Jim G. Shaffer

Jim G. Shaffer (born 1944) is an American archaeologist and professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University.

Quotes

• The Indo-Aryan invasion(s) as an academic concept in 18th- and 19th-century Europe reflected the cultural milieu of that period. Linguistic data were used to validate the concept that in turn was used to interpret archaeological and anthropological data.What was theory became unquestioned fact that was used to interpret and organise subsequent data. It is time to end the "linguistic tyranny" that has prescribed interpretative frameworks of pre- and proto-historic cultural development in South Asia.
  • Jim Shaffer, 1984, ‘The Indo-Aryan Invasions: Cultural Myth and Archaeological Reality’ in Lukacs JR (ed) The People of South Asia: the Biological Anthropology of India, Pakistan and Nepal, Phenum, NY. p.88.

• ‘A diffusion or migration of a culturally complex ‘Indo-Aryan‘ people into South Asia is not described by the archaeological record.‘
  • Shaffer (1999:245), quoted in The Languages of Harappa. Witzel, Michael. Feb. 17, 2000.

• [the demographic eastward shift of the Harappan population during the decline of their cities, i.e. an intra-Indian movement from Indus to Ganga,] “is the only archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of human populations in South Asia before the first half of the first millennium BC”, while the archaeological record shows “no significant discontinuities” for the period when the Aryan invasion should have made its mark.
  • Jim G. Shaffer and Diane A. Lichtenstein: “The concepts of ‘cultural tradition’ and ‘palaeoethnicity’ in South-Asian archaeology”, in G. Erdosy, ed.: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p. 139-140., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• “No material culture is found to move from west to east across the Indus”. [in the relevant time period]
  • Jim Shaffer. Personal communication (to K. Elst) during the 1996 Indus-Saraswati conference in Atlanta GA., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• But even this tempered view is no longer acceptable to the "new school," whose foundation can be said to have been laid in 1984 by Jim Shaffer. He wrote : Current archaeological data do not support the existence of an Indo-Aryan or European invasion into South Asia any time in the pre- or protohistoric periods. Instead, it is possible to document archaeologically a series of cultural changes reflecting indigenous cultural developments from prehistoric to historic periods.
  • Attributed, at [1]

• That the archaeological record and ancient oral and literate traditions of South Asia (ie. the Vedic tradition) are now converging has significant implications for regional cultural history. A few scholars have proposed that there is nothing in the 'literature' firmly placing the Indo-Aryans, the generally perceived founders of the modern South Asian cultural tradition(s), outside of South Asia, and now the archaeological record is confirming this. Within the context of cultural continuity described here, an archaeologically significant indigenous discontinuity occurs due to ecological factors (ie. the drying up of the Sarasvati river). This cultural discontinuity was a regional population shift from the Indus Valley, in the west, to locations east and southeast, a phenomenon also recorded in ancient oral (ie. Vedic) traditions. As data accumulates to support cultural continuity in South Asian prehistoric and historic periods, a considerable restructuring of existing interpretive paradigms must take place. We reject most strongly the simplistic historical interpretations, which date back to the eighteenth century, that continue to be imposed on South Asian culture history. These still prevailing interpretations are significantly diminished by European ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism, and antisemitism. Surely, as South Asian studies approaches the twenty-first century, it is time to describe emerging data objectively rather than perpetuate interpretations without regard to the data archaeologists have worked so hard to reveal.
  • Shaffer, Jim G. and Diane Lichtenstein, 1999. “Migration, Philology and South Asian Archaeology.” In Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and Ideology, edited by J. Bronkhorst and M. Deshpande. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. quoted also in Bryant, E. F., & Patton, L. L. (2005). The Indo-Aryan controversy : evidence and inference in Indian history. Routledge
  • James Schaffer of Case Western University, Migration,Philology and South Asian Archaeology in Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation andHistory, edited by J. Bronkhorst and M. Deshpande, University of Michigan Press 1998. attributed at [2] [3]

• The South Asian archaeological record ..does not support.. any version of the migration/invasion hypothesis. Rather, the physical distribution of sites and artifacts, stratigraphic data, radiometric dates, and geological data can account for the Vedic oral tradition describing an internal cultural discontinuity of indigenous population movement.
  • 1998. “Migration, philology and South Asian archaeology.” In Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and Ideology, J. Bronkhorst and M. Deshpande (eds.). In press, Ann Arbor.

