Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.148

c12.148

At Chanhu-daro a bead-maker’s shop was excavated, and the technique of making the long carnelian or agate beads could be recovered. The rough stone was first split and sawn into a bar, about 3 inches in length and square in section: a copper saw using an abrasive such as emery or powdered quartz was probably used. This bar was then carefully flaked to a rough cylinder and then ground and polished, and at the same time the central longitudinal perforation was bored, by means of tiny stone drills. These were rods about 1½ inches long and 0·12 inch in diameter, with a cup-shaped hollow at one end to hold the abrasive powder with which the actual boring was performed – an experiment showed that it took 20 minutes to drill to a depth of 1 millimetre by this means, using emery as an abrasive, and this would mean that it would take about 24 hours to drill a 3-inch bead! Even allowing for greater adroitness in the practised craftsman and the probable use of a wooden bow-drill into which the stone points were fitted, the making of these beads must have been a slow process, but in the immemorial stagnation of the Harappā civilization this would have counted for little.