Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.s3: South India
Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.s3
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South India
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South of the Narbadā, the pebble industry dwindles but does not completely vanish. Such at least is the evidence as it stands, with the proviso that, where handaxes or cleavers are present, there is a natural tendency to collect them at the expense of cruder pebble artifacts, and so to create a false bias. As things are, the most southerly site at which pebble-tools have been recognized in quantity is in Mayurbhanj in Orissa, where river-sections near Kamarpal have produced a mixed handaxe and pebble industry resembling the Early Soan but with the pebble-tools in a minority.²⁰ Farther south, pebble-tools occur only in small proportion, though other types or industries supplement and extend the Madras handaxes and cleavers which dominate the Peninsula. At first sight, a tenuous link between north and south is sustained by a distinctively mid-Pleistocene fauna. Thus at Nevasa on the Pravara river, tributary of the Godāvarī, between Ahmadnagar and Aurangābād, 150 miles east-north-east of Bombay, a hard cemented basal gravel (I), which is capped successively by two further gravels (II and III) and a thick layer of yellow-brown silt, has produced teeth of *Bos namadicus*;¹ and both *Elephas namadicus* and hippopotamus have been found in comparable gravels of the Godāvarī itself. As between the Soan and the Narbadā, a faunistic equation of this kind seems to make sense (p. 38), but it must be confessed that a similar equation between the Soan and the Pravara is at present less easy. Thus the basal Gravel I of the Pravara, which produced *Bos namadicus*, is said to have yielded a handaxe-cleaver industry of Early-Middle Acheulian type (using trap and dolerite); whereas the Boulder Conglomerate of the Soan, which produced *Elephas namadicus*, yielded only the crude 'Pre-Soan' industry. This apparent unconformity may represent a true technological variation between the two regions, or may be due rather to contemporary differences between the tropical and the submontane fauna; but it needs watching, and illustrates the perils of hasty equation.
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On the Pravara, the Acheulian industry occurs also, though rarely, in Gravels II-III; in particular, an unrolled handaxe of chalcedony was found in Gravel II, 8 feet above the top of Gravel I, and a large pear-shaped handaxe of trap, flaked on both sides by fine step-technique and with subsequent retouch along the edge, one side weathered and the other side in mint condition, lay as high as the surface of Gravel III, under the final silt. But the normal industry of the upper two gravels was of another kind, consisting of scrapers, blades, cores, burins and points of agate, chert, chalcedony and jasper. Here is an acceptable Upper Palaeolithic craftsmanship of a sort at present inadequately represented in our Indian material, and further reference will be made to it in the next chapter.
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Fig. 6
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Further south, in and near the Nallamalais Range of the Kurnool-Cuddapah districts north of Madras, a number of
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Fig. 6 ‘Series 1’ from Nevasa, Pravara valley: trap handaxe flaked by fine step-technique, with subsequent retouch. 1/2
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sites have produced a large assemblage of implements which were analysed in 1930 in a classic paper by Cammiade and Burkitt.¹⁸ The geological environment indicates a succession of prolonged pluvials and interpluvials, the basis being a reddish clayey mass of 'laterite', largely of hydrated alumina and iron-oxide, formed by the weathering of crystalline rocks under torrential rainfall alternating with dry seasons over a long stretch of time. It was on the weathered surface and in washed-down deposits of this laterite, when 'the swamps and forests of the laterite period gave place to large open plains' under supervening dry conditions, that human relics first appeared upon the scene. They consist largely of handaxes (classified as 'Series 1'), unrolled and stained by a largely-vanished capping of laterite. The implements are characteristically made from quartzite pebbles; they show the bold flaking and irregular edges which are encouraged by the coarse material and must not therefore be over-emphasized in a typological classification. Amongst the handaxes is an occasional 'rostro-carinate', with flat ventral plane produced by the removal of a large flake, and a keel-like back formed by part of the original surface of the pebble—a type similarly associated with handaxes at Victoria West in South Africa and in the Oldowan of East Africa.²³
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¹⁸ [Note text not visible on page]
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Fig. 9.1
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Above the laterite-stained pebble-bed which produced the handaxes, a red clay laid down under renewed pluviation yielded flakes ('Series 2'), and other sites in the region are marked by flake-industries at an equivalent horizon. Handaxes are now the exception. Some of the flakes have prepared striking-platforms, others have not. Occasional examples may fairly be described as burins; one as 'a double-ended burin of a very Upper Palaeolithic appearance'. Whilst this post-handaxe series must represent (a part of) the later Palaeolithic of peninsular India, it is at the best a crude product, at a lower level of technical achievement than either the best handaxes and cleavers of 'Series 1', or the more slender backed-blades, planing-tools, end-scrapers, core-scrapers, and burins, made of materials of a more flinty nature, classified as 'Series 3'. The latter occurs on the surface of the red clay, and prepares the way for 'Series 4', which marks the topmost deposits and is generally microlithic in character (agate and quartzite). This belongs to the next chapter.
