Prehistory and Protohistory in India and Pakistan c5.s7: Work Ahead
Prehistory and Protohistory in India and Pakistan c5.s7
- Language
- English
Work Ahead
c5.s7.1
Both have still much to achieve. So far a mere skeleton sequence of cultures has been obtained in prehistory and protohistory, but the whole sociological background is missing. In the former the old techniques are to be perfected and new ones adopted. We are far behind Europe and America and even Africa in this respect. Not only are the latest scientific methods of dating the river and other deposits—called geochronology—suitable to Indian conditions are to be learnt and applied assiduously, but attempts must be made to understand the distribution of hand-axe and other prehistoric as well as protohistoric cultures on an ecological basis. No caves or rock-shelters have yet been excavated.28a Thus in a sense, Indian prehistory is, where the European was in 1860. Only one redeeming feature is that in India stone implements are not being collected nor excavations conducted by untrained workmen and amateurs and momentous theories built on some selected material by the scholars working on them.
c5.s7.2
28a Last year a rock-shelter near Hoshangabad was partly excavated.
c5.s7.3
However, a long way lies ahead which should be trodden by trained men alone so that we shall avoid all those pitfalls which others experienced.
c5.s7.4
In this work, therefore, care has been taken to use the old concepts and terms which have become standard, though found defective and fallacious, with as much precision, as the data at our command allow us.
c5.s7.5
The Four Ages in India
c5.s7.6
First the Three Age Theory of THOMSEN. When the prehistoric archaeology in India is divided or grouped into Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Chalcolithic, it is generally understood that man first knew the use of stone, but not of copper or iron. In this Stone Age, other perishable objects like bone²⁸ᵇ and wood might have been used, but as only stone has survived, it is called by the most prominent object or artifact of the period. According to the geological and artifactual evidence, this Stone Age is divided into (a) Early or Lower Palaeolithic and (b) Middle Palaeolithic,²⁹ leaving room for its final phase (c) Upper Palaeolithic when it is fully discovered and identified.
c5.s7.7
²⁹ As explained in the Preface, this may now be called "Middle Stone Age" and the subsequent "Late Stone Age."
c5.s7.8
Palaeolithic
c5.s7.9
Geographically, these Stone Ages were fairly wide-spread, almost coextensive, barring high lands and thickly forested regions and purely coastal or deltaic regions. Sind, Saurashtra, Kerala, Tinnevelly, Assam, Nepal and West Rajputana did not perhaps witness the Early Palaeolithic; and all these except Sind, Saurashtra and West Rajputana did not witness the Middle Stone Age or Palaeolithic either.
c5.s7.10
Thus, when the term "Palaeolithic" is used, it has slightly restricted connotation. Straightaway, it does not apply to the whole of India.
c5.s7.11
The climate during the first was comparatively humid than the second. Both were followed by a period of relative dryness.
c5.s7.12
Economically, man was a savage, a hunter, though he might have subsisted largely on fruits, roots and grubs during the Early Palaeolithic and on the chase with the help of the bow and arrow or/and spear during the Middle Palaeolithic. Lastly, though so far only stone tools have been known of this stage of man's life and nothing else—man's other aspects of life—social, moral, religious—still the word "culture" is applied to it, because stone tools of certain type constantly recur in both the Stone Ages. These form a leading characteristic and give an inkling of the material culture of the man. Hence, instead of grouping the stone tools into simple "assemblages" or "industries," a term of greater significance and connotation, viz. culture, has been used. Strictly, only the former two terms are applicable.
c5.s7.13
Mesolithic or (Late Stone Age)
c5.s7.14
The term "Mesolithic" is again used in a much more limited sense. It has been amply proved in a number of sites in England, Western and Northern Europe, parts of Africa, Palestine that the Upper Palaeolithic was succeeded by certain climatic changes, during which man used tiny stone tools, called "microliths." The tools, though small, heralded an advance in technological stage and implied the discovery of the principle of compound tools. Economically, the man was still a hunter, and preferred to live in lightly forested, sandy regions. It is argued from certain types of tools occurring in certain context that the man, in a few areas, might be practising primitive agriculture, that is, cutting with stone-teeth sickles naturally growing stalks of grain—like wild barley and wheat. Thus the term "Mesolithic" has a stratigraphic, chronological, typological and economic significance, but not universally, and much less in every part of India. Nor can we equate in time or content the various Mesolithic Cultures of India, either with each other within India or with any outside India.
c5.s7.15
28b Scholars like Professor DART have postulated an earlier "Age of Bone." See "Bone Tools at Makapansgat Australopithecine Locality, Central Transvaal" in the Archaeological Bulletin, vol. XIII, No. 51, 1958, p. 74 ff. The maker of these bone tools is called Australopithecus prometheus.
c5.s7.16
However, with all these limitations, the term "Mesolithic" helps us in distinguishing a few stone-using cultures in a few regions from those of the preceding Stone Age Cultures and the succeeding metal-using cultures of the protohistoric period.