J. P. Mallory
James Patrick Mallory 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.Career
Mallory was born in Belfast in 1945. He 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.
He has written an account on Indo-Hittite linguistics. Mallory's research has focused on Early Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, the problem of the Urheimat 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 answer historical questions.
Mallory has been strongly critical of Colin Renfrew's theory of Indo-European origins, which locates the Urheimat of this language family in early Neolithic Anatolia and associates its spread with the spread of agriculture. Mallory defends linguistic palaeontology as a valid tool for solving the Indo-European homeland problem, arguing that Renfrew is sceptical about it precisely because it offers evidence against the latter's own model. Mallory's book with Douglas Q. Adams, entitled The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World provides an account of the reconstructed language Proto-Indo-European and assesses what it can tell us about the society that spoke it.Major works
Books
Edited volumes
