Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.56

c7.56

The pointed-butt axes were first put into a stratigraphical context in 1947 at Brahmagiri in northern Mysore, thirty miles south of Bellary. There, on an ancient town-site, the latest of a clear sequence of three main cultures was dated by its rouletted and russet-coated painted ("Andhra") wares (p. 31) to the 1st century A.D. Below and overlapping it was an elaborately iron-using 'megalith' culture (p. 162) which is unlikely to have arrived there much before the 3rd century B.C. In turn, overlapping and underlying this megalith culture was a Chalcolithic culture with two subdivisions, marked by abundant pointed-butt axes, crude microliths, rough pottery and rare scraps of copper and bronze. The overlaps in each case imply a partial contemporaneity between the new culture and the old, but equally in each case there was no organic cultural transition. We are dealing with three essentially distinct cultures of which the lowest is characterized by the axes and ended, as a cultural substratum, soon after 200 B.C. In other words, our stone axes with their copper-bronze accompaniment endured in the southern Deccan for something like three centuries after the use of iron had been established farther north. The contrast is not remarkable; there are much later analogies for an emphatically differential development in India.