The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c33.4

v1.c33.4

It is to the later Stone Age, also, that are to be ascribed a class of chipped trap implements from Bundelkhand and the pygmy flints that occur in myriads among the off-shoots of the Vindhyas. Some of the caves in which the latter have been found are adorned with rude drawings in ruddle or haematite, and from the outlines of the primitive weapons depicted in them it has been thought that the drawings were executed during the neolithic period, but though the conjecture is plausible enough and is borne out, let it be said, by the discovery of rubbed specimens of red haematite and palettes for grinding down the material at various neolithic sites in the Deccan, it is by no means certain that these drawings go back to so remote an age. This observation applies still more forcibly to the megalithic tombs, which occur in vast numbers in the central and southern parts of the Peninsula, and to the accumulations of prehistoric scoria, often of considerable size, which are known to antiquarians as ‘cinder-mounds,’ as well as to the so-called ‘cup-marks’ or small hollowed depressions in the rocks, which have been interpreted by some investigators as a forgotten system of writing. In Europe, megalithic tombs analogous to the Indian examples are referred to the close of the neolithic period or to the succeeding age of bronze and copper; but in India there are few such tombs which there is reason for regarding as anterior to the iron age; and in their case, as well as in that of the cinder-mounds which have yielded smooth stone celts, it is a plausible theory that the people who erected them were still in the neolithic state, when iron had long been in vogue among other races of the Peninsula.