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Dear List,
Over the weekend I worked through the articles in this week's Science magazine on Indus archaeology. They include one major article and a half dozen sidebar stories. All the stories are credited to Andrew Lawler, a reporter who writes often in Science on archaeology (see point #10 below). You can get the articles from this link: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/320/5881/1276 A number of people have asked for my reactions to the articles. I've given ten numbered points below. The post is long, for which I apologize, since I've tried to back my criticisms with verifiable evidence. I've also included links to further evidence. 1. The most useful part of the articles in my opinion is found in the concluding sidebar stories, which cover some of the political issues that affect Indus archaeology. These include the negative impact that Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) has long had on the field; problems raised by the India/Pakistan conflict; and topics involving looting and destructions of Indus sites. I was happy to see Lawler discuss the Hindutva problem, which I first alerted him to in 2004, when he was writing a long article on the work by me, Sproat, and Witzel on the Indus symbols. 2. Lawler doesn't take up the Indus inscription issue again in these articles, but limits himself to pointing out that the Indus Valley has yielded no texts and that the "script" was used "chiefly on small seals, and some scholars believe it was not a script at all (Science, 17 December 2004, p. 2026)" -- an allusion to "Collapse of the Indus Script Thesis" <http://www.safarmer.com/fsw2.pdf>. An update would have been useful, since support for our model has grown steadily among linguists and Indus archaelogists (also Iranian archaeologists, including Daniel Potts) over the last four years. Moreover, our thesis has since expanded: we now think we can show that a massive "No Script Zone" existed from the 3rd millennium BCE down to the start of the 1st millennium at a minimum from Central Asia to the Indus Valley to the Gulf region and (pace Yousef Madjidzadeh, on whom below) the Iranian plateau. All these are regions that according to Lawler's article were in trade contact with the Indus and the literate cultures of the Near East. Michael [Witzel] and I have committed to writing a paper on the "No Script Zone" idea sometime in the next few months. We hope to consult with Potts too, who has kindly offered to help "on the Iranian side" of things in respect to our work. For now on this issue, and on our views of the uses of of Indus inscriptions, which transcend the "script" issue, see this abstract of a paper given in Japan a few years ago (Farmer, Weber, Barela, and Witzel 2005): http://www.safarmer.com/indus/Kyoto.pdf 3. While the political coverage in Lawler's new articles is useful, on archaeological issues the results are mixed. Lawler relies heavily on a number of myths that have been used to hype Indus civilization for decades, and sometimes takes them one step further. Despite his criticisms of Hindu nationalists, ironically many of the myths about the civilization that he passes on (I assume unwittingly) are favorites in the nationalist camps. The sensationalism of the article starts with the title and opening lines: > BORING NO MORE, A TRADE-SAVY INDUS EMERGES
Nothing in the archaeological record comes close to justifying these claims. Are we really supposed to believe that the sophistication of Indus commerce and technology surpassed that of the Mesopotamians and Egyptians? Here I'll focus just on the technology claim. My comments on Lawler's representations of Indus trade are found in point #8 below. What evidence can be cited to support the claim that Indus civilization was "the powerhouse" of 3rd millennium BCE technology? To back this claim Lawler relies on a familiar argument that has long been a favorite of Hindutva apologists -- that the Indus were supposedly masters of technological standardization. As Lawler puts it in one of many similar passages: > the Indus penchant for precise standardization -- from
tiny weights
Claims like this have been examined often on the List in the past and have been shown to be spurious. The following three points deal witheasily debunked claims concerning standardized Indus weights, bricks, and cities. 4. On the myth of standardized weights: this was discussed in a long thread [on this listserv] back in 2006. The urban myth that Indus weights were standardized and perfectly proportioned derives from gross distortions of data on Indus weights gathered by A.S. Hemmy in the 1920s from Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. You can look at Hemmy's original data in this scan of his original results, which were published in 1938. I've added some explanatory comments in the margins: http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/weightchart.jpg During our 2006 discussions I took Hemmy's data and put them in two graphs, looking specifically at weights ranging from 13-15 grams and 26-29 grams. (I picked these as examples since one part of the myth is that weights in this upper range should be exactly twice the weight of those in the lower one.) The evidence demonstrates that the distribution of weights in these samples was anything BUTstandardized. Indeed, the values were almost random. Here are the results, which include all published data: http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.13-15.gms.jpg