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Madras industry: 1, handaxe trimmed all over by controlled flaking; 2, similar, with pebble butt; 3, cleaver; 4, handaxe. All from Attirampakkam. 1/2
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Of the chronology of these industries, all that can be said at present is that not less than three pluvial episodes are seemingly identifiable since the first appearance of mankind in these parts, and the successive climatic phases were certainly of long duration. But it must again be affirmed that any attempt to equate these pluvials with the three glaciations associated with implements in the Potwar area of the north is premature on the evidence available.
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A parallel series was identified by T. T. Paterson in and above the Red Hills near Madras, where four terrace surfaces were recognized.¹² Here a considerable layer of detrital or redeposited laterite overlay a well-developed Boulder Conglomerate; and the laterite was eroded to produce Terrace 1, on which were minor deposits of sand and gravel. This in turn was eroded to form Terrace 2, where thicker gravels were deposited and then covered by alluvium. Three groups of implements are associated with this sequence at a number of sites.
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¹² [Note text not visible on page]
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At Vadamadurai Tank, north-west of Madras, the Boulder Conglomerate at the base of this sequence produced handaxes and cores of the first group, which, on grounds of typology and patination, falls in turn into an earlier and a later series. The earlier series includes very crude Abbevillian handaxes with thick pebble butts and much remaining cortex; the flaking denotes a 'stone' technique producing large irregular flake scars. The cores belonging to this series were large, also with rough irregular flaking. Both handaxes and cores bore a very deep whitish crust. The later series is less heavily patinated and is typologically more advanced. It is marked by handaxes of Early Acheulian type, showing the beginnings of a step-flaking technique, though large free flaking is still commonly used. The cores are mostly discoidal, with fairly regular alternate flaking.
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The overlying laterite gravel had stained to a characteristic red colour the implements of the second group. This comprises neater and more regularly shaped (ovate and pear-shaped) handaxes of Middle Acheulian type showing considerably more step-flaking, together with flakes which have only primary flaking and unfaceted platforms.
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The third group has no laterite-staining and but little patination. The handaxes may be classified as Upper Acheulian, and include both ovates with small, fairly flat step-flaking, and
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Fig. 8 Madras industry: 1, ovate; 2, cordate with secondary step-flaking along margin. Both from Attirampakkam
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long pointed forms with thick pebble butts and large, neat free-flaking. The cores are discoidal; the flakes still have unfaceted platforms, but a few have been retouched for possible use as side-scrapers. One cleaver is present. This third group belongs to the gravels of Terrace 1.
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Attirampakkam near Madras is an important site which demands further work. Professor Zeuner informs me that the early series here, consisting of pebble-tools, flakes and handaxes, is pre-laterite. Then came a laterite-weathering phase, [Figure: Figs. 7-8] during which the decomposition of the earlier implements proceeded. This was followed by the denudation of the laterite deposit, and the sediments thus formed in the valleys contain an Acheulian industry with a strong flake-component. The so-called Attirampakkam 5 series (late Acheulian) is fresh and is found in the lowest or latest terrace.
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In recent years fresh fieldwork has been carried out in the vicinity of Giddalur, District Kurnool.²⁴ The Series 1 and 2 of the Cammiade-Burkitt analysis have again been recognized, and within them a gradation from earlier and rougher to later and more evolved has been partially established on the basis of the degree of rolling present in the individual specimens. Thus the Abbevillio-Acheulian handaxes and associated rostro-carinates of Victoria West type, made out of pebbles which often preserve cortical patches, are liable to exhibit a fair measure of rolling. With them are associated Clactonian flakes and cores, likewise rolled, and flake-made handaxes. The more advanced Acheulian ovates and handaxes, ranging from narrow, elongated specimens to wide, almost discoidal forms, are generally fresher in appearance; but no clear geological stratification is described. Cleavers are abundant, and flakes with prepared platforms, of Levallois type, occur though in a small minority. One or two scrapers, including a double-ended scraper with 'nibbled' retouch, recall Upper Palaeolithic industries of the West, but typologically the two Series may be described generally as of a Mid-Palaeolithic facies. Frequent cross-references to African analogies are convincing, though the significance of these comparisons is matter for discussion. Here the problem in relation to the Indian Palaeolithic as a whole, can only be indicated as a background to further research.
