Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9: Chapter II: Prelude – The Indian Stone Age
Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9
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Contents
- c9.s1 Notes to Chapter II — 2 parts
Chapter II: Prelude – The Indian Stone Age
c9.2
They think these finished specimens of skill in the art of chipping prove that the human race is of greater antiquity than has been previously supposed; and the fact that there is no other relic to prove the position they consider of no moment whatever.
T. L. Peacock, *Gryll Grange* (1860).
c9.3
THE archaeological record of prehistoric human settlement in India goes back to a period of geological remoteness whose immensity leaves it without very much meaning to the ordinary person. The vast periods of time involved in geological reckoning, even in those final phases of the natural sequence where traces of man first appear, though they can be expressed in terms of solar years, still leave the mind bewildered. Such reckoning, however, has been attempted, and the results have met with some measure of agreement; the methods employed involve a correlation between the geological phenomena of the Pleistocene period and the fluctuating curve of solar radiation with which those happenings seem to be closely connected, and the result has been to place the beginning of the period somewhere about 600,000 years ago. To this fantastically remote time seem to belong the earliest tools made of chipped stone which attest the existence of man as a tool-using being in the Old World – a hundred thousand years later there is no doubt about the relatively competent technique that has developed in making stone tools to certain recognizable patterns, distinguishable at least in Europe and probably in Africa. To this time too may belong the skull from Modjokerto in Java, claimed by some geologists as the earliest representative of the *Pithecanthropus* race of primitive man. From this time onwards tools and fossils carry on the story of man’s earlier evolution across the millennia to the coming of ‘modern’ times, which from the geological standpoint is a mere fifteen or twenty thousand years ago.
c9.4
The whole of this epoch constitutes the major geological division of the Quaternary Period and the sub-division known as the Pleistocene phase. Archaeologically the human remains and tools from Pleistocene deposits are classed together as the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age phase of man’s development, and both the Pleistocene and the Palaeolithic are further divided into two major subdivisions, Lower and Upper. But there are other important subdivisions of the Pleistocene geological sequence, linked to those fluctuations in solar radiation already mentioned.
c9.5
Throughout the Pleistocene there occurred certain enormous rhythmic climatic changes, spread over many thousand years but constituting alternate phases of comparative heat and cold in the northern regions of the Old World, and probably corresponding phases of wet or dry climate farther south. The cold phases, during which the limit of what is now the North Polar ice-sheet spread south in Europe to form a continuous ice mass to the River Thames in England and in the Himalayas of North India reached the foothills, are the familiar Ice Ages or glacial periods, separated by interglacial phases, both of varying periods of duration. Four main glacial periods have been recognized, separated by three interglacials, and the study of Palaeolithic man is closely linked to these great changes, which were directly responsible for the limits of land available for human occupation or settlement, and for the climate beyond the fringes of the zone of permanent, uninhabitable ice.
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The Palaeolithic period is one of immense, monumental inanition over millennia, with human progress, as deduced from the tangible remains of man’s handiwork that have survived, making but the slowest imaginable moves. During the ‘Great Interglacial’ period, probably lasting for nearly 200,000 years, the changes in the type of tool manufactured are matters of archaeological minutiae which reveal a slow increase in mastery of the technique of fracturing and flaking stones to the required shape; if in the later Pleistocene there appears some acceleration in modifying tools and weapons, this is only on the geological time-scale in which fifty thousand years may become a significant period of change.
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And as in time so in space the Palaeolithic cultures have an enormous duration. At a given period in the Pleistocene one can take, almost without selection, tools from South India, Africa and South England which show identical techniques of manufacture and form, and in all three areas essentially the same evolution can be traced leading up to and developing from these forms and methods of manufacture. Tool-making traditions in the Palaeolithic have trans-continental distributions: what happens at one end of the area seems to be happening more or less simultaneously at the other.
