Archaeologists From The United States

"Increasingly, however, the concept of a single homogeneous culture covering 3 million square kilometers and enduring for over a millennium has become untenable."

"Philip Kohl’s comment is pertinent here: “Archaeological cultures should not be viewed as homogeneous or growing like plants from single seeds; they are always heterogeneous and constantly in the making.”"

"In their environmental settings, subsistence economies, and material cultures, the Andronovo and the Bactrian Margiana complex could not be more different. Renfrew favors an Indo-Iranian identity for the Andronovo, and he fully realizes that there is not a shred of evidence that identifies the Andronovo with the traditional homeland of the Indo-Iranian-speakers either on the Iranian Plateau or in South Asia."

"In fact, the extensive evidence for Bactrian Margiana materials recovered from Susa, Shahdad, Yahya, Khinaman, Sibri, Nausharo, Hissar, etc., might make it the prime candidate for Indo-Iranian arrival on the Iranian Plateau."

"This heightened nationalism projects a mythical and majestic Slavic past in which the archaeology of Arkhaim plays no small part."

"(Ghirshman [1977] attempted to identify the arrival of the Indo-Aryans in the region of the Hurrians (northern Syria) by linking them with Habur Ware and black and grey wares, but this untenable argument was elegantly refuted by Kramer [1977].)"

"The identity of the Indo-Iranians remains elusive. When they are identified in the archaeological record it is by allegation rather than demonstration."

"The vast majority of the Bactrian Margiana seals contain motifs, styles, and even material that are entirely foreign to the repertoire of seals from Syro-Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Gulf, and the Indus (Baghestani 1997). They are of a thoroughly distinctive type and are to be seen as indigenous to the Central Asian Bronze Age world and not as derivative from any other region. They have been found in the Indus civilization, on the Iranian Plateau, at Susa, and in the Gulf. Amiet (1984) and Potts (1994) have documented the wide distribution of Bactrian Margiana–complex materials, and it is in this context that the specific parallels to the Syro-Anatolian region are to be appreciated. The wide scatter of a limited number of artifacts does not privilege any area as a homeland for the complex. The very limited number of parallels between the Bactrian Margiana complex and Syro-Anatolia signifies the unsurprising fact that, at the end of the 3d and the beginning of the 2d millennium, interregional contacts in the Near East brought people from the Indus to Mesopotamia and from Egypt to the Aegean into contact."

"Unfortunately, there is scant evidence to support the notion of an extensive migration from Syro-Anatolia to Bactria and Margiana in the archaeological record."

"Arkhaim has become a center for followers of the occult and Russian supernationalists, a theater of, and for, the absurd and dangerous. It is argued that it was constructed to reproduce a model of the universe; that it was built by King Yima, as described in the Avesta, the sacred book of the Zoroastrians (Medvedev 1999); that it was a temple observatory; that it was the birthplace of Zoroaster, who is buried at Sintashta; that it is the homeland of the ancient Aryans; and that it is the earliest Slavic state. The swastika, which appears on pottery from Arkhaim, is proclaimed a symbol of Aryanism. Visitors come to pray, tap energy from outer space, worship fire, be cured, dance, meditate, and sing."

"The ethnic and linguistic identity of the Andronovo culture nevertheless remains elusive."

"Sarianidi (1998b) now accepts, albeit with misgivings, the higher chronology for the Bactrian Margiana complex advanced in the mid-1980s by a number of scholars. A series of radiocarbon dates collected by Fredrik Hiebert (1994) at Gonur offers unequivocal evidence for the dating of the complex to the last century of the 3d millennium and the first quarter of the 2d millennium."

"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."

"Russian scholars working in the Eurasiatic steppes are nearly unanimous in their belief that the Andronovo culture and its variant expressions are Indo-Iranian. Similarly, Russian and Central Asian scholars working on the Bactrian Margiana complex share the conviction that it is Indo-Iranian. The two cultures are contemporary but very different. Passages from the Avesta and the Rigveda are quoted by various researchers to support the Indo-Iranian identity of both, but these passages are sufficiently general as to permit the Plains Indians an Indo-Iranian identity. Ethnicity is permeable and multi-dimensional, and the “ethnic indicators” employed by Kuzmina can be used to identify the Arab, the Turk, and the Iranian, three completely distinctive ethnic and linguistic groups. Ethnicity and language are not so easily linked with an archaeological signature."