As soon as I posted those data, Richard Meadow, Co-Director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project (HARP), sent me unpublished data on all weights excavated from 1986-2001 from Harappa. These new data were discussed in messages to the List posted on 26-27 December 2006. The data Richard had collected from Harappan weights again indicated that the old story of standardized weights from the Indus Valley is an urban myth. Both Richard Meadow and Mark Kenoyer (who has in fact given at least one talk on the Harappa data) were interviewed by Lawler for the articles published on Friday. The old myths about the "standardization" of weights in Lawler's article would have been caught by either of them if they or anyone else knowledgeable had been allowed to fact-check the articles. But as several of us know from experience, Lawler doesn't allow his sources to fact check his articles, and they are typically laced with inaccuracies. 5. The "standardized brick" claim is just as spurious. Claims that Indus bricks were standardized has again long been a staple of Hindu nationalist mythology. The most usual claim (there are several variants) is that Indus bricks were standardized in neat and mathematical 1 x 2 x 4 proportions. Again, the story has been repeated for decades, but it is easy to demonstrate that it is empirically false. Here, for example, is a scan of four key pagesfrom Marshall 1931, the locus classicus of early discussions of this issue. Marshall in fact distinguished 15 (!) different sized bricks in Mohenjo-daro. Not ONE of those 15 types have 1 x 2 x 4 proportions or anything close. See Marshall's measurements in the charts in the following pages: http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/bricks.pdf Ironically, given the supposed mathematical acuity of the Indus wisemen, you don't even find even-sized bricks in the so-called "Great Bath" at Mohenjo-daro. This is particularly damaging evidence since according at least to popular opinion (again unevidenced and totally speculative) the "Great Bath" was supposedly a religious facility. Marshall measured the bricks in the "Great Bath" in the 1920s, and eventually wrote elsewhere in the excavation report (1931, vol. 1, p. 131): > [The Great Bath] is constructed of specially cut bricks
of varying
If you move on from excavation reports from Mohenjo-daro and look at those from Harappa (e.g., in Vats 1940: Vol. 1, page 12, footnote 1) you will find that the bricks measured in early Indus excavations were different from those found at Mohenjo-daro. You'll also find that NONE of them measured by Vats had 1 x 2 x 4 proportions. You can even falsify the "standardized" brick claim by looking at the picture in Lawler's article on p. 1279. Magnify the picture of the brick wall you find there and you'll see that it is composed of a wide assortment of bricks of many different sizes. 6. What about those standardized "houses" and "whole cities"
that Lawler
claims as being "unique in the early historic period"? The same story.
The claim of standardization here is even contradicted in Lawler's own
article, in which at one point (momentarily forgetting the
standardization
claim) he quotes one archaeologist who emotes over the "tremendous
amount
of variety" found in Indus society. In any event, despite being endless
repeated, the story of standardization
7. Lawler's article also gives us a familiar dose of Indus myths that suggest possible long-range continuities between Indus and far later "Hindu" deities or Indian religious practices. At one point he evokes the long-ago debunked story raised by Marshall in the 1920s concerning "proto-Siva" figures shown on a number of seals and tablets. These figures show a divine being of some sort, often with horns and plants on its head, sitting in what Marshall (and now Lawler) represents as a "yogic" position -- thousands of years before we have any evidence of yogic postures. (Early yogic texts from 2,000 years or so after the fall of Indus civilization in fact contained no discussion of postures at all.) In the last few years this myth too has been thoroughly debunked on the List in discussions that have included extensive visual evidence. The discussion culminated one year ago when in a summary post Michael Witzel posted a new example of this figure on a broken tablet recently found in Ganweriwala. Most importantly on the "yogic" part of this argument, it is important to note that close examination of photos of all known instances of these figures show that NONE of the hands in the figures even come close to resting on the knees. (You can even see this in the photo that Lawler includes in his article, if you use a magnifying glass.) Their arms, which are heavily bangled, instead hang out a bit like branches, which makes perfect sense when you consider the trees or branches often found on their heads, which are common signs of gods (apparently agricultural) in the Indus Valley. Rather than summarize all this again on the List, here is Michael's message showing the newly discovered Ganweriwala tablet along with links to other related images I had posted earlier: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasianresearch/message/7063 Marshall's claims concerning "proto-Siva" figures have been debunked many times before. But despite this, those claims remain important to Hindu nationalists because of the supposed continuities that those figures (supposedly) suggest between Indus and later "Hindu" deities. This allows them to pretend that India has been "Hindu" since the earliest times. Why didn't anyone whom Lawler interviewed inform him of this problem? Was the sensationalism in this old claim just too much to resist? 8. Let me turn now to Lawler's central claim -- that the Indus was some sort of global trading "powerhouse." This too is a favorite argument of Hindu nationalists and a few Western archaeologists. Lawler goes even further than most of them in his hyperbole, apparently again to add excitement to the story. He even trots out Thomas- Friedman style "the earth is flat" corporate rhetoric, telling us a bit embarrassingly on the first page that the Indus civilization > was an aggressive player during humanity's first
