Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.140

c7.140

If, however, it is clear enough that sporadic destruction and low-grade replacement marked the end of the Indus Civilization in its central region, it does not follow that the same fate attended the more southerly cities in Kāthiāwād, which probably lay beyond the Aryan impact. The evidence there is indeed of a contrary kind. Thus at Rangpur excavation revealed a basic microlithic industry without pottery, succeeded by a Chalcolithic culture containing Indus Civilization elements, which was in turn followed by a culture described as ‘late Chalcolithic’ with red and buff pottery suggesting an organic development from the previous phase. The late phase also contained, in its top level, sherds of Black-and-red Ware which had ‘a technical similarity with the “megalithic” pottery of southern India’. This Black-and-red Ware, of which more will be said, is not normally earlier than 1000 B.C. and is often much later; but it certainly occurs, in small quantities, with late Indus Valley material at Lothal, which is only thirty miles north-east of Rangpur, and a similar association has now been observed at Rosadi in mid-Kāthiāwād. It is becoming increasingly clear that the more southerly towns of the Indus Civilization endured for an appreciable time after the fall of Mohenjo-daro, and that the general similarity of the early Black-and-red sherds of Rangpur and Lothal to the pottery of the southern megaliths of a later age is specific and significant. Meanwhile, the important conclusion is that here, in Kāthiāwād, the Indus culture was not obliterated but was transmuted into successor-cultures which adapted Indus ceramic forms and evolved eventually, with other wares, a fine lustrous red pottery painted sometimes with schematized caprids in the old chalcolithic tradition.