"Central Asia has either too many languages and too few archaeological cultures or too few languages and too many archaeological cultures to permit an easy fit between archaeology and language."

"Although ceramics from the Andronovo cultures of the steppe have been found at Togolok 1 and 21, Kelleli, Taip, Gonur, and Takhirbai, Sarianidi (1998b:42; 1990:63) is adamant in opposing any significant Andronovo influence on the Bactrian Margiana complex: “Pottery of the Andronovo type does not exceed 100 fragments in all of southern Turkmenistan.” As rigorous approaches to data retrieval were not practiced, this figure must be merely impressionistic."

"Russian and Central Asian scholars working on the contemporary but very different Andronovo and Bactrian Margiana archaeological complexes of the 2d millennium b.c. have identified both as Indo-Iranian, and particular sites so identified are being used for nationalist purposes. There is, however, no compelling archaeological evidence that they had a common ancestor or that either is Indo-Iranian. Ethnicity and language are not easily linked with an archaeological signature, and the identity of the Indo-Iranians remains elusive."

"The idea of a distant homeland and an expansive migration to Central Asia is difficult if not impossible to maintain, but the origin of the Bactrian Margiana complex remains a fundamental issue. Although some scholars advance the notion that it has indigenous roots, the fact remains that its material culture is not easily derived from the preceding Namazga IV culture. Its wide distribution, from southeastern Iran to Baluchistan and Afghanistan, suggests that its beginnings might lie in this direction—an area of enormous size and an archaeological terra nullius. In fact, the Bactrian Margiana complex of Central Asia may turn out to be its northernmost extension, while its heartland may lie in the vast areas of unexplored Baluchistan and Afghanistan."

"Sarianidi (1990) advocates a late-2d-millennium chronology for the Bactrian Margiana complex, describes it as the result of a migration from southeastern Iran, and identifies it as Indo-Iranian,.. There is absolutely no doubt, as is amply documented by Pierre Amiet (1984), of the existence of Bactrian Margiana material remains at Susa, Shahdad, and Tepe Yahya, but there is every reason to doubt that these parallels indicate that the complex originated in southeastern Iran. The limited materials of this complex are intrusive in each of the sites on the Iranian Plateau as they are in sites of the Arabian peninsula (Potts 1994)."

"Fifty years ago in , while walking along the road I passed an open field and noticed to my astonishment hundreds of flashing in perfect unison. I watched this curious sight for some time and the synchronism of the flashing was unbroken. Many times after I have watched these luminous insects, hoping to see a repetition of this phenomenon, but the flashes in every instance were intermittent. Since that time I have read about these insects in various books without meeting any allusion to this peculiar behavior. At last I have found a confirmation of my early observations. In of December 9, page 414, is the report of an interesting paper read before the by entitled “ Luminous Insects ” in which reference is made to the remarkable synchronism of the flashes in certain European species of fireflies. ..."

"Soon after his first arrival in Japan, Morse became interested in everything bearing on the ancient culture of the people. This was shown in the epoch making discovery and excavation of the . Implements and pottery were found there. In 1878 he wrote that he was starting a collection of pottery. ... In 1890 this great collection was deposited with the Boston Art Museum and two years later the Museum bought it, Morse being made Keeper of Japanese Pottery and holding the office for the rest of his life."

"In the gardens of the better classes summer-houses and shelters of rustic appearance and diminutive proportions are often seen. Rustic arbors are also to be seen in the larger gardens. . High fences, either of board or , or solid walls of mud or tile with stone foundations, surround the house or enclose it from the street. Low rustic fences border the gardens in the suburbs. Gateways of various styles, some of imposing design, form the entrances; as a general thing they are either rustic and light, or formal and massive."

"On the approach of winter, s bury themselves in the ground, and those that have shells retire within the shell as far as possible, and close the aperture of the shell with a film of the mucus which the body secretes so abundantly. In this condition they remain dormant until revived by the warm weather of spring. If the pupil will collect a number of snails in the early spring, and keep them confined in a box, with earth, damp leaves, or bits of rotten wood or bark, the snails in the course of a few weeks will lay a number of little eggs. These eggs will be white and round, about the size of a pin’s-head. By careful tending, that is, by keeping the leaves slightly moist, the eggs will hatch out tiny snails, and these will attain half their mature size the first season."