flirtation with
The evidence for the Indus as a major trading power is tenuous at best. Despite its sex appeal, claims like this have the unfortunate result of pushing to the background a thesis that can be supported (unlike this one) by massive evidence: that most of the economy of Indus cities was local and agricultural (See here the tremendous work on Indus agriculture and related topics by Steve Weber, William Belcher, Richard Meadow, Dorian Fuller, and others in studies like those in Weber and Belcher's Indus Ethnobiology (2003). You can even use studies of Indus symbols -- which are replete with agricultural images, but not images of trade -- to back this thesis. A talk that Steve Weber, Dorian Fuller, and I gave last year at UC Berkeley discussed the evidence on this issue, which is also discussed a bit in "Collapse". Here is an abstract of Weber, Fuller, and Farmer 2007: http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/indus.ethnobiology.pdf I am NOT suggesting here that Indus traders didn't exist. But the evidence suggests that the scale of Indus trade has been hyped to death by Hindu nationalists and the handful of researchers Lawler depended upon to build his "globalization" argument. As evidence of long-distance trade, we have, for example, a handful of cuneiform tablets that speak of trade with "Meluhha", which may or may not refer to one part or another of the Indus civilization -- we really don't know for sure. We have sparse suggestions of the origins in the Indus Valley of some goods that apparently made it to Mesopotamia, especially semi-precious stones. But we have no data at all on how those goods got there. Did they come through direct trade with the Indus? Did they come through indirect trade through Gulf intermediaries? We don't know. On this question, out of thousands of known Indus seals, we have a grand total of what now may be close to 50 seals that found their way out of Indus territories (most of these were already known by the 1930s). some of these seals are cultural hybrids, having round forms (typical of Gulf and not Indus stamp seal types) and often display odd variants of Indus symbols. This evidence doesn't strongly suggest that they were owned by Indus traders. You can count on one hand the number of Indus-type seals that are claimed to have come from Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, a point which -- not noted by Lawler -- certainly doesn't suggest any wide trade contacts in that direction. Most are found instead in the Gulf and in Mesopotamia, indicating as one would expect that whatever contact existed between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley took place via sea routes. But none of this gives us any information on how those contacts were made. Despite this ambivalent evidence, Lawler cites one confident source, Nilofer Shaikh, of Latif University in Pakistan, who claims on the basis of unknown evidence that > "the Indus people were controlling the trade. They
controlled the
How can we possibly know given the paucity of evidence who "controlled" the trade routes? Moreover, even the claim that "only a small number of Mesopotamian artifacts have been found at Indus sites" may be an exaggeration. I may possibly have overlooked some recent find, but so far as I know no one has ever turned up unambiguous evidence of even *one* Mesopotamian artifact in Indus territories. We don't find one cuneiform text, one seal, one seal impression -- nothing. Artifacts even of Central Asian origins are extremely scarce in Indus territories until close to the time when the civilization fell. This problem has long been known and presents an obvious challenge to sensationalist claims about an imaginary "flirtation with globalization 5000 years ago" in the Indus Valley. As we noted in "Collapse," there is much evidence to suggest that the Indus Valley was in fact a remarkably closed society, at least judging by the artifactual evidence. One reason why this may be so that fits in with our model is suggested on p. 44 of that study <http://www.safarmer.com/fsw2.pdf>, where we briefly discuss the trade issue. Finally it should be mentioned that Lawler's article repackages a lot of old evidence as being novel to breath life into his globalization argument. For example, he writes at one point about a well-known cylinder inscription (of unknown provenance) from someplace in Mesopotamia: > An inscription from the late 3rd millennium B.C.E. refers
to one
