Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c8.20

c8.20

That there is no inherent impossibility in applying these standards and methods to Indian excavations has been happily, but all too briefly, shown by the recent work carried out in India by an archaeologist trained in, and an outstanding exponent of, the highest standards in European techniques. Professor R. E. Mortimer Wheeler's excavations on Indian sites between 1945 and 1948 have cut ruthlessly across the old traditions whereby stratification was ignored and ‘levels’ were fixed by measurement from a datum. By this ‘incredible system’, in Wheeler's words, ‘the so-called “stratification” of the Indus Valley civilization is dominated, not by local observation, but at long range by the sea-level at Karachi. ... It is a survival of an obsolete device evolved in the alluvial plains of the great river-valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia as a rough substitute for exact observation in ill-controlled “mass-excavations”. It has no place whatsoever in the technique of modern field-archaeology.’ The 1946 excavations of the hitherto unrecognized defences of the citadel of Harappā have given a new significance to the city, and have established the first sure facts in the stratigraphy of the site.