Language and Archaeology: Review of Archaeology and Language: the Puzzle of Inda-European Origins by Colin Renfrew and A Guide to the World’s Languages, vol. 1: Classification, by Merritt Ruhlen*

Abstract As Renfrew states at the beginning of his work (p. 1), archaeologists of late have had little to say about language origins. With regard to Inda-European, the focus of his book, it is indeed remarkable that the standard textbook on European archaeology (Champion et al.1984) does not even contain the word Inda-European in the index. It is Renfrew’s view that with recent advances in processual archaeology and comparative linguistics the time is ripe for a new attempt to investigate Inda-European origins. The whole enterprise had, of course, fallen into disrepute because of the excesses of the Aryan theory in the 1920s and 1930s, which was the immediate background of Boas’s well-known pronouncements regarding the independence of race, language, and culture.