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Throughout the Palaeolithic period the basis of subsistence was hunting and food-gathering in one form or another, and the evidence permits us to visualize a small population living in tiny groups of families or small tribes, following the animals they killed for food over great tracts of country. Life was impermanent, precarious and isolated, and ideas could not readily be transmitted from group to group. Did psychologists permit us to believe in a group mind, we might well see it as responsible, at an early stage of the evolution of the human consciousness, for the slow changes in tool techniques over vast regions of the earth’s habitable surface.
c9.9
The surviving elements of Palaeolithic material culture are confined to tools made of imperishable stone, and until Upper Palaeolithic times we hardly have even the certain traces of any human settlement, if only a hunters’ camping-place. Discarded stone tools lying in river-gravels, an occasional human fossil, and frequently those of the animals hunted, are almost all we have to rely on for our study of Lower Palaeolithic man and his achievements. All archaeological study suffers from the accident of survival – the least perishable substances will survive alone out of a people’s material culture – but of no period of prehistory is our knowledge so imperfect as of the Palaeolithic. The study of these remote periods must always have a certain inhumanity and lack relationship to anything we know or can visualize within the comprehensible bounds of human history. It is, I think, impossible to do more in describing the earlier phases of the Indian Stone Age than to show how the known stone industries fit into our knowledge of the general pattern of human evolution in the Old World, and their relationship in time and space. Within these limits it is possible to indicate India’s place in the Palaeolithic so far as we have the evidence available: to treat the enormous period of the most ancient hunting peoples as a prelude to the periods which follow the introduction of agriculture in the fourth or fifth millennium B.C., and from which the bulk of our information on prehistoric India comes.
c9.10
In the geological deposits of the lower slopes of the Himalayas of the Kashmir and Punjab region it has been possible to trace a succession of glacial periods, each indicated by typical products of glacial action. These in turn can be related to the structure of the river valleys in the Rawalpindi area, where terraces have been formed by the flow of the river cutting into the detritus brought down in an earlier phase. These problems of glacial geology are complex, and here, without involving the reader in a discussion of its difficulties, one can do no more than stress this complexity. But the combined evidence from glacial phenomena and river-terraces in Northern India suggests that there were in Pleistocene times five glacial periods (‘Ice Ages’) separated by interglacials in that area.
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The importance of this sequence is that it appears to run more or less parallel with that long ago determined first in the Alps and later in Northern Europe. The Indian glaciations would appear to correspond to the main Ice Ages of Europe (excluding the first), and the last glaciations in India seem equivalent to the three periods of maximum intensity in the last European glaciation. As, both in Europe and in India, man-made tools have been found in many of the river terraces associated with this sequence of climatic changes, one would expect that the long-distance correlation established between the natural phenomena would be repeated in the tool types - and this is indeed the case, with parallel evolution in techniques taking place in both areas. It is probable that the North-west Indian climatic sequence can also be extended to take in Upper Burma and North China, and there is reason to think that the natural forces (probably mainly changes in solar radiation) responsible for the glacial and interglacial periods of the more northerly areas may also have produced the alternating periods of comparatively wet or dry climate (pluvial and interpluvial periods) implied by geology and the remains of fossil animals in South India and in East Asia.
c9.12
Against this natural background of changing climatic phases in Asia and Europe we can trace certain important major groupings of tool types, which presumably represent a similar grouping of human traditions or techniques. While the process of fracturing or flaking stone into the shape required for a specific purpose - cutting or cleaving, for instance - has certain basic principles in common wherever such manufacture is carried out, yet nevertheless there is some indication that within certain large geographical areas there was a preference, if nothing more, for characteristic techniques throughout the Lower Palaeolithic. The primary ivision of techniques, suggested by archaeologists when the possibility of making these major groupings was first envisaged, was into *core* and *flake* tools. In the former group, a tool is made by flaking or chipping away from a parent block until the resultant form is satisfactory - a principle broadly analogous to sculpture. In flake tools, however, the first process is to detach a large flake from a block of stone and then to work this into the finished tool. The production of core tools naturally produced flakes in the very process of manufacture, and these were in turn often made into tools, but there is always a very high preponderance of tools made from the core. In the flake industries, on the other hand, the core technique appears only when contact with true core-tool cultures can be traced.
