Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c9.38

c9.38

It may be added that only at Brahmagiri, at Sanganakallu (p. 85), at Kunnattur in Chingleput,⁸⁸ and at Maski has a 'megalithic' settlement been excavated, and very few such settlements have been identified. Only at Brahmagiri was the evidence definitive in a chronological sense. The town lay along the lower slopes of the hill in the vicinity of a tank, and the cists, of which there must have been many hundreds (about 300 survive) are spread about the adjacent plain, amidst what are, and doubtless were, the fields of the inhabitants. In the Madras (Chingleput) region, the relative position of the living and the dead is apparently reversed; there, the megaliths are commonly on the slopes of the hills or amidst rocky outcrops, with the implication that the living dwelt amongst their fields on the adjacent plain. Here, too, ancient tanks are found in the neighbourhood, and it is a fair assumption that the megalith-builders practised tank-irrigation.