The author argues that Colin Renfrew’s farming language dispersal hypothesis for the spread of the Indo-European languages is unverifiable, and rests on dubious theoretical and methodological assumptions. Archaeology is better at recognising institutions than language, and present knowledge defines the Bronze Age, rather than the early Neolithic, as the formative period for the development and spread of so-called of Proto- and Early Indo-European institutions.

Life beside the ancient Indus may not have been so peaceful and egalitarian as has sometimes been thought. Arguing from weapons, the author shows that Harappans only appear to be militarily under-endowed in comparison with Mesopotamians because their assemblages are derived from settlement finds rather than grand tombs.

The authors comment on ways of comparing the results of stable isotopes, on the one hand, and faunal remains, on the other, as evidence for diet

The author offers us a first hand account of his extraordinary and unexpected duties during the second Iraq war. This is history, heritage, regulation and perhaps even legislation in the making.

Rapid extension of 14C-age dating into the Last Glaciation due to a rising interest in high-resolution climate events is demanding ever greater emphasis on accurate stratigraphic placement of samples relative to events or objects to be dated. This shifts the primary responsibility for date quality from the producer of dates, who is responsible for their precision, to geological and archaeological consumers, who are responsible for their stratigraphic and calibrated accuracy. It is essential that both sides accept the partial switch of mutual roles and collaborate constructively and respect the traditional freedom of choice that marks basic research.

Kristian Kristiansen, cogent critic though he may be, commits a category error of a depressingly familiar kind. It is a confusion which has led distinguished scholars such as Dumézil into error, and which, by allowing the conflation of such categories as language, ethnicity, race and institution, worked to the detriment of many groups and nations during the twentieth century, and now, no doubt, also in the twenty-first.

Nowhere does he define precisely what he imagines the term ‘Indo-European’ to mean. Following the perspective agreed by most historical linguists I take it to be a linguistic term, pertaining therefore to languages, members of the language family first recognised by Sir William Jones in 1786, and then further analysed and defined by subsequent generations of linguists. Through examination of the phonology, the morphology and the lexicon, all of which are well-defined and well-understood, it can readily be decided and demonstrated whether a specific language belongs to this family or not. So that when Hittite emerged in the early twentieth century from the archives of Hattusa, and later when documents in Tocharian were discovered and deciphered, the place of both those languages within that family could readily be agreed. Such a methodology is clearly not applicable to social institutions: it only works with words.

The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), the Smithsonian Institution’s new facility on the National Mall in Washington DC, challenges the very notion of what constitutes a museum. Probably the most theoretically informed museum in North America, this is no shrine to the past: it is a museum that claims both past and present to shape a decolonised future for Indigenous populations.

Thousands of artefacts are found every year by the public the world over, and many are sold or destroyed. How are we to ensure that these discoveries can take their place in archaeological research (Editorial, December 2004)? For some, legislation, state control and strong penalties are the best or only option. Here, the co-ordinator of the English Portable Antiquities Scheme makes the case for a voluntary code, led by co-operation, education and reward.

In his response, Colin Renfrew retreats to a formalistic argument – Indo-European can only mean a language family. It has nothing to do whatsoever with institutions or religion. This statement simply writes off a whole academic discourse of Indo-European studies. Consequently Renfrew does not accept an argument that links the spread of an institution to a concomitant spread of its language or its terminology. In opposition to this I consider Indo-European languages to have a history linked to social and economic processes of change that we still know too little about. However, it implies a relationship between them, as Colin Renfrew cogently argues in his book (Renfrew 1987: chapter 6). Institutions which appear to have their origin in the Proto-Indo-European period, and which are still preserved – like language diversified – in later Indo-European religious mythology or sagas, are consequently termed Indo-European in this specific research context, as they share a common history. Often they also share a common terminology that can be demonstrated to have a Proto-Indo-European origin. In that they are interlinked in one way or another with language. It is therefore a worthy research task to consider if processes of language spread and the spread of institutions are interlinked, given that their terminology share a common origin.

From this follows that we must either abolish the term Indo-European completely, or accept that it embodies a number of social and religious traditions and institutions whose history cannot be totally separated from that of language, as their meaning is expressed in a specific Indo-European terminology. The danger of political misuse does not originate from research into this relationship; it originates from simplistic theoretical and methodological conflations of such categories with racist and chauvinistic historical constructions. The relationship between language and DNA, which Colin Renfrew has propagated, is no less subject to such manipulation. The only weapon against this is a developed theoretical and methodological strategy.