents. That the Indians preferred to record most of the things of their lives on palm leaves has been known even as late as the late nineteenth century when the Indian census recorders of the period returned their ‘proformas’ incised on palm leaves."

"Sringaverapura is a site on the bank of the Ganga, not far upstream of Allahabad. Birch leaf fragments have been identified in its Black-and-Red Ware level dated around 800 BC at the site. The nearest source of birch leaf (Betula utilis or bhurja patra) is the Himalayas, possibly Garhwal hills. What is the point in importing these leaves to Srinagaverapura unless they were used for writing? This is certainly a piece of hard circumstantial evidence in favour of pre-Asokan existence of writing in early historic India."

"Only those who have experienced it know how precisely exacting it is. Old palm-leaf manuscripts resemble dried firewood. They are in the danger of breaking apart the moment one touches it. They have to be separated with extraordinary delicateness, care and caution. After this begins the process of reading them. The palm-leaves must first be coated with the juice of leafy greens. It only then that the alphabets will show themselves in black strokes. This is followed by the trouble of unchaining the shackles of the Mōḍi script. This is perhaps the greatest difficulty — it is not easily understood by the people of our era [late 19th century - early or mid 20th century]. Verses written on palm-leaves are not split into neatly ordered feet [Pāda or lines in metrical poetry]. In fact, even different poems are not separated from one another. The whole inscription or poetical work is written like a single sentence from start to finish akin to a chain. Indeed, at the minimum, it takes more than half a day to read just one side of a palm-leaf manuscript... Mere scholarship is insufficient to undertake this kind of work. The person needs extraordinary levels of enthusiasm and a superhuman standards of patience."

"You have to remember that the items that have been stolen from the Museum or have been plundered, are not owned by only one person and usually not only by Afghans. It is usually one or two Afghans with five or six Pakistani partners. And the underground stolen art business in Pakistan is just as well organised and it is just as dangerous as the drug business. In fact, I have heard some people say that as far as the end-result is concerned, it’s even more profitable than drugs."

"While I have seen few museum pieces for sale in Pakistan, there are a number of artifacts on the market that have recently been dug up in Afghanistan. Mujahideen commanders in all parts of the country are involved in this illicit activity, most notably in the east near the Hadda museum. An important Buddhist pilgrimage site in the second through seventh centuries, Hadda has been totally stripped of its exquisite clay sculptures in the Gandhara syle, which combines Bactrian, Greco-Roman, and Indian elements. Looted artifacts from Faryab and Balkh provinces in the north allegedly include jewel-encrusted golden crowns and statues, orbs (locally described as "soccer balls") studded with emeralds and all manner of exotic ephemera, as well as fluted marble columns similar to those found at Ai Khanoum in the northeastern province of Takhar. These are being carted away to embellish the houses of the newly powerful, according to witnesses."

"Ideas of invasions, diffusions, and conquests have obscured and hindered investigation into the region's indigenous cultural processes. To fully understand and appreciate the various solutions to cultural problems recorded in the South Asian archaeological record, alternative explanatory frameworks must be considered."

"Archaeology in South Asia did not crystallize out of the informal archaeology of enthusiastic amateur South Asians, but was created by elite foreigners, at the capital, by an act of state."

"It is clear...that Indian tradition, Vedic or Puranic, is not likely to help much in the interpretation of archaeological data. The theories propounded by reputed archeologists are laboured ones and based on pre-conceived notions. Most scholars have twisted the traditional accounts or invented their own legends to suit their interpretations because it is utterly difficult to apply the tradition as a whole to the field of pure archaeology involving one or more material cultures.... [The] majority of Indian traditions are unhistoric and coloured and therefore none of their archaeological interpretations would prove to be free from subjectivity.... Tradition and archaeology should not be mixed together in any form at least as far as Indian protohistory is concerned."

"Very few Indian universities offer archaeology. They are also fairly unenthusiastic about their approach to archaeological research. I know one full-fledged university archaeology department which, since its establishment in 1960, has only published the result of its first year of excavations in 1962. I know another university department – a Department of Indian History, Culture and Archaeology— where the results of excavations of a major Harappan site are not merely unpublished beyond a few pages but also the entire pottery collection from the site was reputedly taken out of the pottery bags and their contents were mixed up and buried in the trenches specifically dug for the purpose."