"Whatever value these records may possess lies in the fact that when they were made, Japan had within a few years emerged from a peculiar state of civilization which had endured for centuries. Even at that time, however (1877), changes had taken place, such as the modern training of its armies; a widespread system of public schools; government departments of war, treasury, agriculture, telegraph, post, statistics, and other bureaus of modern administration, — all these instrumentalities making a slight impress on the larger cities such as Tokyo and , sufficiently marked, however, to cause one to envy those who only a few years before had seen the people when all the wore the two swords, when every man wore the and . The country towns and villages were little, if at all, affected by these foreign introductions, and the greater part of my memoranda and sketches were made in the country."

"One of the reasons why the Catholic Church attains greater success than the Protestants in China is that its missionaries are men, its preachers are men, the dresses in Chinese garb, he lives among them and becomes one of them ; he is careful not to interfere with their superstitions only so far as these interfere with his own, and is especially careful not to inveigh against the . His , , and picturesque ritual does not widely differ from the Buddhist."

"...[h]uman actors, and not reified systems, are the agents of culture change. Human actors devise complex strategies to solve their problems and meet their goals, and these strategies are neither random nor shaped solely by differential survival either at the population level as ecosystem would have, or at the level of the individual as more recent evolutionary cultural theorist claim. This is not to say that humans always “get it right” or that their actions do not have unforeseen consequences. It is simply to argue that human goals are relevant to cultural outcome."

"I am to archaeologists what the is to tourists. They keep coming to see if the old lady is still around. And working."

"We owe our knowledge of pre-Greek art in Crete in large measure to the excavations of . The six volumes of Evans' publication of The Palace of Minos at Knossos, which appeared between 1921 and 1936, aroused a storm of enthusiasm for this marvelous civilization until then unknown. Cretan art is not only fundamentally different from but aesthetically superior to Egyptian and Oriental art. was from the beginning a close observer of this newly-discovered civilization and an important contributor to the vast literature which sprang up as a consequence of the many problems surrounding . I remember his guided tours for Fellows of the , whose director he became. They introduced us to this new civilization in the same clear and competent manner that I now find in his last book, written when he was 88 years old. … It is the best first introduction to Cretan art I know."

"The history of the cult of in Rome has been well investigated and is well known ... In 204 B.C. a meteorite was brought from in to Rome. It came on a ship named Salvia up the Tiber. When the ship got stuck in the shallow waters, , an aristocratic maiden, freed it and drew it upstream with her belt. This miracle is reported by Ovid (Fasti, 4, 291-348) in the time of Augustus. It is still represented on an altar in the Capitoline Museum dedicated by Claudia Syntyche, probably in the Antonine period ... The same event is represented on a medallion for , that is after death and deification in 141 A.D. by her husband the emperor ... The statue, or rather the sacred stone, representing Cybele was then brought up to the , where under lively participation by the aristocracy was dedicated to the and a temple was erected and dedicated in 191 B.C. Augustus restored this temple as he did many other temples in Rome."

"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 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."

"Afghanistan never did have any monuments on the world heritage list. As far as I know, nine different monuments have been nominated over time for inclusion on the world heritage list. The world heritage committee just opened their meeting for this year, and there is one Afghan monument, the minaret at Jam, being considered this time. Because of the sympathy and the general feeling about Afghanistan these days, people seem to think it has a good chance of being put on the list. But the reason the nine others never got on the list was because the government of Afghanistan could not fulfill the requirements for their protection."

"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."

"At the end of the third millennium the strong flow from the Sarasvatī dried up... This [the drying up of the Sarasvatī towards the end of the third millennium] carries with it an interesting chronological implication: the composers of the Rgveda were in the Sarasvatī region prior to the drying up of the river and this would be closer to 2000 BC than it is to 1000 BC, somewhat earlier than most of the conventional chronologies for the presence of the Vedic Aryans in the Punjab."

"Of relevance here is Possehl's observation (1977) of the "extraordinary 'empty spaces' between the Harappan settlement clusters," as well as "the isolated context for a number of individual sites" (546). He proposes that "pastoral nomads, or other highly mobile (itinerant) occupational specialists filled in the interstices," since such spaces are un- likely to have been unoccupied. He goes so far as to suggest that "pastoralists formed the bulk of the population during Harappan times since there do not seem to be any settled village farming communities there" (547). Pastoralists and farmers coexisted "not . . . as isolated from one another, but as complementary subsystems: two aspects of an integrated whole. One relied on the intensive exploitation of plants and arable land, the other on the extensive exploitation of animals and pastures" (547). Moreover, "the presence of pastoralists makes very good sense if we see them as the mobile population which bridged the gap between settlements as the carriers of information, as the transporters of goods, as the population through which the Harappan Civilization achieved its remark- able degree of integration" (548)."