c9.13
This original simple division has by some authorities been modified by the introduction of a third major group, allied to the flake industries but considered worthy of separate distinction, and comprising tools presumed to be used as choppers. This *chopper-chopping tool* group (as it has been called, very clumsily) is of particular importance to Asia, since it includes certain distinctive North Indian Lower Palaeolithic industries which are regarded by other archaeologists as within the flake cultures, without the necessity of further distinction. In South and Central India, however, there is abundant evidence of core cultures about which there is no dispute, and in certain regions fusion in techniques between the two main Indian groups can be seen.
c9.14
In India itself, unfortunately, no remains of the skeletons of Palaeolithic man have been discovered, though Asia has produced some of the most important evidence of man's early evolution. In the Upper Miocene deposits of the Siwalik Hills (within the Tertiary geological period, and separated from the Pleistocene by the intervening Pliocene phase, and many million years) have been discovered important remains of fossil apes which seem to have occupied a place in the evolution of the common stock from which man and the contemporary anthropoids eventually sprung. The evidence of these apes, and of others from Africa, probably equally ancient, suggests that certain elements in the skull of modern man (the structure of the lower jaw, for instance) are extremely ancient, and are foreshadowed in these fossils, and that the process of divergent specialization, which has gone on over the millennia, is partly one in which the skulls of contemporary apes are more specialized, and more remote from the common ancestral form, than our own.
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By the Middle Pleistocene it is possible to distinguish two main groups of fossil men, the Neoanthropic and Palaeoanthropic stems, and as they have already by this time reached a considerable degree of divergence, the period in which the undifferentiated common ancestors lived must be very remote. In Europe at least there is evidence that the Neoanthropic group, whose skulls differ little from that of modern man, is associated with the type of tools within the core cultures, and that the Palaeoanthropic stem, whose skulls bear greater resemblances to the common man-ape stock, may possibly be associated with the chopper-tool culture in East Asia; certainly by later Palaeolithic times the descendants of this particular group are essentially makers of flake-tools. The East Asian representative of the Palaeoanthropidae is the famous *Pithecanthropus* of Java, and his relatives from Choukoutien in China. In the latter site rough quartzite implements associated with the human fossils have been considered as comparable to others from North India and other Asiatic localities, as we shall see later.
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To sum up, the background of the Old Stone Age in India is the presence of climatic phases during the Pleistocene which can be correlated with similar phases in Europe, and probably with others in South India and Africa, where pluvial conditions replace glaciations. Against this natural etting can be set two main traditions in implement manufacture - one in the north of India related to other similar flake or chopper industries known from several East Asiatic sites; the other, in the south, belonging to the core-tool family whose distribution includes Africa and Western Europe. While no human fossils have been found, the evidence from elsewhere in the Old World suggests the tentative conclusion that tools of the flake or chopper tradition may be the products of the ‘Ancient’ or Palaeoanthropic stem in human evolution (such as *Pithecanthropus*), and that those of the core technique were made by the earliest representatives of *Homo sapiens* in the ‘Modern’ or Neoanthropic family. With this outline in our minds, we can turn to consider the Indian evidence in slightly more detail.
c9.17
The earliest indication of tool-making men in Pleistocene India appears to be in the last phase of the Second Glaciation or at the beginning of the Second (Great) Interglacial. In deposits of this geological age in Northern India, in the Potwar (Rawalpindi) region, and perhaps again in Central India, in the Upper Narbada valley (Hoshangabad, Jubbulpore, district) large rough flake-tools have been found, and should belong to the very end of the Lower Pleistocene phase and be contemporary with the earlier Pithecanthropoids in Java. In West and Central Europe at this time both core and flake industries are recognizable in distinctive forms. The Indian flake-industry is known as the *Pre-Soan* industry, to indicate its chronological position before the main series of Lower Palaeolithic cultures in the valley of the Soan River, a tributary of the Indus in the Potwar region of the Punjab. These early flake-tools have no close relatives in other Asiatic industries, as far as these are known at present.
