Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c9.35

c9.35

Before these various factors are further considered, something must be said of the date of the megalithic series. This can now be stated in general terms, but within them no detailed chronology is yet available. The lower limit at least is fairly clear. At Brahmagiri, where a town-site alongside the megaliths was explored with this problem in view, it was found that the megalithic culture overlapped a different and more elaborate successor which was dated by the occurrence of Rouletted Ware (p. 31) to the 1st century A.D. This evidence was confirmed forty-five miles away at Chandravalli where the successor-culture was marked, not only by Rouletted Ware, but also by imported silver coins of the Roman Principate, dating from the first three or four decades of the 1st century A.D. Again, 300 miles to the south-east, at Arikamedu near Pondicherry, a brick-built commercial town which yielded imported Arretine and other wares of the first half of the 1st century A.D. succeeded, apparently without a time-gap, a village characterized by the 'megalithic' Black-and-red Ware.¹⁰⁰ As long ago as 1817 a Roman silver coin of Augustus (23 B.C.-A.D. 14) is recorded to have been found in a megalithic cist in the Coimbatore district; it may of course have been intrusive. A port-holed cist at Tiruvilvamala in Cochin contained russet-coated pottery with white or yellow curvilinear patterns, allied to a similar ware with rectilinear patterns dated to the 1st century A.D. at Brahmagiri and Chandravalli.¹⁰¹ The evidence as a whole, though not abundant, is consistent, and some of it is well-documented. The megalithic complex ended in the first half of the 1st century A.D.