"The term 'Early Harappan' as opposed to 'Pre-Harappan' has gained acceptance for a number of reasons. The principal reason is the evidence for cultural and historical continuity between the Early and Mature Harappan as well as the premise that the process of change was primarily autochthonous. It involved the peoples of the Greater Indus Valley itself, without significant or out-of-the-ordinary, external influence . . ."

"Race as it was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been totally discredited os a useful concept in human biology…. There is no reason to believe today that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke Indo-European languages and was possessed with a coherent and well-defined set of Aryan or Indo-European cultural features."

"It seems that during the Indus Age the Sarasvati was a large river and that water that now flows in the Yamuna and/or Sutlej Rivers made it so. Over time these waters were withdrawn and the Sarasvati became smaller, eventually dry. The agency for these changes was the tectonic reshaping of the doab [interfluve] separating the Yamuna from the rivers of the Punjab."

"Over the course of the third and second millennia, the Sarasvati dried up."

"“… in the end that [Bökönyi’s identification of horse remains at Surkotada] may be a matter of emphasis and opinion.”"

"This picture represents one man’s view of the past informed by 23 years of archaeological and ethnographic research in Pakistan and India and by 18 years of growing up in India. But the paints, often applied with a broad brush necessarily in an impressionist manner, are tempered by Western academic skepticism. Thus we do not see those wild flights of fancy or long leaps of faith that characterize some literature of the region. What flights and leaps are there do not require a suspension of disbelief to entertain."

"The destruction of the Indus cities by invading tribes of Aryans... has long since been discounted by serious scholars."

"Referring to a discussion that Meadow and Patel had with Bökönyi before the latter’s death, they write (1997: 308): “We went through each point that we had raised and in some cases agreed to disagree. He (i.e. Bökönyi) remained firmly convinced that there are the bones of true horse (Equus Caballus) in the Surkotada collection, and we remain skeptical.”"

"No one has any exact knowledge of the date when the Aryans first entered the Indus Valley area; they have not yet been identified archaeologically."

"…we cannot even establish a definite correlation between the end of the Indus civilization and the Aryan invasion. But even if we could, what is the material evidence to substantiate the supposed invasion and massacre? Where are the burned fortresses, the arrowheads, weapons, pieces of armor, the smashed chariots and bodies of the invaders and defenders? Despite extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of Aryan invasion. It is interesting that Sir John Marshall himself, the Director of the Mohenjo-daro excavations that first revealed the "massacre" remains separated the end of the Indus civilization from the time of the Aryan invasion by two centuries. He attributed the slayings to bandits from the hills of west of the Indus, who carried out sporadic raids on an already tired, decaying, and defenseless civilization. The contemporaneity of the skeletal remains is anything but certain. Whereas a couple of them definitely seem to represent a slaughter, in situ, the bulk of the bones were found in contexts suggesting burials of sloppiest and most irreverent nature. There is no destruction level covering the latest period of the city, no sign of extensive burning, no bodies of warriors clad in armor and surrounded by weapons of war. The citadel, the only fortified part of the city, yielded no evidence of a final defence. …..Indra and the barbarian hordes are exonerated."

"In an article of 1966, "The Decline of the Harappans", G. R. Dales, director of archeological fieldwork in South Asia, particularly in West Pakistan, for a good number of years, wrote in connection with the topic of an Aryan invasion of India: "The Aryans ... have not yet been identified archaologically.""

"“Indra and the barbarian hordes are exonerated” (Dales 1964: 43)"

"There is no destruction level covering the latest period of the city, no sign of extensive burning, no bodies of warriors clad in armor and surrounded by the weapons of war … Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan invasion. (Dales, 1964: 43, 38)"

"Where are the burned fortresses, the arrow heads, weapons, pieces of armour, the smashed chariots and bodies of the invaders and defenders?... Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan invasion."

"There are, as yet, no convincing reports of horse remains from archaeological sites in South Asia before the end of the second millennium BC. Many claims have been made but few have been documented with sufficient measurements, drawings, and photographs to permit other analysts to judge for themselves."