COMMENT | In today’s world, identity politics increasingly plays a central role in shaping how we interpret archaeology and history.

The past is no longer merely a matter of academic curiosity but has become deeply intertwined with contemporary issues of ethnicity, religion, and national identity.

In modern-day India, for example, there is an ongoing debate about whether the Aryans or the Dravidians were the true ancestors of the Indian population.

This debate directly challenges long-standing theories of the Aryan invasion, which posited that Indo-Aryans migrated into the subcontinent and displaced an earlier Dravidian population.

Today, many scholars and political actors dispute this theory, seeing it as a colonial construct with little archaeological or genetic support.