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[Figure: Fig. 9] Setting aside for the moment the blade-and-scraper groups such as the 'Upper Pravara' which may prove to be the nucleus of a widespread Upper Palaeolithic, we are left with three main Early-Mid Palaeolithic series: A, the large-flake Pre-Soan industries; B, the pebble points and choppers represented pre-eminently by the main Soan succession; and C, the Madras handaxes and cleavers. Of these, Series A stands for the time-being in isolation. The Boulder Conglomerate in which it occurs has been equated tentatively with the Boulder Conglomerate of the Madras Red Hills which has yielded pebble-tools of the 'pebble-handaxe' type along with biface core tools and flakes;²⁸ but the equation lacks all evidence, and cannot be used as an indication that pebble-tools appear earlier in south India than in the north. It must be accepted that pebble-choppers are significantly dominant in the north (the Punjab), although on a number of sites handaxes occur with them as a subordinate element. In central India the position is reversed; the handaxes are now in the ascendant, and south of the Narbadā and Orissa the pebble-choppers are in a small minority.
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Fig. 9 Giddalur I: 1, quartzite rostro-carinate; 2–4, quartzite pebble-tools and handaxe. ½
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Fig. 10
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The first impression conveyed by this differential distribution is that the two series are essentially separate and complementary, with dispersal centres respectively in the north and in the south. This may be the correct answer; the seeming separateness of the series is slightly reinforced by the fact that the handaxes which accompany pebble-choppers in the Early Soan are wholly or largely absent from the Late Soan, which is otherwise its logical sequel, and a comparable sequence recurs in the Narbadā valley. Here it may be that a changing environment or population is the answer; but, even so, the seeming ease with which the two main elements of the Early Soan or the Lower Narbadā group slide apart is at least consistent with a divided tradition. Again, in the Sabarmati valley evolved Acheulian handaxes have been observed alongside a crude pebble and flake industry with which they have no obvious affinity. A somewhat similar disharmony is apparent in the Series 2 of the Nallamalais Range in south India, where the splendid handaxes of Series 1 are largely replaced by a crude pebble and flake industry which is not readily explained by the normal processes of devolution, though again a changing environment (of which we know very little) may be a cause. Certainly the possibility of independent origins for the pebble choppers and the handaxes must be kept open, and receives some support from wider geographic considerations. Before considering these, however, we must glance at the parallel situation in Africa.²³
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Fig. 10 Giddalur I: 1-3, cleavers; 4, discoidal 'Clactonian' core; 5, pebble-chopper; 6, small handaxe showing removal of alternate flakes on opposite sides. 1/2
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There the Victoria West (Cape Province) rostro-carinates have already been cited as analogies to the rostro-carinates of the Madras industry. But the similarities between the Indian and the African Palaeolithic are both more extensive and perhaps more significant than isolated resemblances suggest. Both in East and in South Africa the earliest Stone Age industry consists of pebbles from which one or two flakes have been struck to produce an irregular cutting edge. The industry is ascribable to the Lower Pleistocene, but it was of long duration and an alleged East African manifestation, known as the Kafuan from the river Kafu in Uganda, has been thought to exhibit a modest evolution. Here however a word of warning, applicable alike to India and to Africa, must be interpolated. The most primitive of human industries, whether in Europe, Africa or elsewhere, are necessarily liable to approximate to natural forms; and conversely, natural forms are sometimes liable to pass for primitive human artifacts. Various factors such as the quantitive occurrence of these 'artifacts' in a given deposit, and their occurrence or non-occurrence with human bones or other vestiges, help to shape a final judgement, but a subjective element is likely to remain. And so it is that the Kafuan series is not universally accepted as a human industry at all, and must be used with caution as a supporting analogue to Indian industries, whilst these in turn, in their more rudimentary forms, should only be accepted with the greatest circumspection. I have, in fact, little doubt that already in India more chipped pebbles have been received as artifacts than are, or should be, dreamt of in our archaeology.
