Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.141

c7.141

For the rest, it will suffice to add that the distinctive Painted Grey Ware, which in the north marks the lower bracket of our Dark Age (1000 B.C. or somewhat later), was preceded at Hastināpura in the upper Ganges valley by a settlement which used crude ochre-coloured pottery and copper implements. An interval elapsed between the two occupations, so that the ochre pottery should carry us back well into the hiatus there. Again, this is at present merely a pointer without substantive value; but in one way and another, and particularly in the western coastlands, Indian archaeology is beginning to close in upon its Dark Age from both ends, and the gap may well have vanished by the time that these words appear in print.