Vakhsh culture

The Vakhsh culture is a Bronze Age culture which took place around 2500-1650 BC, as shown by radiocarbon dates, and flourished along the lower Vakhsh River in southern Tajikistan, earlier thought to be from ca. 1700 BC to 1500 BC.

Quotes

• Like all other archaeological cultures, there is no unanimity concerning the Indo- Iranian or Indo-Aryan ethnic identification of these burials either. Lyonnet wonders why, if they had been Indo-Aryans who had provoked or appeared at the time of the collapse of the Bactria and Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), Namazga, and Harappan civilizations, they did not continue to foster the links between these regions, which had previously been connected for millennia. Rather, these connections collapse at this time (Lyonnet 1993, 83). She underscores the extreme paucity of metal objects found in the graves, which "is rather odd for a culture considered to come from the Andronovo people, famous for their metallurgy" (Lyonnet 1994a, 430). Moreover, "no trace of the horse is found, there is no evidence of any social differentiation, and, altogether, the material is rather poor" (430). As far as she is concerned, "if we are dealing with intruders, as some features suggest, and if it is certain that they are not Andronovians, we do not have enough evidence to identify them as Indo-Aryans. We can only compare their movement to the textually known much later migrations of two other groups, who, coming from 'the steppes,' went through Central Asia into India." These are the Kusanas around the beginning of our era, and the White Huns in the fifth century A.D.: "All these nomads, albeit at different periods, took exactly the same path, used exactly the same areas for their cemeteries consisting of kurgans that all look alike from the outside" (430).
  • Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 10

• Tribes that bury their dead in kurgans (which are so common over vast geographic and temporal expanses) have been migrating into India throughout its history, but these have not induced language shift across the entire north of the subcontinent. So one is hardly compelled to interpret the scanty evidence of the Bishkent and Vakhsh cultures as evidence of the arrival of a new language group on its way to Indo-Aryanize North India. Like the Andronovo culture, this culture does not enter the subcontinent either. Moreover, Piankova (1982) dates the graves to the last quarter of the second millennium, which is far too late for migrants who are supposed to already have completely settled down and written the hymns in the Indian subcontinent by this time, even allowing the lowest possible dates proposed by scholars for the Rgveda. Moreover, anyone prepared to gloss over the absence of horse bones in these sites cannot then deny the presence of the Indo-Aryans in the Indus Valley Civilization on these particular grounds.
  • Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 10