Mortimer Wheeler

A bronze bust of the English archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler

Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler FRS FBA FSA (10 September 1890 – 22 July 1976) was a British archaeologist and officer in the British Army. Over the course of his career, he served as Director of both the National Museum of Wales and London Museum, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, and the founder and Honorary Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London, in addition to writing twenty-four books on archaeological subjects.

Quotes

• The Aryan invasion of the Land of Seven Rivers, the Punjab and its environs, constantly assumes the form of an onslaught upon the walled cities of the aborigines. For these cities the term used in the Rigveda is pur, meaning a “rampart,” “fort” or “stronghold.” ... Indra, the Aryan War god, is puraydara, “fort-destroyer.” He shatters “ninety forts” for his Aryan protégé Divodasa. [...] Where are – or were – these citadels? It has in the past been supposed that they were mythical, or were “merely places of refuge against attack, ramparts of hardened earth with palisades and a ditch.” The recent excavation of Harappa may be thought to have changed the picture. Here we have a highly evolved civilization of essentially non-Aryan type, now known to have employed massive fortifications, and known also to have dominated the river-system of north-western India at a time not distant from the likely period of the earlier Aryan invasions of that region. What destroyed this firmly settled civilization? Climatic, economic, political deterioration may have weakened it, but its ultimate extinction is more likely to have been completed by deliberate and large-scale destruction. It may be no mere chance that at a late period of Mohenjo-daro men, women and children appear to have been massacred there. On circumstantial evidence, Indra stands accused.
  • ? (1947), p. 82

• The city, so far from being an unarmed sanctuary of peace, was dominated by the towers and battlements of a lofty man‐made acropolis of defiantly feudal aspect. A few minutes’ observation had radically changed the social character of the Indus civilization and put it at last into an acceptable secular focus.
  • Still Digging: Interleaves from an Antiquary Notebook (1955), p. 192

• One terracotta, from a late level at Mohenjo-daro, seems to represent a horse, reminding us that the jaw-bone of a horse is also recorded from the same site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in northern Baluchistan. ... There is no evidence of any kind for the use of the ass or mule. On the other hand the bones of a horse occur at a high level at Mohenjo-daro, and from the earlier (doubtless pre-Harappan) layer at Rana Ghundai in northern Baluchistan both horse and ass are recorded. It is likely enough that camel, horse and ass were in fact all a familiar feature of the Indus caravans.
  • Report on his excavations at Mohenjo-daro, E. J. H. Mackay (1938, vol. 1, p. 289; vol. 2, pt. 78, no. 11), as quoted in K. D. Sethna, The Problem of Aryan Origins (New Delhi: Prakashan, 1992)

Attributed

• For a civilization so widely distributed as that of the Indus no uniform ending need be postulated.
  • Reported in M. Danino, "Climate, Environment, and the Harappan Civilization", Critical Themes in Environmental History of India, ed. R. Chakrabarti (2020), pp. 333-377

• Archaeology is not a science, it’s a vendetta.
  • Attributed, without citation, in "Mortimer Wheeler Adventures Archaeology", scihi.org (n.d.)

• One terracotta, from a late level of Mohenjo-daro, seems to represent a horse, reminding us that the jaw-bone of a horse is also recorded from the site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in northern Baluchistan.
  • The Indus Civilization, 3rd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 92

About

• Since India’s and Pakistan’s independence, South Asian archaeology was significantly influenced by Sir Mortimer Wheeler and, to a lesser degree, by the late Stuart Piggott. Wheeler secured a reputation as one of the most prominent archaeologists in the English speaking world....If Jones’ had his “philologer paragraph,” Wheeler had his “Aryan paragraphs” which directed archaeological, historical, linguistic, and biological interpretations within South Asian studies for over a half century.
  • Jim Shaffer, "South Asian archaeology and the myth of Indo-Aryan invasions" in E. F. Bryant and L. L. Patton, The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History (Routledge, 2005)

• Given the charge of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1944, when he was a brigadier in the British army fighting in North Africa, he revived the ASI and institutionalized a more rigorous stratigraphic method designed to record a site’s evolution period after period. Irascible but magnanimous, theatrical but hard-working, Wheeler energetically put his stamp on Indian archaeology. But having received his archaeological training in the context of the Roman Empire, he transferred its terminology wholesale to the Harappan cities, which thus became peppered with ‘citadels’, ‘granaries’, ‘colleges’, ‘defence walls’, etc., when no one, in reality, had a clue to the precise purpose of the massive structures that had emerged from the thick layers of accumulated mud.
  • M. Danino, The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvatī (Penguin Books India, 2010)

• One important legacy of Wheeler's influence is an a priori acceptance by scholars of the use of migration and stimulus diffusion to describe all major South Asian discontinuities - beginning with the invention of agriculture and ending with the arrival of the British. Alternative explanations of cultural change are not considered. Wheeler's interpretations promoted an encapsulation of South Asian culture history into a series of chronologically and culturally distinct units focused on northern areas. It the became difficult to perceive or reconstruct a cultural account incorporating an integrated sub-continent. Recent archaeological data suggests fundamental interpretive changes are now warranted.
  • Migration, philology and South Asian archaeology by Jim G. Schaffer & Diane A. Lichtenstein^{[citation needed]}

• Wheeler used all his talents and literary skill to Prove that the Indus Valley Civilization was the outcome of the Mesopotamian experiment in city-life; at one place he even goes to the extent of suggesting that the mastercraftsmen came from a foreign country to Mohenjodaro to build the first houses ! In other words, he looked at this civilization not as a ‘primary’ civilization, like that of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, developing on its own soil and produced by its own genius, but as a secondary civilization built by the foreigners,
  • S. P. Gupta, in The "lost" Sarasvati and the Indus civilization, p. 180^{[citation needed]}