“...there is only one solution left to save the invasionist model, or at least the concept of an “arrival of the Indo-Iranians”: invisible migrations. To this end, James Mallory, for example, came up with the military-inspired notion of Kulturkugel (“culture bullets”)—as if, perhaps, a Germanic term might excuse, almost in a humorous manner, the use of a diffusionist model by an English-speaking author. Mallory’s explanatory drawing shows a rifle cartridge (or a shell, depending) in which the bullet itself is the material culture and the charge is the language. Thus, the Indo-Aryan nomads of the steppes would have traveled across the BMAC, shedding their entire material culture on the way but not their language. Having thus become archaeologically undetectable, they would then have descended toward the Indus Plains to impose their new culture and their preserved language; this new culture would have had no known archaeological equivalent at the time.”