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We are on surer ground in East Africa with Leakey's 'Oldowan' pebble-industry, which is ascribed to the lower part of the Middle Pleistocene but may be somewhat earlier. Here crude choppers made by the removal of flakes in two directions along one side of the pebble seem to merge logically into very simple pebble-handaxes flaked in three or four directions so that two jagged cutting edges intersect in a point at one end. Subsequently, as at Victoria West, some of the implements display rostro-carinate characters, with the flat ventral surface and keeled dorsal surface described above. These characters combine with those of the bi-convex handaxes, and finally a mature Acheulian type, based on cores or large flakes, is achieved. It is possible here to regard the whole process from pebble to Acheulian handaxe as organic and evolutionary. With the Acheulian handaxes, other elements of more disputable ancestry—straight-edged cleavers, tortoise cores and Levalloisian flakes—complete the conventional assemblage. But it is not unimportant to add that simpler pebble-tools remained in use long after the handaxe complex was fully developed.
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If from this orderly picture we return to the Indian problem, the thought occurs that there, too, the pebble-chopper and handaxe industries *may* not be unrelated. Pebbles sharpened bilaterally like great clumsy pencils have suggested the name ‘pebble-handaxes’ (above p. 35), and they may in turn, with the supplementary use of large flakes as cores, have contributed directly to the development of the Abbevillio-Acheulian types. The Acheulian cleaver, as in Africa, is more difficult to fit into any such evolutionary scheme, but may itself be in origin a Clactonian flake with secondary dressing. A real if partial affinity *may* in fact subsist between some facets of the pebble (and flake?) industries and of the great handaxe complex; whether by mere interaction or by genuine kinship is another matter.
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There remains, however, the overriding factor of geographical distribution. This has been discussed in general terms by Hallam Movius,²⁴ who is inclined to write off the near-handaxes of Java and Malaya for technical reasons as an independent development and to exclude both the Acheulian handaxe and the Levalloisian flake entirely from the Far East.* This leaves the pebble—or chopper—industries in dominant possession there, in contrast to India, Western Asia, Africa, and central, southern and western Europe, in all of which Acheulian handaxes and flake implements manufactured by the prepared striking-platform and tortoise-core technique are at home. But, as we have seen, the handaxe distribution is not exclusive. In North, East and South Africa, as in many parts of India, there is a basic or background pebble-chopper industry, the uncontaminated survival of which in the Far East may be due to the (alleged) failure of alien handaxe-elements to penetrate farther eastward than India. In other words, the differential distribution of choppers and handaxes on the wider map may seem to favour a cultural duality as the explanation of their differential distribution on the smaller map of the Indian subcontinent. If this inference be correct, Africa becomes the obvious centre of primary dispersal for the handaxe complex, and we are confronted with the diffusion of ideas on a vast scale.
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²⁴ [Note: The text does not provide the footnote content for 24, only the reference mark.]
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∗ Professor Zeuner, on the other hand, would include the Javan and Malayan handaxes in the main series.
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Here two points emerge, both of which will be encountered in later contexts. The first is the recurrently unitary aspect of the cultures fringing the Indian Ocean. We are accustomed to the recurrent interrelationship of the lands framing the Mediterranean; we may equally accustom ourselves to a cultural community between East Africa, Arabia and India, whether in prehistoric or historic times. Today, the interests of the East African Coast are vested in Indians and Arabs no less than in Africans and Europeans. Further back, the principal medieval mosque on the island of Kilwa, off the coast of Tanganyika, reflects the great mosque of Gulbarga in the Deccan. The medieval history of that same coast is a story of Arab trade and domination. Then and later, Chinese wares flowed around this great periphery. Earlier than all these, the *Periplus* tells us how in the 1st century A.D. traders linked East Africa with Egypt, Arabia and India. Like the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean is an essentially unitary 'culture pool', if so insignificant a name may be stretched to so immense [Figure: CHOPPER CHOPPING-TOOLS— DARK PORTION OF EACH CIRCLE
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BIFACIAL HANDAXES AND CLEAVERS—WHITE PORTION OF EACH CIRCLE
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1. GULER
2. SITES NEAR NALAGARH 3, 4. SITES IN POTWAR REGION
5. SITES IN CHITTOR DISTRICT
6. SITES IN THARBAULT BASIN
7. DEOGARH
8. SITES NEAR HOSHANGABAD
9. SITES NEAR NARSINGHPUR
10. SITES IN SABARMATI VALLEY
11. SITES IN MAHI VALLEY
12. SITES IN MAYURBHANJ
13. SITES IN UPPER GODAVARI VALLEY
14. SITES IN LOWER GODAVARI VALLEY
15. SITES NEAR KHANDIVLI
16. SITES IN MALAPRABHA BASIN
17. SITES IN LOWER KRISHNA VALLEY
18. SITES NEAR GIDDALUR
19. SITES IN NELLORE DISTRICT 20, 21. SITES IN KORTALAYAR VALLEY
22. SITES IN LOWER KAVERI VALLEY]
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Fig. 11 Comparative occurrence of 'chopper chopping-tools', bifacial handaxes and cleavers a compass; and it was already a unitary culture-pool, it seems, far back in the Middle Pleistocene.
