05-Sep-2010, 02:11 AM
(Cross-posted at the Religious Education Forum)
Timothy Insoll has some very helpful advice for Indologists and historians on page 35 of his book Archaeology and World Religion:
Timothy Insoll has some very helpful advice for Indologists and historians on page 35 of his book Archaeology and World Religion:
Quote:The textual roots of Hindu religious tradition go back to the four Vedas; the Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda, and Atharvaveda which are conventionally dated to between 1500 to 1000 BCE. More reflective of reality is the belief that these are composite texts containing diverse traditions of diverse periods and cannot represent any specific period in the Indian historic sequence. There is no Vedic Age. Similarly, there is no Vedic Archaeology. The same may be said about the textual corpus associated with the main bodies of the Vedas, such as the Upanishads. What is clear from the point of view of the present chapter is that the first textual phase of Indian philosophical and religious tradition has to remain undated and that archaeology has to be kept out of it.
In such a situation archaeology can do only one thing: try to trace different ritual behaviors which Hindus traditionally associate with Hinduism. It is not a question of beginning with a checklist of rituals and looking for their archaeological manifestations. Rather, it is a question of looking at the early archaeological record as a whole and pointing out the categories of evidence which make sense from the point of view of later, well-documented Hinduism.