Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.77

c7.77

THE WORD 'CHALCOLITHIC' occurred in the last chapter and will recur in its successors. It is a term which has been widely and not always very discriminately used by writers on Indian archaeology; applied alternatively to essentially stone-using communities to which copper or bronze are rare luxuries, or, less aptly, to copper- and bronze-using communities which retain a substantial though subordinate stone equipment. It may be accepted as an ugly utility-term; an alternative label, 'Protometallic', is scarcely more elegant or exact.