Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c13.20

c13.20

Do these objects represent trade or migration? To anticipate the further evidence discussed below, the latter seems the more likely, and, since the pottery represents a local tradition, it seems likely too that migration was one of persons travelling light, bringing with them only the portable property of seals, spears, and battle-axes. Can these be war-bands, enslaving or marrying the local women, who would make the pots, and is the Shahi-tump cemetery in some way related to the sacking of the Baluchistan villages? Skulls are slender evidence and deductions from their measurements must be used with caution, but the anatomist who examined the skull of the Shahi-tump man buried with the spear and axe reported that it showed ‘traces of mixed origin and in certain respects tends to approximate to the Caspian or Nordic type of skull’. Unfortunate though the second adjective is in a modern context, it does at least seem probable that the Shahi-tump cemetery was that of newcomers to the region, rather than that of the old population, with a few novel types of seals and weapons acquired by trade.