Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c9.15

c9.15

3. Shallow-pit burials, without a cist, are sometimes found within stone circles, which may then be less than twelve feet in diameter. The pit may contain one or more pots or a terracotta legged sarcophagus. A variant type, best illustrated by an excavated example at Porkalam in Cochin,¹ may be restricted to the very individual megalithic complex below the ghats of Kerala in south-west India. Here the pit, in the centre of a sixteen-foot circle of roughly dressed laterite blocks, was itself covered by a granite slab. The pit was 4½ feet deep and contained a large urn enclosing many smaller ones, three iron objects, and a few crushed bones. At Kunnattur, in the Chingleput district, a similarly sealed pit within a circle contained a terracotta sarcophagus, Black-and-red pottery, two iron bracelets, and scraps of bone.88