Richard H. Meadow

Richard H. Meadow is Director of the Zooarchaeology Laboratory at the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, Senior-Lecturer on Anthropology at Harvard, and Project Director of HARP—the Harappa Archaeological Research Project.

Quotes

• There are, as yet, no convincing reports of horse remains from archaeological sites in South Asia before the end of the second millennium BC. Many claims have been made but few have been documented with sufficient measurements, drawings, and photographs to permit other analysts to judge for themselves.
  • 1987. Meadow, Richard. 1987. "Faunal Exploitation Patterns in Eastern Iran and Baluchistan: A Review of Recent Investigations." Orientalia losephi Tucci Memoriae Dicata (881-916). Ed. G. Gnoli and L. Lanciotti. Quoted from Bryant Edwin-The-Quest-for-the-Origins-of-Vedic-Culture, p 171

• The destruction of the Indus cities by invading tribes of Aryans... has long since been discounted by serious scholars.
  • About the "mythical massacre" that according to some ended the Indus valley civilization. Attributed in Michel Danino - The Invasion That Never Was (2004), and [1]

• This picture represents one man’s view of the past informed by 23 years of archaeological and ethnographic research in Pakistan and India and by 18 years of growing up in India. But the paints, often applied with a broad brush necessarily in an impressionist manner, are tempered by Western academic skepticism. Thus we do not see those wild flights of fancy or long leaps of faith that characterize some literature of the region. What flights and leaps are there do not require a suspension of disbelief to entertain.
  • Preface of Jonathan Mark Kenoyer’s Ancient Cities of the Indian Civilization, Oxford University Press (Karachi), 1998

• Referring to a discussion that Meadow and Patel had with Bökönyi before the latter’s death, they write (1997: 308): “We went through each point that we had raised and in some cases agreed to disagree. He (i.e. Bökönyi) remained firmly convinced that there are the bones of true horse (Equus Caballus) in the Surkotada collection, and we remain skeptical.”
  • quoted in B.B. Lal, Aryan invasion of India, Perpetuation of a myth. in : Bryant, E. F., & Patton, L. L. (2005). The Indo-Aryan controversy : evidence and inference in Indian history. Routledge 70

• “… in the end that [Bökönyi’s identification of horse remains at Surkotada] may be a matter of emphasis and opinion.”
  • quoted in THE HORSE AND THE ARYAN DEBATE by Michel Danino* (Published in the Journal of Indian History and Culture of the C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar Institute of Indological Research, Chennai, September 2006, No.13, pp. 33-59.)
  • Richard Meadow & Ajita Patel, “A Comment on ‘Horse Remains from Surkotada’ by Sándor Bökönyi,” South Asian Studies, vol. 13, 1997 (New Delhi: Oxford & IBH), pp. 308-315.

External links

• Bibliography