Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c11.s1.5

c11.s1.5

In RG II we see newcomers arriving at the site, building houses with boulder footings over the compacted debris of RG I, and making a superb painted pottery, turned on the wheel and decorated with fine stylized figures of humped bulls and of black buck, painted with great skill in black paint on a background which varies from pinkish or buff to a dark terra-cotta colour, and without the use of any secondary red colour (Fig. 13). A few sherds of the typical ‘Bull’ pottery of RG II have been found elsewhere in the Zhob Valley, notably at Sur Jangal, but the new material from Rana Ghundai enables us to see that the pots were very fine, well-made bowls, with either a foot-ring or a pedestal base, and each with a frieze of stylized bulls or black buck, in which the vertical elongation of the legs and horns is a contrast to the horizontal elongation of the Kulli animals. There is a crisper, less naturalistic handling of the RG II animals than of those in the Kulli Culture, and as we shall see there are good parallels to the style of bowls and the treatment of the animals found in Northern Persia.