[6] In 2013 he was appointed Cabot fellow of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, receiving recognition for his book on comparative mythology.

[15] After 1987, he has increasingly focused on the localization of Vedic texts (1987) and the evidence contained in them for early Indian history, notably that of the Rgveda and the following period, represented by the Black Yajurveda Samhitas and the Brahmanas.

Witzel aims at indicating the emergence of the Kuru Kingdom in the Delhi area (1989, 1995, 1997, 2003), its seminal culture and its political dominance, as well as studying the origin of late Vedic polities[16] and the first Indian empire in eastern North India (1995, 1997, 2003, 2010).

The linguistic aspect of earliest Indian history has been explored in a number of papers (1993,[20] 1999,[21][22] 2000, 2001, 2006,[23] 2009)[24] dealing with the pre-Vedic substrate languages of Northern India.

[25] These result in a substantial amount of loan words from a prefixing language ("Para-Munda") similar to but not identical with Austroasiatic (Munda, Khasi, etc.)

the related Harvard, Kyoto, Beijing, Edinburgh, Ravenstein (Netherlands), Tokyo, Strasbourg, St.Petersburg, Tübingen, Yerevan conferences of IACM).

[49]Bruce Lincoln concluded that Witzel in this publication theorizes "in terms of deep prehistory, waves of migration, patterns of diffusion, and contrasts between the styles of thought/narration he associates with two huge aggregates of the world's population [which] strikes me as ill-founded, ill-conceived, unconvincing, and deeply disturbing in its implications.

[59] Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel presented a number of arguments in support of their thesis that the Indus script is non-linguistic, principal among them being the extreme brevity of the inscriptions, the existence of too many rare signs increasing over the 700-year period of the Mature Harappan civilization, and the lack of random-looking sign repetition typical for representations of actual spoken language (whether syllable-based or letter-based), as seen, for example, in Egyptian cartouches.

He states that "even short noun phrases and incomplete sentences qualify as full writing if the script uses the rebus principle to phonetize some of its signs".

[64] Shorter papers provide analyses of important religious (2004) and literary concepts of the period,[65] and its Central Asian antecedents[66] as well as such as the oldest frame story (1986, 1987), prosimetric texts (1997), the Mahabharata (2005), the concept of rebirth (1984), the 'line of progeny' (2000), splitting one's head in discussion (1987), the holy cow (1991),[67] the Milky Way (1984),[68] the asterism of the Seven Rsis (1995,[69] 1999), the sage Yajnavalkya (2003), supposed female Rishis in the Veda (2009,)[70] the persistence of some Vedic beliefs,[71][72] in modern Hinduism (1989[73] 2002, with cultural historian Steve Farmer and John B. Henderson), as well as some modern Indocentric tendencies (2001-).

[94] Witzel and his allies argued that the changes were not of a scholarly but of a religious-political nature,[92][note 2] reflecting a limited view on Hinduism which excludes non-Vaishna traditions.