Raymond Allchin

Frank Raymond Allchin, FBA (9 July 1923 – 4 June 2010) was a British archaeologist and Indologist. He and his wife, Bridget Allchin, formed one of the most influential British partnerships in the post-Independence study of South Asian archaeology. Producing a large body of scholarship ranging from archaeological excavations, ethnoarchaeology as well as epigraphy and linguistics, the Allchins made their work and that of others accessible through a series of sole, joint and edited publications. Seminal works include The Birth of Indian Civilisation (1968), which was later superseded by their books The Rise of Indian Civilisation in India and Pakistan (1982) and The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia (1995).

Quotes

• Probably the first settlers arrived in the region around 1750–1600 BC and their numbers grew steadily during the following centuries. We would expect this early Vedic period to come to an end around 1500 BC and the first compilation of the Rigveda Sayhita, i.e. Majjals II–VII, to be made during the next two or three centuries.
  • (1981: 344). quoted in Edwin Bryant, Laurie Patton - Indo-Aryan Controversy_ Evidence and Inference in Indian History-Routledge (2005) p 189

• Even respected archaeologists of the old school of thought, such as Raymond and Bridget Allchin, now admit that the arrival of Indo-Aryans in Northwest India is "scarcely attested in the archaeological record, presumably because their material culture and life-style were already virtually indistinguishable from those of the existing population."
  • Attributed, in : [1]

• Their [the Aryans] presence should therefore be in evidence archaeologically… But as yet it is scarcely attested in the archaeological record presumably because their material culture and lifestyle were already indistinguishable from those of the existing population.
  • Allchin B. and R. 1997 Origins of a Civilization. Viking Penguin, India.
  • quoted in Kazanas, N. (2002). Indigenous Indo-Aryans and the Rigveda: Indo-Aryan migration debate. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 30(3-4), 275-334.

About

• The Allchins, in their archeological capacity, have consistently emphasized the continuity that links the residues of the Indus civilization with those of the later classical India in the Ganges basin and further south. Furthermore, they repeatedly emphasized that archeology provides no clear evidence of any mass movement of peoples from Central Asia into northern India. So why do they continue to pay deference to the “racist” notions of nineteenth-century philologists in this way? (Incidentally, there is no “general agreement that the Indo- Iranian languages . . . were originally spoken in the steppes of Eurasia”)
  • 241-2, Sir Edmund Leach. Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 227-245.