ABSTRACT
A central motivation for the writing of this book is the conviction that the conclusions of linguistic archaeology need to be tested against reality: however rigorous our approach may be, at some point we must attempt to relate our findings to the hard facts – the physical remains, times, and places which archaeologists and other prehistorians deal with. At the very least, we need to learn how far it is possible to make such correlations. Some of the problems involved in the comparison of linguistic and archaeological findings have been discussed in 1.7. The intervening chapters (particularly Chapters 3 and 5–9) contain various inferences about prehistoric events based on linguistic data. These inferences are based in the first instance exclusively on linguistic evidence; only after the linguistic inferences have been spelled out, has there been any attempt to look for correlations in the archaeological or historical literature. The following Section, 10.2, presents a brief summary, roughly chronological, of the linguistic prehistory of South Asia based on the inferences made in those chapters. In the final Section, 10.3, I return to the question of the relationship between linguistic and archaeological evidence, and its implications for the future of communication between the two disciplines.
