Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.48

c7.48

Both at Sukkur and at Rohri, situated on opposite banks of the lower Indus in Sind, have been found core and flake industries showing a typological affinity with the Chalcolithic series but associated neither with pottery nor with metal. This might be explained by the evident fact that the sites were primarily workshops. On the other hand, there is also some geological reason for supposing that they antedate the Indus Chalcolithic, in that the hill-top soil associated with them disappears on the slopes under a covering of silt left by an Indus flooding at a considerably higher level than today and *a fortiori* higher than in Indus Civilization times. (In the early days of Mohenjo-daro the flood-plain of the lower Indus was at least twenty feet lower than today.) This has suggested but does not prove that the Sukkur-Rohri industries may be earlier than, and ancestral to, the Chalcolithic cores and flakes of the Indus valley, though not necessarily at any very great interval of time.