Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c4.1

c4.1

THIS BOOK is a tentative sketch of a large and growing subject. Much of its material is, in the present stage of research, fragmentary and disjointed; in fact, the archaeology of the subcontinent is passing through that phase of increasing complexity which inevitably precedes a more comprehensive synthesis. The examples here presented are chosen mainly as representative of the cultural trends in the arterial valleys and on the great plains and plateaux, where the major developments took place. Apart from incidental references, no attempt is made to describe the static communities which still, in the highlands and backwoods, occupy an appreciable part of India and often preserve their tribal usages and techniques surprisingly intact in a closing world. There is much about these remote peoples that the archaeologist would like to know but does not. His turn will come; meanwhile the anthropologist holds the field.