Prehistory and Protohistory in India and Pakistan c5.s7.1

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.