Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c9.42

c9.42

The most northerly occurrences of the fabric are in the fertile south-eastern parts of Rājasthān, on the eastern flank of the Arāvalli Range. There, in the districts of Udaipur, Chitorgarh and Mandasor, bowls with everted rims, black internally and largely red externally, and occasionally painted with simple rectilinear or circular patterns in white, are found sometimes with and sometimes without microliths, rarely with a scrap of copper. At Āhār, close to Udaipur railway-station, an ancient site of some recorded importance showed over thirty feet of occupational deposit in which two main cultures, separated by a break, have been recognized. The later is of the historical period, but the earlier, nearly twenty feet thick, showed three sub-phases, all characterized by Black-and-red sherds. From the lowest sub-phase the ware is described as rather coarse, and polished only on the exterior; in the middle sub-phase the fabric is finer and the pots are polished both inside and outside; in the final sub-phase, decay has set in and new wares begin to dominate the field. In the upper levels of this culture were pottery-ringed soakpits of the kind which began to characterize the cities of northern and central India in the latter half of the 1st millennium B.C. Only two microliths were noted.¹⁰⁵