c9.18
In the Second Interglacial Period of the Himalayas, however, well-defined human industries belonging to the two main groups already referred to can be traced in river terraces and other deposits in North-West India. It will be convenient to deal first with those tools which come within the flake (or chopper) family, which in India, as far as is known at present, are confined to a series of localities in the valley of the Soan, and the Indus, in Poonch, near Jhelum and in the Salt Range. This industry, which can be divided into three phases, has been called the Soan Culture.
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The Early Soan industry contains two main types of implements, one series made from rounded pebbles, which of course exercise some control over the form of the implement, as only the minimum flaking necessary to obtain a chopper shape is found. Such massive pebble-tools have been found in approximately contemporary (or rather earlier) Palaeolithic deposits in South and East Africa, but the simplicity of the form, so greatly dictated by the raw material, makes it dangerous to insist on such comparisons. The other types within the Early Soan comprise thick, heavy flakes and the equally crude parent cores from which they were detached. These flake-implements have been compared to the earliest flake-tools of Europe in the Clactonian industries, and some archaeologists would therefore include this aspect of the Soan within a general ‘Clactonian’ family of flake-tools distributed over most of the Old World. But recently it has been suggested by the American archaeologist Movius that a new group of chopper-tools must be recognized, allied to the Clactonian flake-tools but not part of it. In this chopper-tool group Movius would group the Soan industry as well as other similar industries in Burma (the Anyathian), Malaya (Tampanian), and Java (Pajitanian), and probably also the rough quartzite and limestone tools found with *Pithecanthropus* at Choukoutien. If this last correlation were correct, it would afford a very valuable link between tool-groups and types of fossil man, and give more reality to the East Asiatic chopper-tool group of the Middle Pleistocene as the products of the Palaeoanthropic branch of the human family.
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But at least we can say that the Soan industry is East Asiatic in affinities. Intervening sites between Northern India and Burma should appear if field-work is undertaken.
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The Soan industry develops in technique as the geological context becomes later - the Early Soan is mainly of early Middle Pleistocene date, within the Second Interglacial period and, dated by the solar radiation method, between about 400,000 and 200,000 years ago. By the end of this period, however, technical developments in stone-flaking can be seen dividing into two the industries which become distinct in the Late Soan industries, apparently beginning in Third Glacial times, but surviving later. In one of these the pebble element is retained in a pronounced form, but in the other this primitive feature is discarded and use is made of a technique of preparing the core before detaching the flake similar to that which appears more or less contemporaneously in South Africa, Palestine, and Western Europe. It is generally felt, however, that the appearance of this particular technique need indicate no more than parallel evolution in flake production in the various regions in which it occurs. These final phases of the Soan industries persist into the Last Interglacial period and beyond, and are distributed far afield in North-West India.
c9.22
The core-tool family of Lower Palaeolithic stone implements is represented by a large number of finds, centred in South-East India but also coming from Central and Western India and even represented in the area of the Soan Culture itself. To this Indian representative of the core-tool group the name *Madras Industry* (or *Madras-Acheul*) has been given from its area of apparent main concentration.
