Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.63

c8.63

A similar process is indicated by a dozen other sites which have been trenched in the great central region. Here examples must suffice. A site of great promise is that of Maheshwar, probably the Māhishmati of the Mahābhārata, on the northern bank of the middle Narbadā, with the confronting site of Nāvdā Toli on the south side.¹⁷ As the opposed sites suggest, Maheshwar was an established crossing which carried the highroad from Ujjain and the Ganges basin into the Deccan. Its mounds rise to a height of 100 feet and have produced four main cultures. Like many other central Indian settlements, this was founded on the fertile Black Cotton soil which no doubt yielded a tolerably easy livelihood to an undeveloped community equipped with microliths but lacking both metal and pottery and not yet, therefore, commercially-minded. The microliths are not of an elaborate kind; they include small to medium-sized scrapers of chert and jasper, made mostly on flakes with faceted platform, and irregular and sometimes fluted cores. After a break, of uncertain implication, a more advanced microlithic industry, with backed and crested blades, lunates and points and associated with copper flat-axes, chisels and hooks, introduces the now-familiar central Indian chalcolithic. Querns and slingstones appear, and an abundant pottery, some ochre-washed but predominantly red and often painted with parallel lines, hatched triangles, circles and foliage, occasionally with antelopes and dancing human figures. This deposit is from five to eight feet thick, and may be ascribed to the second quarter of the 1st millennium B.C. It is followed by a deposit no less than twenty feet thick containing a number of occupation-layers marked by large baked or mud bricks, soakpits lined with bricks or pottery-rings, iron implements (sickle, hoe, nails, arrowheads, spearheads), punch-marked coins, N.B.P. Ware and 'megalithic' Black-and-red Ware, a little of which had seemingly appeared also in the preceding deposit. Here once more we have the familiar complex of the second half of the 1st millennium B.C.: a mixture of dominant 'Ganges' elements with certain others of a more southerly kind. Above this deep deposit occurred a finely burnished red ware with 'sprinklers' of a type found at Chandravalli (Mysore) and in western India at Kolhapur, Baroda and elsewhere in layers dating from the early centuries A.D. From this crowning deposit, the 'megalithic' Black-and-red Ware was absent.