Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.105

c8.105

Meanwhile, with the possible exception of Ujjain, which may be found to have an earlier nucleus but owes its formidable urban character to advancing Gangetic interests about 500 B.C., the sites mentioned above, with others of their kind, have their origins in a widespread and often rudimentary microlithic culture—if the term culture can be so narrowed. Sometimes, as at Rangpur and Maheshwar, this primary culture or industry is thought to have been devoid at first of associated pottery; but at more than one site two to four successive phases of microlithic occupation have been marked by differing pottery-groups and have suggested a certain mobility in locally variant communities at a uniform economic and technological stage of development. In so far as generalization is feasible, we may say that there was in central India, in the earlier half of the 1st millennium B.C., a considerable village-population which used microliths, a little copper or low-grade bronze, and rather coarse painted pottery, often but not always wheel-turned, with a certain community of types that included large round-bottomed bowls with flaring rims and spouted, carinated ‘teapots’. This population extended from the Vindhya Range 600 miles southwards into northern Mysore.