Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.61

c8.61

For the rest, the Chalcolithic of central India—a phase to which the term 'civilization' cannot at present be applied although villages were already merging into towns—lacks any clear initial link with the Indus, unless the occasional animal patterns on pottery and certain types of flake implements are an echo from the Indus borderland. Instead, within a generally coherent scheme, it shows a wide diversity of detail, based upon local tradition and initiative. The most northerly site of the series is at Nāgdā, on the east bank of the Chambal north-west of Ujjain, where the uppermost third of a partially natural mound ninety feet high represents three cultural periods.* The earliest, twenty-two feet thick, includes massive mud and mud-brick structures of which one may possibly have been the bastion of a rampart. Alongside a few scraps of copper are many microliths, mostly parallel-sided blades with one side occasionally retouched and the other (the working side) often serrated. A few blades show a crested ridge. The pottery, mainly red but sometimes cream-coloured, is painted in black or chocolate with concentric circles, wavy lines, hatched lozenges, 'sun-symbols', spotted deer, and peacocks. The date is roughly the earlier half of the 1st millennium B.C.; for the phase is succeeded without appreciable break by an iron-using culture with 'megalithic' Black-and-red Ware. This is followed by the limited introduction of baked bricks and by N.B.P. Ware, with more iron. A potsherd and a terracotta ball from the upper levels bear inscriptions of about the 2nd century B.C.