Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c8.22

c8.22

Side by side with the collection of material in India and Baluchistan, new work was being carried out in other countries of Western Asia. Iran in particular was yielding up the secrets of her prehistory to the excavations of the French and Americans in the 1930's, and the indefatigable Sir Aurel Stein made a noteworthy series of explorations from Fars to Lake Urmia which filled in the geographical background for the distribution of the cultures found in stratified contexts in the excavations. Already in 1933 Professor Gordon Childe had made a penetrating synthesis of the North-west Indian material in its relation to the other cultures of the most ancient East; ten years later the accidents of war brought me to New Delhi and enabled me to start on a revision of Childe's basic work in the light of the accumulated new knowledge of the intervening decade, and this has been continued since the war by Dr Donald McCown of the Oriental Institute of Chicago.