Methodological issues in the Indo-European debate

The Indo-European debate has been going on for a century and a half. Initially confined to linguistics, race-based anthropology and comparative mythology, it soon extended to archaeology, especially with the discovery of the Harappan civilization, and peripheral disciplines such as agriculture, archaeometallurgy or archaeoastronomy. The latest entrant in the field, archaeogenetics, is currently all but claiming that it has finally laid to rest the whole issue of a hypothetical migration of Indo-Aryan speakers to the Indian subcontinent in the second millennium BCE. This paper questions the finality of this claim by pointing to inherent limitations, methodological issues and occasional biases in current studies as well as in the interpretation of archaeological evidence.