Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.67

c7.67

Beyond India, Burma has produced good examples, and the type, highly finished or in the rough, is widely characteristic of south-east Asia. It is recorded from Malaya; in Indo-China it is included both in the so-called Bac-Sonian culture north of Hanoi and in the more southerly Somrong Sen culture of Cambodia and Annam. In no instance has an example been found by a competent excavator, but there seems little doubt that the users of the shouldered hoe were also potters and occasionally employed bronze or copper.⁴² In Tongking, allegedly associated remains were of the Han period (202 B.C.–A.D. 220). Farther north usually crude shouldered hoes occur sporadically over a wide stretch of China from Hong Kong to Hunnan and the Yangtse valley of Szechwan.⁴³ More doubtfully, they are reported from Manchuria and Japan. The type has been related, very speculatively, to bronze shouldered axes of the Yin dynasty (about 1300–1028 B.C.) in An-yang, south-west of Tientsin.⁴⁴ Certainly the more highly finished rectangular examples suggest a metal prototype, and it has been suspected that the stone was in some instances cut with a metal wire, a technique which still obtains in India.⁴⁵ The evidence as a whole points to a Chinese parentage for the shouldered hoe, with an origin perhaps in the earlier half of the 1st millennium B.C. and a southerly trend through the Chinese lowlands to Laos and Burma. When it arrived in India is at present unknown; no example has there been found in any significant association, although the Tongking evidence, if verified, might favour a date in the latter half of the millennium, i.e. somewhat later than the first of the polished axes. To link its arrival with that of Austroasiatic languages from south-eastern Asia, as has been attempted, is mere guesswork.