• The shift by Harappan groups, and perhaps, other Indus Valley cultural mosaic groups, is the only archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of human populations in South Asia before the first half of the first millennium BC.
  • (*6)6. Jim G. Schaffer and Diane A. Lichtenstein, The Cultural Tradition and Paleoethnicity in South Asian Archeology, To appear in LANGUAGE, MATERIAL CULTURE AND ETHNICITY: THE INDO-ARYANS IN ANCIENT SOUTH ASIA (Berlin, Mouton, DeGruyter).

• According to Shaffer (1984b): Current archaeological data do not support the existence of an Indo-Aryan or European invasion into South Asia at any time in the pre- or protohistoric periods. Instead, it is possible to document archaeologically a series of cultural changes reflecting indigenous cultural development from prehistoric to historic periods. . . . The Indo-Aryan invasion(s) as an academic concept in 18th- and 19th-century Europe reflected the cultural milieu of that period. Linguistic data were used to validate the concept that in turn was used to interpret archaeological and anthropological data. What was theory became unquestioned fact that was used to interpret and organize all subsequent data. It is time to end the "linguistic tyranny" that has prescribed interpretative frameworks of pre- and proto-historic cultural development in South Asia. (88)
  • Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.

• Shaffer (1993) refers to one set of data that undermines this simplistic portrayal of an apparent devolution and re-evolution of urbanization, which "has nearly become a South Asian archaeological axiom" (55). Although there appears to have been a definite shift in settlements from the Indus Valley proper in late and Post-Harappan periods, there is a significant increase in the number of sites in Gujarat, and an "explosion" (300 percent increase) of new settlements in East Punjab to accommodate the transferal of the population. Shaffer (1995) is insistent that "this shift by Harappan and, perhaps, other Indus Valley cultural mosaic groups is the only archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of human populations in South Asia before the first half of the first millennium B.C." (139;).
  • Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.

South Asian archaeology and the myth of Indo-Aryan invasions (2005)

Jim Shaffer. South Asian archaeology and the myth of Indo-Aryan invasions in : Bryant, E. F., & Patton, L. L. (2005). The Indo-Aryan controversy : evidence and inference in Indian history. Routledge

• Despite a plea by one South Asian scholar to be “. . . hopefully somewhat free from the ghosts of the past”, the legacy of a post-Enlightenment western scholarship concerning South Asian prehistory and history has been for the arguments to be repeated so often as to become dogma.

• Academic discourse in philology, ethnology, archaeology, paleontology, biology, and religion was plumbed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to substantiate a sense of self and shared identity in a newly expanded view of the known geographic world and in a reassessment of a chronology of human antiquity beyond a Biblical interpretation of human origins.

• It is singularly refreshing, against this dogmatic pursuit of what may be an unobtainable goal, to know there are South Asian scholars who “. . . do not believe that the available data are sufficient to establish anything very conclusive about an Indo-European homeland, culture, or people”

• The existing interpretative discussions postulating large-scale human “invasions” simply do not correlate with the physical, archaeological, or paleoanthropological, data.

• Lacking fullest data, there is, nonetheless, a growing consensus that Harappan culture is the result of indigenous cultural developments, with no “Mesopotamian” people or diffusions of Western inventions, by whatever means, needed to explain it.

• Given the meticulous archaeological efforts to identify culture patterns for the geographic areas described, and with the relative and radiometric chronologies established for the archaeological record, it seems that there is no “Vedic night” separating the prehistoric/protohistoric from the early historic periods of South Asian culture history. Rather, these data reinforce what the site of Mehrgarh so clearly establishes, an indigenous cultural continuity in South Asia of several millennia.

• The modern archaeological record for South Asia indicates a history of significant cultural continuity; an intrepretation at variance with earlier eighteenth through twentieth-century scholarly views of South Asian cultural discontinuity and South Asian cultural dependence on Western culture influences.

• We have already noted that the scholarly paradigm of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in conflating language, culture, race, and population movements has continued, with historical linguistic scholars still assiduously attempting to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European language and attempting to link that language to a specific “homeland,” in order to define population migration away from that seminal geographic base

• The current archaeological and paleoanthropological data simply do not support these centuries old interpretative paradigms suggesting Western, intrusive, cultural influence as responsible for the supposed major discontinuities in the South Asian cultural prehistoric record.

• The image of Indo-Aryans as nomadic, conquering warriors, driving chariots, may have been a vision that Europeans had, and continue to have, of their own assumed “noble” past.