"I would say that the present state of affairs in Indian archaeology also shows, as the present state of affairs in the study of ancient India in the Indian universities does, that ‘ancient India’ does not figure conspicuously in the Indian middle class vision."

"In my assessment, the administrative regime that takes care of monuments has failed. My friends in ASI tell me that the agency has been tasked to do too many different things, with the result it doesn’t do any of those tasks well. Perhaps what we need is a separate agency to manage monuments."

"The scientific back-up of the subject remains marginal in the country. The government is simply not bothered about setting up a national laboratory for archaeological dating and chemical and other analyses. Even the quality of the Ajanta paintings has been allowed to be compromised."

"My familiarity with the various shades of political opinion among Indian archaeologists convinces me that none of our political parties and organizations has a coherent and professional attitude to the Indian past, archaeological or otherwise."

"The Mysore Archeological Department…came under the Mysore University… [But then] the department began to rust. A few years later, the [ancient] gold coins in the Museum were stolen under the watch of its Director… The Archeology Department has not published a single annual report in the last sixteen years… now the Department does not have a full-time Director…no new epigraphical research has been done in Karnataka over the last several years… from the past thirty-two years, Archeology Research was a compulsory subject in Kannada and History Honours… now, the Honours degree itself has been dropped."

"The tragedy is that, by and large, the Indian historians have very little understanding of field-archaeology and they just make a mess when they use archaeological evidence."

"Tribes that bury their dead in kurgans (which are so common over vast geographic and temporal expanses) have been migrating into India throughout its history, but these have not induced language shift across the entire north of the subcontinent. So one is hardly compelled to interpret the scanty evidence of the Bishkent and Vakhsh cultures as evidence of the arrival of a new language group on its way to Indo-Aryanize North India. Like the Andronovo culture, this culture does not enter the subcontinent either. Moreover, Piankova (1982) dates the graves to the last quarter of the second millennium, which is far too late for migrants who are supposed to already have completely settled down and written the hymns in the Indian subcontinent by this time, even allowing the lowest possible dates proposed by scholars for the Rgveda. Moreover, anyone prepared to gloss over the absence of horse bones in these sites cannot then deny the presence of the Indo-Aryans in the Indus Valley Civilization on these particular grounds."

"The linguistic attributes are mapped onto archaeological correlates: artifacts are selected, like the chariot, as well as ecofacts, like agriculture, or whole archaeological cultures (material assemblages). The archaeological correlates become some sort of labels or tags that one may employ in order to trace the supposed Indo-European populations. But, in fact, very little of the illustrative archaeological material actually exhibits specific Indo-European or Indo-Iranian traits; a question therefore arises: what is the relevance of archaeological material if any sort of assemblage present at the expected or supposed time/space spot can function as the tag of a linguistic group?"

"The critical point is that language and ethnic shift can take place without radical change in the material particulars of life and with an amount of change in the gene pool so small as to be for all practical purposes undetectable. We should not replace the fallacy of assigning all significant culture change to migration with the fallacy of thinking that language shift and the spread of new ethnic self-identification occur only with major or radical cultural transformations."

"At one time social anthropologists used to complain that their archeologist colleagues had no sense of the overall coherence of human societies. Now [prehistorians] have become committed to a functionalism of a wholly naive sort. They seem to assume that cultural systems and language systems are bonded together and intrinsically stable over long periods of time. If societies are left alone, they stay put; otherwise, they roll across the landscape like impermeable billiard balls. If the archeological record shows that in fact changes have occurred, their occurrence is always explained as the conse­quence of a movement of population that carries with it the products (both material and immaterial) of a preexisting, alien, self-contained culture. As a rule, the alleged movement of people takes the form of a military conquest."

"If we count the gradual increase of china in Indian houses during the recent decades, and sit down to judge as future archaeologists with as mechanical an approach as is evident among those who equate pottery with people, we would find the entire country suffused by a new people. The same inference would be drawn from the sudden popularity of stainless steel followed by aluminum alloy and the like."

