The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture, and Ethnicity, vol. 1.

• Author: Possehl, Gregory

Edited by GEORGE ERDOSY. Indian Philology and South Asian Studies, edited by Albrecht Wezler and Michael Witzel, vol. 1. Berlin: WALTER DE GRUYTER, 1995. Pp. 417 + maps, index.

This is a good book on a difficult subject. The so-called "Aryan invasion" of South Asia has developed into one of the most confused and confusing topics in the ancient world. George Erdosy and his nineteen colleagues who contributed to this well-produced, but expensive, volume have made an effort to begin to untangle the web of intellectual confusion and make it more intelligible. Rather than review each of the papers in this edited work, the focus of this review will be on some of the questions that the book, as a whole, seems to be aimed at addressing.

Human biology (race), language, and the rest of culture, including material culture, are independent historical variables. This proposition was first critically established in 1940 by Franz Boas in Race, Language and Culture. Using an abundance of examples, and ethnohistorical research, the message of Boas' book is that human biology, language, and material culture do not appear to "travel" together as linked historical variables. Rather, human biology, language, and culture tend to diverge and realign over relatively short periods of time. What this means is that hypotheses like that put forward by Sir Colin Renfrew in 1987 in his Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins has little chance of being historically viable. It also means that there is not much of a chance that the Subcontinent received, let alone was invaded by, a group of people with a narrow range of distinctive biological characteristics (Aryans), who all spoke a language that had deep historical roots with their biological ancestors and possessed a characteristic body of material culture.

If hypotheses that propose such historical linkages between human biology, language, and material culture are advanced, then they have to be supported by carefully researched, detailed historical accounts of well-documented cases where this can be shown to have taken place. Boas found possible exceptions (the Eskimo and perhaps the Polynesians), but two cases in all of human history hardly makes this the rule. Moreover, even these exceptions have qualifiers associated with them.

Another issue addressed in Erdosy's book is that the Rgveda does not portray an invasion of ancient India. The geography of the early vedic texts is centered in the...