Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c11.133

c11.133

Before leaving the clay figurines and toys of the Kulli Culture we must notice one important type of model more likely to be a toy than a votive offering. We saw that a bull on wheels was found at one site - clay wheels for such movable models have been found more than once, and at Mehi and Shahi-tump there have also been found bits of clay models of carts. Now clay carts are very common indeed in the Harappā Culture, and fragments of them turn up on almost every site of the culture, however small, so their presence at Shahi-tump and Mehi may be explained in terms of Harappā imports. The Shahi-tump fragment is, indeed, very much of the Harappā type, and though that from Mehi is of a less common form, there are pretty good parallels for it at Chanhu-daro at least, so that on the whole the carts in the Kulli Culture cannot be claimed as necessarily an integral part of the culture, and are more likely to belong to Harappā trade and traders in the Mashkai and the Makran regions. In the hill country of Baluchistan, carts would be less essential to the farming communities than in the Indus plain.