Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.72

c7.72

In this context, Dr. C. von Fürer-Haimendorf has suggested the living analogy of the Reddis, who maintain today an atavistic mode of life in the hills flanking the Godāvari gorge of the Deccan. They stand midway between semi-nomadic food-gatherers and settled peasantry, occupying hamlets of no great substance, and they supplement wild plants and tubers by raising crops and breeding animals. ‘Their agricultural methods are extremely primitive: they clear and burn the jungle and then sow sorghum, small millets and pulses in the ashes, partly by broadcasting and partly by dibbling with the help of a digging-stick. No hoe is used. . . . Neolithic man in possession of a polished celt may well have practised a similar form of agriculture.’⁴ If anything, the Brahmagiri axe-people would appear to have been more advanced and static (or less decadent and harassed) than the Reddis; it may be suspected that they had already learned to supplement ‘slash-and-burn’ agriculture with some knowledge of crop-rotation. But the general picture of a limited agriculture based on jungle-clearance within the range of nuclear settlements is a convincing one, and gives a needed actuality to the somewhat tedious vestiges now recoverable from the soil. To this it may be added that a number of ‘cinder-mounds’ situated mostly between Bellary and Hospet have been identified by Professor Zeuner as ancient accumulations of cattle-dung, and in and about one of them I collected a dozen or more pointed-butt axes in the space of half an hour. In 1938 Sir Leonard Woolley had a similar experience; at the Kupgal near Bellary he ‘picked up, on and around a cinder-mound, two or three celts of basalt trap’; and as long ago as 1872 R. Bruce Foot found a ‘celt’ in a cinder-mound between Bellary and Gadag. The suggestion is that of a pastoral community in our axe period. We may fairly regard our axe-people as herdsmen anchored by a rudimentary agriculture.