A multidisciplinary scenario for South Asian prehistory

I would first like to point to an important observation that I do not believe has been made before. The distribution of the Indo-Aryan languages, even today (but excluding Sri Lanka), corresponds remarkably with that of the Chalcolithic cultures of the northwestern Deccan and the Ganges-Yamuna Basin. These are all characterized by a use of copper and painted pottery, usually in black on a red background, and include the Ahar, Malwa, and Jorwe cultures of Rajasthan and Maharashtra, and the Ochre Coloured Pottery and Black and Red Ware cultures of the Ganges Basin. They also, of course, include the Mature and postHarappan. In the Ganges Basin, as discussed in chapter 4, a strong argument can be made for cultural continuity in archaeological terms from perhaps 3000 Bc into historical (Buddhist and Hindu) times (Liversage 1992). Because of this, a hypothesis of Indo-Aryan continuity through the same time-span should be taken seriously.

The Dravidian languages as spoken today cover the region of the Southern Neolithic, with its villages of circular houses and cattle pastoralism, and domestication of a number of south Indian cereals and legumes. These southern sites have a distinct character, despite some obvious signs of connection with the northwestern Deccan. Again, continuity in southern India seems likely from Neolithic through to Early Historical times, with the marked exception of the Early Historical spread of an Indo-Aryan language in the form of Sinhalese to Sri Lanka.

Taking into account the above details, and bearing in mind the many points of view currently in circulation, I would offer the following scenario for South Asia as a whole (Figure 10.4).

1. During the Neolithic of Iran and Baluchistan, from 7000 BC onward into Early Harappan times, an Elamo-Dravidian linguistic continuum (following McAlpin) was spread from Khusistan to the Indus and perhaps beyond. Early Indo-Iranian speakers moved into Iran from the steppe lands to the north during Neolithic times, exactly when being uncertain.

2.The Harappan civilization itself, like that of Mesopotamia, was surely polyglot. My hunch here is that the language of the pictographic Harappan script was a relative of Elamite, rather than a close relative of the Dravidian languages currently spoken in southern India. The common people of the civilization would have spoken both ancestral Indo-Aryan and ElamoDravidian languages, just as their Mesopotamian contemporaries spoke Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, and even Eblaite if one traveled up the Euphrates far enough. But since we cannot decipher the Indus script we will never know the finer details.

3.During the time span of the Early Harappan, starting perhaps 3500 Bc, farming settlements spread into Gujarat and Rajasthan. By 3000 BC they were spreading into the Ganges Basin. Even earlier, perhaps as early as 5000 BC, hunter-gatherers in camps such as Bagor in Rajasthan were acquiring cattle and caprovines from Indus-region farming villages, and commencing a pastoralist/herding specialization (Lukacs 2002). Following the distributional argument adumbrated above, did the village settlements mainly house Indo-Aryan-speaking agricultural populations, and were the herders of cattle and caprovines Dravidian speakers of native South Asian origin, both populations existing in a mutualistic relationship on the borderlands of the burgeoning Indus city-scape?

4.A number of sites in the northwestern region of India are noted as having unusual basal features, for instance the circular houses at Navdatoli and Balathal, and even perhaps the cow dung fill of the stone-walled enclosure (ca. 2800 Bc) at the latter site. Could these represent an early Dravidian presence? We will never know, but my suspicion is that a linked farming and herding population, with both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian components, continued to move southward through Maharashtra toward Karnataka after 3000 BC. Specializations continued toward village farming on the one hand, and cattle herding on the other, but with much overlap between the two economic modes. If the village farmers were indeed Indo-Aryans, they seemingly limited themselves to Maharashtra and northward, where their Southwest Asian winter cereals would still grow well, albeit with irrigation when necessary. In this scenario, the pastoralist Dravidians pushed onward into the Deccan, Karnataka, and southern India, there to develop their own style of millet agriculture and cattle corralling.

Figure 10.4 Suggested language family movements in South Asia.

5. It is likely that no Dravidians moved into the Ganges Valley, and that the Chalcolithic farmers of the OCP phase, presumably Indo-Aryans, were the first agriculturalists here (at least until they met the ancestral Mundas, but more on these later).

This reconstruction has the Indo-Aryans and Dravidians together undertaking the agricultural and pastoralist colonization of a formerly hunter-gatherer India,

with the latter adopting a more mobile herding lifestyle and continuing southward into Karnataka and the southern Deccan, but not the Ganges plains. Modem Hindi, spoken widely on the latter, has derived about 30 percent of its agricultural terms from linguistic sources that were neither IA, nor Dravidian, nor Munda (Masica 1979). Walter Fairservis and Franklin Southworth (1989) refer to this source as "language X." The Gangetic location of Hindi thus counter-indicates a Dravidian substratum in this region. Did "language X" belong to some pre-IA farming population of the Ganges Basin? I find this hard to accept in the absence of any clear linguistic survivals, but further speculation seems unwarranted.

The IA languages Gujerati and Marathi of northwestern India do carry a number of Dravidian loans, so a former presence of Dravidian speech here is not in question. Were the early Dravidians confined mainly to the southern part of the Indus realm, extending into Gujarat, Maharashtra, and perhaps Rajasthan? Were the early IndoAryans initially confined to the northern part of the Indus realm, later moving south (and east) to mingle with and eventually replace Dravidian languages in Gujarat and Masharashtra, but not Karnataka or southern India (Figure 10.4)? The basal structures at Navdatoli and Balathal offer some faint support for this view.

