Thanks very much to Dr. Aderson and others.
With all due respect for all. Same  I disagree with the attempts to decipher the symbols of Shindu valley. It is not scientific to become passionate and closed, recalcitrant with those does question our work. Openness to new initiatives is always good. Same  they are no most successful, then openess is the way to new concerns. I recommend to all over-read Thomas s. Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Sincerily.

Dr. Horacio Francisco Arganis Juárez
Lic. M.A. Ph. D. Catedrático Investigador de la Universidad
Internacional Euroamericana.
Departamento de Filosofía y Religión Comparada.
www.uie.edu.es

--- El mié 20-jun-12, Dean Michael Anderson <eastwestcultural@YAHOO.COM> escribió:

De: Dean Michael Anderson <eastwestcultural@YAHOO.COM>
Asunto: Re: [INDOLOGY] Harappan script
A: INDOLOGY@liverpool.ac.uk
Fecha: miércoles, 20 de junio de 2012, 12:15

  > On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 3:59 PM, Steve Farmer <saf@safarmer.com> wrote:
    >>I'm convinced that the issue *can* be definitively settled this way. We have tried the other ways (e.g. the Conference funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the American Linguistic Society that Richard Sproat and I organized at Stanford in 2007, etc.) without luck, since we couldn't get Asko at the time to agree to the point-by-point discussion
>>

Are the conference findings available anywhere? Or is there at least a detailed summary of the points discussed by both sides?

I've been able to locate some criticism of the FSW theory but haven't found any in-depth discussion supporting FSW by other experts in the field. Even the criticism has generally been more impressionistic than detailed.

I agree with Steve that something like a Current Anthropology discussion would be valuable. I fear, however, that while it would be very illuminating, it might still be inconclusive. So far I still agree with Greg Possehl's conclusion in his book, Indus Age: The Writing System -- there is a need for more basic research before we can know for sure. Ideally this would be free of assumptions about which language, or non-language, it represents.

Even then it may elude us. I don't think we should try to rush to a final conclusion. These things take their own time and it may be left for a future generation to finally unravel the mystery. The discussion is valuable, nevertheless, if only to clarify the issues.

To address the original question, here is a basic list of books on the subject. There's lots more but these are important to know about.

Parpola, Asko, 2000. Deciphering the Indus script.
Also his 3 volumes of: Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions.
More of his publications are at: http://www.helsinki.fi/~aparpola/index.html

Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel. The collapse of the Indus-script thesis: The myth of a literate Harappan civilization.       http://www.safarmer.com/fsw2.pdf

Possehl, Gregory. The Indus Age: The Writing System.

Iravatham Mahadevan. The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance and Tables.

Bryan K. Wells. 2011. Epigraphic approaches to Indus writing.


Best,

Dean