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The appearance of a few tools of this type from four sites of Second Interglacial date in the river-terrace system of the Soan and Indus enables us to correlate the industry with the glacial sequence and so with a general chronological scheme, and the persistence there of the cultural tradition the type of tool represents is shown by the occurrence of evolved forms of core-tools with Late Soan types in one site in the same region (Chauntra). In South and Central India, where evidence of pluvial periods replaces that of glaciation, core-tools have been found in a pluvial period which may equate in part with the Second Interglacial phase, but which goes on into Third Interglacial times or even later.
c9.24
The tool-type of the Madras Industry is essentially pear-shaped or oval, flaked on both faces in such a way as to produce a continuous cutting edge – the so-called ‘hand-axe’. There is constant interaction between the Madras and Soan industries, and, as one would expect, the core-tool element is strongest in the south and south-east, while the flake or chopper types dominate when one comes farther north – e.g. in the Kurnool area. A development in technique can be traced over the long range of finds from Early Middle to Early Upper Pleistocene times, in which this greater skill is acquired in the process of flaking, with the consequent production of more elaborately finished – and smaller – tools. There is some evidence that suggests that the primary flaking in the Madras industry was done (as in the Soan) with a hammer-stone, and the finer work of the later phases with a bar of wood or horn, which alone will reproduce the characteristic flat flake-scars. (This has been shown experimentally in the study of the European Palaeolithic industries.) But many of the hand-axes of the Madras in the Kurnool area, where Soan influence was strong, are more or less manufactured by Soan techniques of stone-flaking. In addition to the regions mentioned, tools of the Madras Industry have been found in India as far south as the Rivers Cauvery and Vaigai, in the west round Bombay and north of the Narbada, and north-east as far as the upper reaches of the Son, a tributary of the Ganges.
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The Madras Industry is almost exactly similar, in its tool techniques and their evolution, to the Lower Palaeolithic industries of South Africa of the Stellenbosch group - recently re-named, in terms of the analogous French sequence of core-tools, ‘Chelles-Acheul’. This use of French terminology reminds us that the core-tool province stretches north-westwards to include Europe and Southern England, and that in all areas - India, South Africa, Western Europe - strong similarities, sometimes amounting to identity, can be seen in the hand-axes and their techniques of manufacture. To this vast Eurafrican province, then, the South Indian Palaeolithic cultures belong, and, as far as is known at present, represent its farthest eastward extension. Probably the nearest core-tool area geographically is that of Arabia, where traces of similar industries exist. If the evidence from Swanscombe, in England, is accepted as representative of the whole province, we could attribute the core-tools to *Homo sapiens*, a skull almost indistinguishable from contemporary types having been found associated with a core-tool industry of the Acheul (or Madras) type at this site.
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It must be confessed that the evidence of stone tools in the Lower Palaeolithic of India takes us a very small way in visualizing anything of the life of their makers, but other areas of the world have contributed practically nothing more. We seem to have the imperishable remnant of the material culture of nomadic hunting groups, who may have been well equipped with other objects made of such impermanent substances as wood, fibre, grass, leaves or other organic materials such as skin and leather. The use to which the Soan choppers or the Madras hand-axes were put is unknown: we can guess, more or less unprofitably, at many uses to which a simple cutting or hacking tool might be turned, from chopping at meat or wood to grubbing for roots. The most striking feature of the Lower Palaeolithic industries is their immense duration - from about 400,000 to the end of the last glaciation, perhaps 10,000 years ago - and the slowness of human progress in technological achievement in that time.
c9.27
The final phases of the Palaeolithic period in India are still obscure. There seems to have been some continuance of the later Soan tradition in flake-tools with the characteristic technique of core preparation (the so-called Levallois technique) surviving in more than one area (the Punjab, the Narbada, and in South India) into the last Glacial period and possibly beyond, and it has been claimed that certain stone industries from Kurnool in the Dekkan and near Bombay represent a new type of tool based not on the massive flake but on the slender blade detached from a core.