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The other point is this. The transference of industries, or even cultures, from one part of the world to another does not necessarily imply mass-migration. It does not take a thousand men to carry an idea, particularly a revolutionary idea. Indeed, I sometimes think that ideas have wings and fertilize like casual butterflies. There is at least no need to imagine African hand-axe-battalions marching north and east and imposing a new colonialism upon backward pebble-using natives. If one thing is more certain than another, it is that the time-intervals represented by these various industrial modes were astonishingly lengthy, and that for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years cultural change must have been scarcely perceptible. Changes, when they came, may have been relatively sudden, whether actuated by violent alterations of environment, by disease or other accident, or by the even less predictable impact of human genius. There is no simple answer, nor ever will be.
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Finally, let us glance back over this chapter as a whole. By and large, it must be admitted that the story of Old Stone Age man in India is at present monotonous, inhuman stuff. We have no solitary tooth of his, upon which we can exercise our humane imaginations, still less a skull wherein we can enclose that intelligence which was content, age after age, to batter quartzite pebbles into some crudely utile shape. It may be that sometime before 1881 we came nearer to a little knowledge of his likeness if a human cranium discovered by W. Theobald in what may have been a Pleistocene bone-bed in central India was truly of that geologic age.²⁷ But the skull was subsequently lost in the museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and we can only wait, with a proper impatience, for Indian palaeontology to get to work anew.
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Nor need the answer, when found, be a simple one. It is more than likely that, in the Middle Pleistocene, India was populated by human or sub-human beings of very various types, perhaps both more and less advanced than the *pithecanthropi* or ape-men, of doubtful speech and diverse aspect, who have been recognized elsewhere in Asia. It is not impossible that these heterogeneous types, partially contemporary with one another, shared in the industries which we have described. Meanwhile, in fairness to our proto-Indians of the Old Stone Age, let it be said again that we know almost nothing about them. Their brains, many of them, were probably no less ample than ours, and their thoughts may have been only a little more inconsequential. We like to imagine them as squatting along the river-banks in the neighbourhood of suitable outcrops, shaping, with prodigal expenditure of material, endless masses of stone with which to slay and dismember endless processions of animals in the unwary moment of the morning or evening draught. But in sooth we do not even know the intent which lay behind this industrious manipulation of flakes and pebbles. What, for example, was the real function of those weighty handaxes, sometimes a foot in length, which were so skilfully sharpened on both sides alike by carefully controlled blows? It has been suggested that the handaxe was 'an excellent instrument for digging up roots, grubs, and other food from the ground': truffles with a handaxe. On the other hand, at that astonishing site at Olorgesailie, near Nairobi in Kenya, tens of thousands of handaxes are associated with animal-bones split to extract the marrow and skulls smashed to extract the brains. Handaxe man was certainly an indifferent vegetarian; and the answer doubtless is that this tool, made by the million, was in fact an all-purposes tool, whether actually held in some vast encompassing handgrip or mounted for use in some fashion lost to us. We do not even know whether the abstract creature whom we have called 'Handaxe man' had articulate speech.
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An ingenious Dutch psychiatrist suggests that handaxes were made symmetrical for ambidexterous users, whereas the emergent flake-industries were connected with nascent right-handedness; and that this right-handedness was in turn linked with the development of speech-centres on the left side of the brain.²⁸ That may be sound physiology but it is perhaps not very good archaeology since flakes occur as early as handaxes. It may of course be that men with the gift of articulate speech co-existed with others, grunting *mlechchhas*, who lacked it. We simply do not know.
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Even the inferred bias towards river-banks may well be wrong. The picture is as likely as not to be unbalanced by the fact that river-cuttings are of their nature particularly liable to expose the buried strata on which these remote peoples had their being. No doubt, however, it is near enough to the truth. The story of these folk is a part—in years, a very long part—of the story of India; the careful and onerous investigation of their industries and environment is a primary task for Indian and Pakistani archaeology; but, for all our skill, they are doomed to remain, these pioneers, little more than 'Handaxe folk' or 'Pebble-chopper-chopping folk', little more than archaeological labels which thinly disguise the poverty of our understanding.