Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.115

c14.115

The evidence is very slight, but it does imply inhumation under a mound, with some sort of ‘barrier’ set between dead and living. I have, following the views of Peake and others, suggested that this may be connected not only with the known practice of setting up ritual timber post-circles round tumuli in Bronze Age Europe, but also with the monuments known as *stupas* which suddenly appear in Mauryan and Sungan times in India (third and second centuries B.C.) as a part of the Buddhist cult. Many of these have elaborate stone versions of wooden fences surrounding them, the copying of carpenters’ techniques in masonry being so slavish as to imply that the wooden prototypes were no very distant memory. It seems generally agreed that the idea of the stupa, which in its ritual form enshrines a relic, is based on a burial mound originally covering an interment, and in some instances at least surrounded by a wooden post-and-rail fence, and that such prototypes would not be out of place in what we know of Aryan burial customs. At present we have no archaeological evidence of such burial mounds (the structures at Lauriya Nandigarh, sometimes claimed as such, were found to be in fact stupas themselves), and their identification remains among the challenges to Indian archaeology of future years.