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Now such industries are characteristic of the final phases of the Palaeolithic in Europe and in certain parts of Western Asia, during the Last Glacial Period. Comparative study of these industries has shown that they are likely to be divisible into three main early groups, all of which originate outside Europe and probably in Western Asia. Of these groups, which in European stratified sites can be shown as representing successive waves of folk-movement westwards, the second is the Aurignacian (formerly known as Middle Aurignacian), and is not known to occur farther east than Palestine and Transcaucasia; but it has been suggested that its point of origin should lie at least as far away as the Iranian plateau, and some of the Chinese industries of the Shuitungkou River suggest that Aurignacian forms may exist there. The third of these early Upper Palaeolithic industries, the Gravettian, is in fact known from sites as far east as Kurdistan, in Northern Iraq, and it is clear that the identification of true blade industries in India, whether or not related to the groups already known, would throw a very considerable light on Upper Palaeolithic problems.
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For the present there is not enough material to form a basis for discussion, and the most hopeful line of research would seem to be the excavation of caves and rock-shelters in India such as were so often inhabited as winter retreats by Upper Palaeolithic man in Europe and West Asia. Bone implements, described as similar to the Upper Palaeolithic Magdalenian forms, were found in 1884 in a cave near Kurnool with bones of extinct mammals, but they have been lost and nothing further is known about them; it is incidently most improbable that they were Magdalenian in type, since this culture is one restricted almost entirely to France. It will be seen however (p.237 below) that certain metal harpoons from the Ganges Valley, of mid second millennium B.C. date, are copies of barbed bone or antler points in the Upper Palaeolithic or Mesolithic tradition.
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In passing, mention must be made of the paintings found in certain Central Indian rock-shelters, as in those at Singanpur. These paintings have been claimed as Upper Palaeolithic and compared with the well-known series in the caves of Western France and Spain, but Gordon’s recent work has shown that not only is there no evidence of a Palaeolithic date, but that inferential evidence makes it difficult to date any of the paintings before the fifth century B.C. at the earliest. Conclusive evidence for the existence in India of any Upper Palaeolithic cultures comparable to those of Europe or the Near East is, therefore, still to be found. It may not be without significance that the Anyathian industry of Burma (a chopper-tool culture comparable to Soan) appears to have continued uninterrupted by outside influences until the local Neolithic, which may well have been a very recent event.
c9.31
In Europe and North and East Africa, and again in Palestine, it has been shown that in immediately post-glacial times, when the ice was making its final retreat to within its present bounds, various regional industries or cultures grew up, based on Upper Palaeolithic traditions of blade-tools but showing a marked tendency to reduce these blades to often absurdly small dimensions, presumably as the armament of composite tools made largely of wood or bone. In a large number of regions in South or Central India, south of a line joining the Upper Ganges to the Rann of Cutch, and sporadically elsewhere (in Sind and in North-West Punjab) there occur stone industries consisting of such diminutive implements, which are comparable to the Capsian group of post-glacial, Mesolithic industries of Europe and North Africa. The Capsian industry is represented in Kenya, and it has been claimed that certain skeletons from Gujerat, allegedly of the same date as a local microlithic industry, show Hamitic or Negroid characteristics. Whatever weight we give to this evidence, there is nevertheless a likelihood that the Indian microlithic industries are not unconnected with those moves from North Africa eastwards which can be traced in other regions.
c9.32
The Indian microlithic industries have not been found at any site in a geological deposit of known age, nor in such stratigraphical relationship to earlier human industries that a connexion with the final phases of Palaeolithic cultures can be shown. But there is evidence that the industries survived in certain areas at least down to early historic times. They may truly represent a transition from Palaeolithic industries to those of a more advanced or specialized type, but this transition need not have taken place at a period as remote as the parallel phenomenon in countries farther west, since the Palaeolithic cultures themselves may have a very long post-glacial survival.
c9.33
The fact that the microlithic industries of India seem to represent the arrival of new peoples, probably from the west, rather than the fact that they are an evolution out of a more or less non-existent Upper Palaeolithic blade industry, relates them more to those cultures which follow them than to those they supersede. It is not known whether the Indian communities which made the microliths were (as their counterparts in Europe were) hunters and food-gatherers in the Palaeolithic tradition or whether they were agriculturalists;
c9.34
still less is it known whether it can be shown that in India, as in certain other regions of the Old World, there existed a stage of human progress in which the arts of agriculture and stock-breeding were practised, but metal was not known – a so-called Neolithic stage of development.
