Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.51

c7.51

Parallel-sided chert blades of normal Indus type have been found as far south as southern Kāthiāwād, at the Indus sites of Lothal and Rangpur. It may be therefore that there is a cultural kinship between these blades and those which have in recent years been recovered from a considerable series of Chalcolithic sites in central India (northern and central Deccan): Tripuri, Nagda, Maheshwar, Nāvdā Toli, Prakāsh, Bahāl, Nevāsā, Jorwe, Nāsik, and Maski. At these sites the Chalcolithic phase, though not closely dated, is clearly post-Indus, and 1200–500 or 400 B.C. is probably a fair guide.* Nor, in spite of the occasional affinity of their flake-industry with that of the north, can it be described as significantly ‘Indus’; it has, as already pointed out, a strongly microlithic bias (doubtless emphasized by the limitations of the raw material available) and includes lunates and occasionally other microlithic forms, although the published ascription of the overall term ‘microlithic’ to an industry such as that at Maski, where chert blades up to 5½ inches long are included,28 is not to be commended. Further reference will be made in Chapter 7 to these central Indian cultures; meanwhile it may be suspected that the Maski blades, like those of Kāthiāwād, represent an intrusion from the blade-industries of north-western India into the essentially microlithic cultures of the Deccan.