Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.40

c7.40

These stratified Ṭeri industries contain lunates, transverse arrowheads, bifacial points showing pressure-flaking, backed blades, unifacial and bifacial discoids, a microburin, end- and side-scrapers, and an occasional pebble chopping-tool of greater size. The tools are of quartz and variously coloured cherts. On certain sites, association with black-and-red sherds of urnfield or megalith type and of the last three or four centuries B.C. is ascribed to the blowing away of the A horizon and the consequent re-deposition of the sherds at the lower level. There is little doubt that, as a whole, the Tinnevelly Ṭeri industry represents a pre-pottery or at least a non-pottery phase. The pressure-flaked bifacial implements are elsewhere absent from India but recur in Ceylon.