Besides the fact that we don't know what the historical significance of the seal is, it is important to note that it was discovered in the 19th century, was discussed among other places by Leo Oppenheimer in 1964 in Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, and has been mulled over endlessly by Indus researchers ever since. To make it sound like a new discovery may add a little excitement to Lawler's article, but it is very old news, and reference to an interpreter of an unknown language is hardly a potent argument for ancient "globalization." 9. There are many other sensationalist but dubious or unverifiable assertions in Lawler's article that I can't cover. These include [1] claims by B.S. Bisht (an archaeologist and Hindu nationalist who excavated Dholavira, but has published little formally on the site) about a gigantic "stadium ground stretching nearly the length of three football fields and including terraces to seat thousands of people"; I've never met a serious researcher who has believed Bisht's claim, but Lawler doesn't mention any skeptics; [2] really odd claims that what since the 1920s has been assumed to be a Buddhist stupa from a far later era found at Mohenjo-daro dates in fact to the Indus era; one of the two named backers of this idea is the German archaeologist Michael Jansen, who has long been one of the most fervent supporters of the "standardization" idea, despite all the evidence to the contrary; [3] unverifiable claims, welcome to Hindu nationalists who long for evidence of continuity between Indus and Vedic traditions, that Indus cities may have lingered for hundreds of years longer than previous claimed; these claims are nearly impossible to test, since the upper layers of Indus sites are typically heavily disturbed, making estimations of the scale of any late habitations impossible to estimate: what does "linger on" mean? That there was a giant population? A few stragglers? [4] Equally unverifiable claims that Indus urban populations "dwarfed" those of the Middle East, which I doubt that anyone seriously believes; claims about the "1000-plus known Indus sites" mentioned by Lawler may appear to provide intuitive support to this idea, until we realize that most of these sites are vanishingly small -- a fine point that Lawler doesn't mention. In any event, the claim that the population of Indus cities "dwarfed" those in the Middle East, which Lawler makes on his first page, is totally off-thee-wall. 10. Finally, a bit on Lawler, whose reliability as a reporter has often been been called into question. Lawler was one of the chief original promoters of Yousef Madjidzadeh's huge publicity campaign over the excavations at Jiroft in Southeast Iran. The problem of sorting out the hyperbole from fact in respect from Jiroft will continue for years. Lawler's part in the Jiroft hype is suggested in a scathing article written in 2005 on Jiroft by Oscar Muscarella, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We have discussed this article often on the List; you can find the full article here: http://www.bulletinasiainstitute.org/Muscarella.BAI15.pdf Muscarella's deconstruction of the Jiroft hype came *before* Madjidzadeh's most outrageous claims began -- that he had turned up inscriptions at Jiroft with "writing" on it. As soon as Madjidzadeh made those claims, Lawler picked them up and reported them in further sensationalist articles in Science. After nearly two years of skeptical discussion on the List concerning these inscriptions -- whether or not there was writing in a large civilization relatively close to the Indus was of obvious importance to many of us -- last year we finally got our hands on high-resolution photos of the claimed "inscriptions." They included the following ludicrous example, whose many linguistic absurdities were analyzed on the List by me, Jacob Dahl, and others: http://www.safarmer.com/Jiroft/Jiroft02.jpg Not long after we posted these, Madjidzadeh for the first time showed them publicly, in Ravenna, where they were widely ridiculed last summer. At the time, Lawler began to prudently tiptoe back, which ended in an article in early August 2007 that mentioned archaeologists at Ravenna whispering: "Everyone is convinced they are fakes, but no one dares say it." (Actually, a lot of us on the List had been saying it for some time.) Lawler also cited Jacob Dahl, who had earlier implied the same on the List, as saying in Ravenna that "no specialist in the world would consider these to be anything but absolute fakes." One week after the Ravenna conference, in July 2007, at a conference we held at Stanford on "pseudo-decipherments" and similar topics, attended by Jacob as well as me, Sproat, and Witzel, we got our chance to say so again. But little skepticism was expressed in Lawler's articles before we pushed the issue, and getting people to publicly say the pieces were fakes took a long time. Finally, many of us got a taste of Lawler's methods in December 2004 in his article on the Indus-symbol issue. To make the story more spectacular, I was turned into a "street kid from Chicago"; the archaeologist Greg Possehl was referred to as a linguist; and the always cautious Richard Meadow was impossibly quoted as saying that old Indus seals were thrown away "like expired credit cards." All this would have been prevented if Lawler had stuck to his repeated promises to allow fact checking of his story, which he researched for months. Eventually, Science was forced to print retractions of a few of his errors, but who even sees such retractions? When I questioned him about all the unnecessary factual errors in his story, his only comment was "It could have been worse." ************ The public deserves better than what it is getting on the Indus story. The next popular magazine that deals with the issue will hopefully begin by discussing the long list of Indus Valley fantasies that reach back to at least 1882 -- when the first Indus forgery appeared <http://www.safarmer.com/firstforgery.pdf>. Those fantasies have served the needs of sensationalizing researchers, political mythologists, and parts of the popular press, but they certainly have not served the interests of science or the public. My apologies again for the inordinately long post! Steve Farmer |