Colin Renfrew

Andrew Colin Renfrew, Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn (25 July 1937 – 24 November 2024) was a British archaeologist, paleolinguist and Conservative peer noted for his work on radiocarbon dating, the prehistory of languages, archaeogenetics, and the prevention of looting at archaeological sites.

Lord Colin Renfrew in 2012

Quotes

• Why, beyond reasons of scientific curiosity, do we want to know about the past? And whose past is it anyway? …the past is big business…the past is politically highly charged, ideologically powerful and significant.
  • Archaeology: Theories, Methods, Practice --Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahns

• This area [east Macedonia], although firmly now part of Greece, has sometimes been a marginal one, and may at times have owed allegiance in different directions through a process of boundary displacement. It was indeed occupied in early classical times by Thracian tribes, barbarians who did not speak the Greek language. No doubt they did indeed speak a Thracian language akin to that in what is now Bulgaria, whose origins were suggested earlier.
  • Renfrew, Colin. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, Penguin books 1990, p. 176

• As far as I can see there is nothing in the Hymns of the Rig Veda which demonstrates that the Vedic-speaking population were intrusive to the area: this comes rather from a historical assumption of the "coming of the Indo-Europeans." .. Nothing implies that the Aryans were strangers there.
  • C. Renfrew, ARCHAEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 182-88 also quoted in [1] [2]

• It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley Civilization.
  • Renfrew 1988:188-190. Archaeology and Language. New York: Cambridge University Press, 190 also quoted at [3]

• This hypothesis that early Indo-European languages were spoken in north India with Pakistan and on the Iranian plateau at the sixth millennium BC has the merit of harmonizing symmetrically with the theory for the origin of the Indo-European languages in Europe. It also emphasizes the continuity in the Indus Valley and adjacent areas from the early neolithic through to the floruit of the Indus Valley civilization.
  • C. Renfrew, ARCHAEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 196 also quoted at [4]

• Many linguists have commented that these proposed dates of separation are 'too early,' but how . . . do they know this, or judge this?
  • Renfrew (1990) in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 12

• When Wheeler speaks of “the Aryan invasion of the Land of the Seven Rivers, the Punjab,” he has no warranty at all, so far as I can see. If one checks the dozen references in the Rig Veda to the seven rivers, there is nothing in any of them that to me implies an invasion. . . . Despite Wheeler’s comments, it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley.
  • (1987: 188, 190) Renfrew, C., 1987. Archaeology and Language. London: Jonathan Cape. in Bryant, E. F., & Patton, L. L. (2005). The Indo-Aryan controversy : evidence and inference in Indian history. Routledge 60-61

• Certainly the assumption that the Aryas were recent ‘immigrants’ to India, and their enemies were ‘aborigines’, has done much to distort our understanding of the archaeology of India and Pakistan.
  • Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language, p. 195
  • quoted in Danino, M. (2009). A BRIEF NOTE ON THE ARYAN INVASION THEORY. PRAGATI| April-June 2009

About Colin Renfrew

• “All the migrations postulated by Renfrew ultimately stem from a single catalyst: the crossing of Anatolian farmers into Greece… For all practical purposes, Renfrew’s hypothesis disregards Tocharian and Indo-Iranian.”
  • Heaven, Heroes and Happiness: The Indo-European Roots of Western Ideology by Shan M.M. Winn, University Press of America, Lanham-New York-London, 1995. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• [Supporters of Renfrew’s theory] “have tried to render the Indo-Iranian problem moot. They argue that the Indo-Iranian branch was somehow divided from the main body of Proto-Indo-European before the colonists brought agriculture to the Balkans. Greek and Indic are thus separated by millenniums of linguistic change - despite the close grammatical correspondences between them (... these correspondences probably represent shared innovations from the last stage of PIE).”
  • Heaven, Heroes and Happiness: The Indo-European Roots of Western Ideology by Shan M.M. Winn, University Press of America, Lanham-New York-London, 1995. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• The linguistic designation of a category of “Indo-European/Aryan” languages is not the question here. However, the historical, and prevailing, use of the language designation is the issue. For two centuries, scholars concentrating on the South Asian data have described an Indo-European/Aryan migration/invasion into South Asia to explain the formation of Indian civilization. The conflating of language, people/culture, “race” to maintain the “myth of the Aryan invasion” continues, perhaps, as Leach so cogently notes, due to the academic prestige at stake. The distinguished scholar Colin Renfrew (1987) opts to distort the archaeological record rather than to challenge it. Failing to identify archaeological evidence for such a migration in the European post-Neolithic periods, Renfrew argues instead for an Indo-European/Aryan human migration associated with the spread of food production economies from Anatolia. In doing so, he ignores critical archaeological data from Southwest Asia and South Asia. The South Asian archaeological data reviewed here does not support Renfrew’s position nor any version of the migration/invasion hypothesis describing western population movement into South Asia. Rather, the physical distribution of prehistoric sites and artifacts, stratigraphic data, radio- metric dates, and geological data describing the prehistoric/proto-historic environment perhaps can account, in some degree, for the Vedic oral tradition describing a cultural discontinuity of what was an indigenous population movement in the Indo-Gangetic region.
  • 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