There remains one other group that interacted eventually with both IAs and Dravidians in the northeastern peninsular regions of India. These are the Mundas, an Austroasiatic-speaking population whose ultimate linguistic origin was in Mainland Southeast Asia (Figure 10.7). Reconstructions of Proto-Munda indicate cognates for rice, millets, and legumes, so there is little doubt that this population introduced rice cultivation into northeastern India, perhaps at about 3000 BC (Zide and Zide 1976; Southworth 1988; Higham 2003). Interestingly, according to the linguistic analyses of F. B. J. Kuiper (1948), Dravidian and Munda languages were in contact prior to any IA presence in eastern India, presumably somewhere in the current overlap zone between these two families in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, and southern Bihar. This suggests that the Dravidian settlement of the Deccan was a fairly rapid affair after it got under way at about 3000 BC. However, it is not clear how far Munda languages originally spread up the Ganges river system, and Franklin Southworth (1988) has suggested that their greatest extent was never very much larger than now, perhaps due to competition from IA and Dravidian. This suggests that the three language

families concerned all spread into the subcontinent at roughly the same time - a considerable historical coincidence, the results of which are still visible in the Indian ethnolinguistic landscape today.

Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and the

Issue of Nostratic

We have already raised the question of whether or not language families can be subgrouped into macrofamilies. Some linguists reject the idea without question, on the grounds of imperfections in methodology and the possibility that observed similarities can be due to chance (Dixon 1997). 1 do not wish to become embroiled in a debate about research methodology amongst linguists, but for a decade or more I have been intrigued, as has Colin Renfrew (1991), by the possibility that some macrofamily hypotheses could be reflecting important developments in archaeological prehistory, especially in terms of the linked origins and radial dispersals of agricultural peoples out of homeland regions.'

One of the most significant language macrofamilies, promoted especially by Russian comparative linguists since the 1960s, is Nostratic. In its basic form, Nostratic is stated to include Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Kartvelian of the southern Caucasus, Uralic, Altaic, and Dravidian, all of which are claimed to share either some degree of common origin, or at least to have shared early histories with a fair degree of inter-family contact.' More recently, Joseph Greenberg (2000) has put forward a competing hypothesis, involving a Eurasiatic macrofamily that includes IndoEuropean, Uralic, Yukaghir of Siberia, Altaic (including Korean and Japanese), Ainu of Hokkaido, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo-Aleut.

With lists of language families as long as these, it is perhaps not surprising that some linguists express exasperation. Archaeologists also find them a little hard to handle. Obviously, in the case of Greenberg's Eurasiatic, all these diverse populations cannot be connected with any agricultural radiation and the concept, if real, presumably reflects the initial colonizations of northern latitudes by modern humans, who after all did not reach the Americas until after 15,000 years ago. The survival of some degree of archaic linguistic residue is perhaps not surprising.

But Nostratic could be a different matter, since many of its constituent language families were potentially very deeply involved in agricultural radiations out of the Middle East into Europe, North Africa, and Asia. This is so for Indo-European, Afroasiatic, and Elamo-Dravidian. Kartvelian, as a stay-at- home family in the mountainous and remote Caucasus, also fits this model geographically, although the Caucasus does have two other language families that are not part of the Nostratic grouping. One of the latter (Nakh-Dagestanian) apparently had an agriculturalist proto-language with a glotto-chronological age of about 6,000 years according to Johanna Nichols (in Wuethrich 2000), but little appears to be known about the history of Kartvelian in this regard.

The other two members of the Nostratic macrofamily, Uralic and Altaic, pose different problems. The Uralic language family includes the Finnish and Hungarian, both of course languages of farming peoples today. But the basic consensus appears to be that Uralic derived originally from a hunter-gatherer spread across postglacial northern Europe and Asia. Kalevi Wiik (2000) has recently published a reconstruction of Uralic linguistic history which has many of the speakers descending from the original hunter-gatherer populations of postglacial northern Europe, later to be influenced by incoming Indo-European- speaking agriculturalists. Other linguists note that Proto-Uralic reveals close connections with Indo-European languages, especially Iranian, but there is no consensus as to whether these links reflect shared ancestry or more recent borrowing during the period of Iranian linguistic domination of the steppes, prior to the spread of Turkic languages after about 500 BC. I cannot claim to know the answers for Uralic, but it is clear that the language family cannot be regarded as connected with any agricultural population radiation out of Southwest Asia.

Altaic poses a different problem, this being that the most likely homelands for its chief subgroups (Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic) are agreed by almost all linguists to be in Mongolia and Manchuria, far to the east of any close connection with the other members of Nostratic. We return to Altaic matters later, allowing that a southwestern origin for the family close to Southwest Asia is most unlikely.

We are thus left with the three language families with which we began - IndoEuropean, Afroasiatic, and Elamo-Dravidian - as representing agriculturalist dispersal out of Southwestern Asia. One might argue that, unless

one accepts the Nostratic idea in its entirely, one should not adopt it at all, and such a conclusion would doubtless please a number of linguists. I am not sure what I would reply to such a doubtful linguist in this regard, but to an archaeologist I would state that the reconstructed history of agriculturalist dispersal from Southwest Asia makes an associated and radial dispersal model for these three language families very appealing. ProtoNostratic need not be such a wild idea after all.

Indeed, some linguists have tried to identify the cultural vocabulary, location, and possible date for Proto-Nostratic. Alan Bomhard (1996) locates a homeland loosely south of the Caucasus at the end of the Pleistocene. Aharon Dolgopolsky (1998) suggests that Proto-Nostratic had no clear agricultural reconstructions, but did have terms for barley, bovids, sheep, and goat, again favoring a pre-agricultural homeland within Southwest Asia (although Dolgopolsky does not attempt to locate one). Perhaps the Natufian and its contemporaries occupied a position quite centrally within the Nostratic equation, although it is clear that precise cultural affiliations for ProtoNostratic will always remain elusive.