J. P. Mallory

James Patrick Mallory (born 1945) is an Irish-American archaeologist and Indo-Europeanist. Mallory is an emeritus professor at Queen's University, Belfast, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the editor of the Journal of Indo-European Studies and Emania: Bulletin of the Navan Research Group (Belfast).

Mallory received his A.B. in History from Occidental College in California in 1967, then served three years in the US Army as a military police sergeant. He received his Ph.D. in Indo-European studies from UCLA in 1975. He has held several posts at Queen's beginning in 1977, becoming Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology in 1998.

Professor Mallory's research has focused on Early Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, the problem of the homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and the archaeology of early Ireland. He favors an integrative approach to these issues, comparing literary, linguistic and archaeological evidence to solve historical puzzles.

One consequence of Professor Mallory's preference for an integrated approach is that he has been strongly critical of the widely publicised theory of Indo-European origins held by Colin Renfrew, which locates the urheimat or homeland of this language family in early Neolithic Anatolia and associates its spread with the spread of agriculture. A key element of his criticism has been a vigorous defence of linguistic palaeontology as a valid tool for solving the Indo-European homeland problem, arguing that Renfrew is sceptical about it precisely because it offers some of the strongest evidence against the latter's own model. Mallory's book with D. Q. Adams, entitled The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford University Press 2006) provides a comprehensive account of the reconstructed language Proto-Indo-European and assesses what it can tell us about the society that spoke it.

...
Wikipedia