Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9.46

c9.46

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.