Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.31

c7.31

The dating of these Indian industries is at present full of doubt. Provisionally, a line of division may be drawn between (earlier) microlithic industries which are not clearly associated with pottery and (later) ones which are. True, the incidence of pottery is likely to be a variable and even accidental datum. In recent years a number of Late Stone Age cultures devoid of pottery have been identified sporadically in Asia: at Kila Gul Mohammed near Quetta in Baluchistan, at Jarmo in the foothills of northern Iraq east of the Tigris, at Jericho in Jordan, and farther west in Cyprus. At Jarmo radiocarbon tests give a date about 4700 B.C. or earlier. At Jericho similar tests indicate that the pre-pottery Neolithic was flourishing both before and after 6000 B.C. The Baluch example produced a radiocarbon date of about 3350 B.C. Broadly, it may be affirmed that there is no reason, as knowledge stands, to assume the existence of good kiln-baked pottery anywhere in the world much before 4000 B.C., or in India before 3000 B.C. Some at least of the pottery found with microliths in India is of the Bronze or even the Iron Age, i.e. well within the 1st millennium B.C. Indeed it is a fair generalization that, in the Deccan and probably also in peninsular India, the Iron Age, which began there not earlier than the 5th century B.C. and in some places appreciably later, is an alien structure founded directly upon a microlithic and chalcolithic substratum (see Chapter 7).