c9.35
There certainly exist a vast quantity of ground stone axes of the type known in ‘Neolithic’ contexts elsewhere, from many sites scattered over the country, not infrequently associated with microliths, but so far no distinctive habitation site has been found which places allegedly ‘Neolithic’ material in stratigraphical relationship to the earliest known agricultural communities in Baluchistan or Sind. Typology or colour-staining of the surface of an axe is a very untrustworthy guide to antiquity, and claims for a high dating for surface finds on these grounds can be ignored. On the other hand, certain stratified sites have produced ground stone axes and pottery in a distinct cultural layer, and these need to be considered.
c9.36
The South Indian stone-axe cultures have been put on a new footing by Wheeler’s recent work in Mysore State. His earlier work on the Coromandel coast in 1945 had provided the first fixed date in the sequence of indigenous cultures in that region, by establishing their relationship to imported coins and pottery of the first century A.D. in a Roman trading-post at Arikamedu near Pondicherry. With dated types of native pottery now identified it was possible to use this evidence in Mysore in conjunction with finds of Roman coins of the same period, and in the Chitaldrug region a sequence was established as follows:
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I. *Stone Axe Culture*. This was characterized by polished, pointed-butt axes of local rock and a crude microlithic industry in jasper, flint, agate, and crystal. Two small copper objects show that metal was known but extremely scarce. Pottery was hand-made, rarely painted or incised.
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The beginnings of this phase may go back to early in the first millennium B.C., and it was followed about 200 B.C. by a
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II. *Megalithic Culture*. This was an intrusive iron-using culture, making wheel-turned pottery and building elaborate megalithic tombs. It continued into the first century A.D., overlapping with
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III. The historical *Andhra Culture* dated in its earlier phases by Roman coins of the early first century A.D. and pottery of Arikamedu types, and continuing to the third century A.D.
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This evidence, then, shows that in certain areas of South India at least the ‘Neolithic’ cultures are of relatively late date, surviving almost to the dawn of recorded history. Wheeler has published a map showing the known distribution of stone axes and microliths in India; they appear to occur almost exclusively to the south and east of a line from the Gulf of Cambay to Lucknow, with a few microlithic sites between Cambay and Karachi.
c9.42
Extravagant claims have been made for a very early Neolithic culture in Kashmir. The excavations at Burzahom, between Srinagar and Gandarbal, do not seem to have been very satisfactory, and the report upon them is certainly most inadequate. A sequence was found as follows:
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Layer A – Buddhist, fourth century A.D.
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Layer B – Sherds of highly polished black ware and others with incised patterns.
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Layer C – Unweathered post-glacial loess, 9 feet in thickness, at the base of which, on virgin soil, was a hearth with polished axes, bone awls, and pottery.
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In interpreting this sequence the excavators compared the pottery from Layer B with the Jhangar Ware described in Chapter V, which is itself undated but is certainly later than the middle of the second millennium B.C. On the other hand the polished ware sounds as though it might be Wheeler’s ‘Northern Black Polished Ware’, known for instance from Taxila, dated between the fifth and second centuries B.C., and spread widely over the Mauryan kingdom. But, whatever the date of Layer B, it is obviously highly dangerous to regard the 9 feet of loess as implying such a passage of time that the Neolithic material at its base would be of an antiquity ‘far beyond’ the earliest Mesopotamian agricultural cultures of the fifth or sixth millennia B.C., as has been done by the excavators. There is really no valid reason for regarding the Kashmir Neolithic culture as of any proven antiquity beyond perhaps the first millennium B.C., followed locally by a relatively rapid accumulation of wind-deposited soil.
