Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c11.24

c11.24

The designs are wholly geometric and representations of animals or plants have not yet been discovered. Chevrons Stein in Baluchistan and by Majumdar in Sind, sites which yielded an aggregate of many thousands of potsherds, there is nothing strictly comparable to the Quetta material as a group. The grey-ware bowls with black painted ornament, it is true, appear also in certain Zhob Valley sites (e.g. at Sur Jangal) and in Sistan, but for parallels to the predominant Buff ware we can only look outside India, to the west. Here we immediately find precise parallels - in a group of early pottery from sites in the Fars province of Persia, notably at Tal-i-Bakun near the site of Persepolis. We shall see, when dealing with the Shahi-tump cemetery at a later stage, that certain forms of this pottery had a very long survival in Southern Persia and Baluchistan, but this derivative ware is distinctively unlike that from the Quetta sites. Quetta ware really does seem comparable to that represented by the Tal-i-Bakun site itself, Susa I, Giyan V, and Sialk III, and may be equally early in date. This is supported by the evidence from Anau in Russian Turkestan, where intrusive elements appearing between Anau I and II include black-on-red painted ware, buff ware with ornament in red-and-black, and buff ware with distinctive stepped motifs - an assemblage which seems to point strongly to Baluchistan as its probable point of origin.