"Like all other archaeological cultures, there is no unanimity concerning the Indo- Iranian or Indo-Aryan ethnic identification of these burials either. Lyonnet wonders why, if they had been Indo-Aryans who had provoked or appeared at the time of the collapse of the Bactria and Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), Namazga, and Harappan civilizations, they did not continue to foster the links between these regions, which had previously been connected for millennia. Rather, these connections collapse at this time (Lyonnet 1993, 83). She underscores the extreme paucity of metal objects found in the graves, which "is rather odd for a culture considered to come from the Andronovo people, famous for their metallurgy" (Lyonnet 1994a, 430). Moreover, "no trace of the horse is found, there is no evidence of any social differentiation, and, altogether, the material is rather poor" (430). As far as she is concerned, "if we are dealing with intruders, as some features suggest, and if it is certain that they are not Andronovians, we do not have enough evidence to identify them as Indo-Aryans. We can only compare their movement to the textually known much later migrations of two other groups, who, coming from 'the steppes,' went through Central Asia into India." These are the Kusanas around the beginning of our era, and the White Huns in the fifth century A.D.: "All these nomads, albeit at different periods, took exactly the same path, used exactly the same areas for their cemeteries consisting of kurgans that all look alike from the outside" (430)."

"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)."

"Migrationists consider that movement of people is responsible for the movement of pottery assemblages, and they think that it suffices to demonstrate that potteries have moved to demonstrate the migrations."

"[T]he rise, fall and recovery of migration models is partly embedded in paradigm shifts in archaeological theory, with all the socio-political factors of academic competition that are entailed. ... The insistent clamour of the homeless, the migrant and the refugee is rarely still and we cannot but face its consequences on an academic as well as a human level."

"There are several generations of archaeologists living in Europe whose life experiences bore the often devastating effects of invasions and migrations in two World Wars and their aftermaths. It is hard to resist the notion that these personal experiences did have an effect on the models of explanation which they proposed... I suggest... that the personal impact of migrations and invasions on archaeologists has been a factor much underestimated in past "explanation" of the changing modes of archaeological explanation. I would like to suggest that there is a yet largely untapped reservoir of information and insight about the writing of archaeological texts relating to the subjective experiences of scholars."

"“Recent discoveries and radiocarbon dates provide good evidence to consider anew the Vakhsh culture of southern Tajikistan. This “culture” is almost exclusively identified by its burials under kurgans (“classical Vakhsh culture”) except for one settlement, and by its handmade pottery. A detailed classification of the pottery coupled with the available dates or comparisons is presented here. It can now safely be dated between the second half of the 3rd millennium and the 17th century BC as shown by radiocarbon dates and is thus contemporary with the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). A few Vakhsh pots have been found in southern Bactria up to Herat and parallels can also be found in graves from Gonur Depe. It has no connection with the Andronovo culture but presents affinities with communities of the Altai-Xinjiang area.”"

"These interpretations suggest the simple equation that 'material culture = people = language‘... Processual and post-processual developments in archaeological theory have surely enabled us to abandon such crude equations and to acknowledge that the dynamics of material culture, ethnicity and language are far more complex."

"Like the teeth of the recent iguana, the crown of the tooth is accuminated; the edges are strongly serrated or dentated; the outer surface is ridged, and the inner smooth and convex; and as in that animal the secondary teeth appear to have been formed in a hollow in the base of the primary ones, which they expelled as they increased in size. From the appearance of the fangs in such fossil teeth as are in a good state of preservation, it seems probable that they adhered to the inner side of the maxillae, as in the iguana, and were not placed in separate alveoli, as in the crocodile. [...] [T]he term IGUANODON, derived from the form of the teeth, (and which I have adopted at the sugges­tion of the Rev. W. Conybeare) will not, it is presumed, be deemed objectionable."

"Iguanodon was a relative of the duckbill. It won international fame as the first dinosaur made known to science, when it was dug from road-gravel quarries in Sussex, England, in 1822. The iguanodont's adaptations were styled after the duckbill's—closely packed chopping shredding teeth (although iguanodont's weren't as complex as duckbill's)."

"He discovered the fossil bones of the prehistoric Iguanodon in the Sussex Weald"

"Iguanodon was about thirty feet (ten meters) long and weighed a few tons. It had a spike on its thumb for defense and a beak at the front of its mouth for snipping plants, and it could switch between walking on all fours and sprinting on its hind legs. Its line would eventually go on to produce the hadrosaurs, or duck-billed dinosaurs, [...]"

"You'll find their footmarks all over the Hastings sands, in Kent, and in Sussex. The South of England was alive with them when there was plenty of good lush green-stuff to keep them going. Conditions have changed, and the beasts died. Here it seems that the conditions have not changed, and the beasts have lived."

"In bas-relief he late has shown A horrible show, agreed— Megalosaurus, iguanodon, Palaeotherium Glypthaecon, A Barnum-show raree;"