c9.47
In Sind, at Rohri and Sukkur, and again near Karachi at Drigh Road, a characteristic industry made from chert or flint from the Sukkur limestone has been known for many years. Some long thin blades and the conical cores from which they have been struck are precisely comparable to those from the Harappā Culture of c. 2500–1500 B.C., and the rather earlier cultures such as Amri in Sind or those in the Zhob Valley, which again produce a similar flint industry. But other implements suggest an independent and probably early tradition, while the presence of archaic survivals, such as Levallois flaking and oval hand-axes, in addition to the cores and blades, does suggest that the Rohri industry may be of relatively great antiquity. Of the date of the apparently comparable industry from Raichur in Hyderabad (Dekkan) State one can say nothing.
c9.48
Our evidence, therefore, shows that Lower Palaeolithic cultures within the core and flake (or chopper) groups were both present in India at the beginning of Middle Pleistocene times and that they survived in archaic forms long after the close of the last Glacial Period in a way rather comparable to that of the Palaeolithic industries of Burma. The microlithic flint industries may be contemporary with those of fairly early post-glacial date in Europe and the Near East, or they may be later; in any event they seem likely, in the absence of the Upper Palaeolithic blade industries which might be considered ancestral to them in India, to represent a new cultural, and perhaps ethnic, element. These microlithic cultures again had a long survival, side by side with communities making pottery and ground stone axes in the Neolithic tradition. The origin of these Neolithic cultures is unknown, though they are more likely to be the result of folk-movements from the west than of independent invention within India. Neither in Central India nor in Kashmir can such cultures be dated satisfactorily much before 500 B.C. on the evidence at present available.
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The blade industries in Sind, while certainly in part related to their counterparts in the Amri or later cultures, nevertheless have some claims to a Palaeolithic ancestry and a relatively ancient date. Other aspects of the flint industry are presumably introductions to the region from farther west with the earliest agriculturalists.
c9.50
To understand the subsequent prehistory of India we must look beyond its present frontiers to the other lands of Western Asia. A knowledge of the sequence of prehistoric cultures in Persia and Mesopotamia is necessary for an understanding of the Indian material, which has to be compared and equated with that of the more westerly lands, our knowledge of which is greater. So in the next chapter we turn to the story of the early agricultural communities in Western Asia between the fifth or sixth and the second millennium B.C.
Notes to Chapter II
c9.s1.1
Pleistocene cultures and chronology in the Orient as well as elsewhere are discussed by Professor F. E. Zeuner in *Dating the Past* (1946), and the Indian material is conveniently summarized by V. D. Krishnaswami in *Ancient India*, no. 3 (1947), 11-57. The most important special studies are H. H. De Terra and T. T. Paterson, *Studies on the Ice Age in India and Associated Human Cultures* (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1939), and H. L. Movius, *Early Man and Pleistocene Stratigraphy in Southern and Eastern Asia* (Papers of the Peabody Museum, Harvard, 1944). Accessible summaries of the main points in this latter book and of the current views on *Pithecanthropus* are given by Professor W. E. Le Gros Clark in *Antiquity*, XIX (1945), 1-5; *ibid.*, XX (1946), 9-12. For a general summary of our knowledge of fossil men in Asia and elsewhere, see the same writer’s *History of the Primates* (1949).
c9.s1.2
The Upper Palaeolithic in Western Asia and in Europe is treated by Professor Dorothy Garrod in *Proc. Prehist. Soc.*, IV (1938), 1-26. For the cave-paintings in India, see Krishnaswami’s paper referred to above, and Col. D. H. Gordon’s paper on those of the Mahadeo Hills in *Indian Art and Letters*, X, 35-41. For the stone axe culture in Mysore, Professor Wheeler’s excavation report is in *Ancient India*, no. 4 (1948), 181-310. He has described the ‘Northern Black Polished Ware’, referred to in connexion with the Burzahom site, in *Ancient India*, no. 1 (1946), 55-58.