Quote

... the slides contain no information at all identifying
the pieces, which are mixed up crazily from sites and periods. This makes the
data here absolutely useless from a research point of view. What we are
learning increasingly -- this was the most important conclusion of the 2009
Kyoto conference -- is that any studies of anything Indus, and above all
the symbols, must carefully distinguish products of different periods and
regions: the old view that Indus civilization and Indus symbols were
unified and unchanging over time is grossly misleading: there wasn't one
"Indus civilization, " or a single set of Indus symbols, but many, in a way.
To just throw down an unlabeled mass of pictures of symbol-bearing
objects mixing up periods and sites is a step backwards. Another
obvious problem comes from the fact that the Indus Corpus as now
published is anything but complete: perhaps as many as 1/3 of
the symbol-beating objects whose photos were published in the 1930s and
40s are missing -- and many of these are the most interesting and
anomalous pieces. (This will be rectified in Vol. III.) And huge numbers
of symbol-bearing potsherds that indicate just how wildly varied the
supposed "system" of symbols was remain unpublished (many of these
I've studied in the HARP data base.) It is correct that inaccessibility of
good photos (with find data!) of the symbols is a big problem. In Kyoto
in fact we pledged funds of $50,000 - $100,000 (!) to create a *scholarly*
online data base of the symbols. There was much interest in this expressed
in Kyoto, but some institutional obstacles have to be overcome: we hope
to make progress here soon. There is as much interest here from
researchers including Mark Kenoyer as from our group, and even Asko
Parpola (who has control over the photos) agrees in principle. Finally, this
mishmash of images from Kalyanaraman, stolen (minus the critical
identification data [!] from the Corpus) comes with a deadly poisoned bullet;
his crazy and hypernationalist views of Indus symbols, which are accepted
by absolutely no one in the research community -- underline "absolutely
no one." But no unsuspecting amateur user of this site could know that.
Use of Kalyanaraman' s amateurish site just perpetuates myths about
the Indus civilization as some sort of timeless realm that produced
a single set of timeless symbols without key regional variations. That myth
is also perpetuated in the work of Rao et al., who too misrepresent the
symbols from many periods and sites as a supposedly homogenous
system. (This critique BTW is one that Kenoyer has also often expressed
in regard to Indus symbol studies, and we agree with Mark here completely.
- Steve.]