• It is currently possible to discern cultural continuities linking specific prehistoric social entities in South Asia into one cultural tradition. This is not to propose social isolation nor deny any outside cultural influence. Outside cultural influences did affect South Asian cultural development in later, especially historic, periods, but an identifiable cultural tradition has continued, an Indo-Gangetic Cultural Tradition linking social entities over a time period from the development of food production in the seventh millennium BC to the present.

• The archaeological record and ancient oral and literate traditions of South Asia are now converging with significant implications for South Asian cultural history. Some scholars suggest there is nothing in the “literature” firmly locating Indo-Aryans, the generally perceived founders of modern South Asian cultural tradition(s) outside of South Asia, and the archaeological record is now confirming this. Within the chronology of the archaeological data for South Asia describing cultural continuity, however, a significant indigenous discontinuity occurs, but it is one correlated to significant geological and environmental changes in the prehistoric period. This indigenous discontinuity was a regional population shift from the Indus Valley area to locations east, that is, Gangetic Valley, and to the southeast, that is, Gujarat and beyond. Such an indigenous population movement can be recorded in the ancient oral Vedic traditions as perhaps “the” migration so focused upon in the linguistic reconstructions of a prehistoric chronology for South Asia.

• We reemphasize our earlier views, namely that scholars engaged in South Asian studies must describe emerging South Asia data objectively rather than perpetuate interpretations, now more than two centuries old, without regard to the data archaeologists have worked so hard to reveal.

Quotes about Jim Shaffer

• In a joint paper, “Migration, philology and South Asian archaeology”, two of the participating archaeologists, Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein, confirm and elaborate their by now well-known finding that there is absolutely no archaeological indication of an Aryan immigration into northwestern India during or after the decline of the Harappan city culture. It is odd that the other contributors pay so little attention to this categorical finding, so at odds with the expectations of the AIT orthodoxy.
  • Elst, Koenraad (2007). Asterisk in bharopiyasthan: Minor writings on the Aryan invasion debate.

• The paper by J. Shaffer and D. Lichtenstein will illustrate the gulf still separating archaeology and linguistics. It reflects recent disillusionment with the traditional paradigmsdominating archaeological explanation be the cyclical models of cultural growth-florescence-decay, the continuing prominence — in South Asian archaeology at least — of diffusionism, or the obsession with the “Harappan Civilisation” at the expense of other social groups constituting the cultural mosaic of the Greater Indus Valley. Apart from the influence of 19th century ideas on the civilising mission of European powers, such views have also been fostered by an inadequate definition of “cultures” as recurring assemblages of artefacts (after Childe 1929). The authors, therefore, attempt to construct new analytical units based on a study of material culture, with special focus on the concept of “cultural tradition”. The paper builds on an earlier study Shaffer (1991), by placing emphasis on hitherto neglected structural features of cultural traditions; more importantly, it demonstrates by way of an example the potential of this method to lay bare the dynamics of long-term cultural change. The new concepts mark a significant advance in ways of handling the material culture of South Asia. Although they could certainly accommodate models of lan‘guage change, however, the authors stress the indigenous development of South Asian civilisation from the Neolithic onward, and downplay the role of language in the formation of (pre-modern) ethnic identities.
  • G. Erdosy (1995), p. xiii. George Erdosy (ed.) (1995): The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter.

• But first a glimpse of the archaeological debate. In a recent paper, two prominent archaeologists, Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein (1999), argue that there is absolutely no archeaological indication of an Aryan immigration into northwest- ern India during or after the decline of the Harappan city culture. It is odd that the other participants in this debate pay so little attention to this categorical finding, so at odds with the expectations of the AIT orthodoxy, but so in line with majority opinion among Indian archaeologists.
  • Elst K in Bryant, E. F. (2008). The Indo-Aryan controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge. 236

• Or it mainly was American professor James Shaffer, not exactly a “Hindu nationalist”, whose 1984 paper on the archaeological assessment of the hypothesised Aryan invasion threw the gauntlet against AIT complacency. He noted that already for more than half a century, well-financed excavations in the Harappan area had been looking for traces of the Aryan immigration (whether violent, as the archaeologists had expected, or under the radar, as they were later forced to postulate), but no trace had appeared. Indian archaeologists were becoming skeptical but the signal for them to gradually go public with this, at least in India to start with, was Shaffer’s statement.
  • Elst K. In The Eye of the Storm Again: The “Aryans” September 13, 2023