Painted Grey Ware culture Quotes

“There can, therefore, be no reasonable doubt in ascribing the Ware to the later Aryans.”

“Wikipedia: Painted Grey Ware culture”

“It is clear that there is a continuation of the Harappan tradition until the onset of the PGW culture towards the end of second millennium BCE.”

“At present, the archaeological record indicates no cultural discontinuities separating PGW from the indigenous protohistoric [Harappan] culture.”

“D.D. Kosambi, an Indian communist icon to whom it is almost obligatory for government of India historians to pay homage, went to the extent of calling Painted Grey Ware ‘Puru-Kuru ceramics’.”

“The PGW is but one of many dashed hopes of Aryan invasion believers looking for a material sign of their hypothesis. None of Lal’s colleagues has discovered the long-awaited trace of an invasion.”

“Such items of material culture [as the PGW] are very rarely the private monopoly of any one ethnic, racial, let alone linguistic group, but are the products of craftsmen, working within traditions, and serving whole communities.”

“The black ceramics from Swat attributed to the Āryas, the gray ceramics, which Indian archaeologists consider as the best marker of their presence in the Indus and Ganges valleys, do not in any way recall what is found in Togolok or Gonur.”

“A further terminus ante quern can be postulated by the fact that Painted Gray Ware (PGW) sites dated to around 1000 B.C.E. were found on the bed of the river, as opposed to on its banks, indicating that the river had already become dry well before this time.”

“PGW can be regarded as one of the ceramics of the Iron Age North India which emerged, developed and declined in the socio‐cultural contexts during the late second and early first millennia BCE. However, there are many problems to be solved for better understanding the significance of PGW.”

“There is no connection between the PGW and the 'Aryans'... If PGW has an indigenous South Asian origin it cannot, therefore, represent an intrusive culture with a western origin... this conclusion . . . means that we have no archaeological culture which might represent the Aryan phenomenon.”

“The idea that the Painted Grey Ware was an Aryan pottery has caused considerable damage to the study of ancient Indian history in north India because two or three generations of students who were raised on a strong diet of this theory in the many books written for them in Hindi accepted this idea almost as an axiom.”

“To what extent has this Aryan hypothesis contributed to a better understanding of the relevant Indian archaeological data? In two cases at least. . . the Painted Grey ware and Ahar cultures this seems to have actually distracted attention from the basic task of a proper evaluation and analysis of the cultures themselves.”

“...nothing in the archeological record suggests that the Ganges plain society was radically discontinuous from its Indus predecessor. Nor is there any independent archeological evidence for a massive intrusion of foreigners from the northwest. The suggestion in parts of the recent archeological literature that such evidence does exist is quite misleading. The “Painted Grey Ware Culture” of these writers would never have been interpreted as such if they had not started out by treating the Rig Veda as a history book.”

“Two conclusions may be drawn from the archaeological data. First, there is no connection between PGW culture and that of the Aryans. Second, if the "Aryan" concept is to have any cultural meaning, then such a culture (PGW) had an indigenous South Asian origin within the protohistoric cultures of the Ganga-Yamuna region. There was no invasion from the West. The current archaeological evidence suggests that the original reconstruction indicating the occurrence of an Indo-Aryan invasion mistakenly associated linguistic change with the migration of peoples. Linguistic changes and affiliations are brought about by a complex series of cultural processes, many of which do not involve the physical movements of social groups.”