An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology v1.c5.5

v1.c5.5

In 1944, another upturn came when Mortimer Wheeler was appointed as Director-General. He realized that in a country so vast and containing so many ancient sites as India, careful planning was essential if archaeological field-work was to produce coherent results. He devised two systems of digging, *viz*., vertical and horizontal, to meet these requirements and advocated the employment of strategic planning in the solution of archaeological problems. He felt that orderly knowledge of cultural sequences must precede detailed investigations of particular cultures. Initially, therefore, he stressed the building up of a cultural time-table for Indian archaeology through vertical excavation. As a result, during 1944-47 problem-centred excavations were carried out at Arikamedu (1945), Brahmagiri (1947), Harappa (1946) and Taxila (1944). The selected problems related to primary and obvious gaps in our knowledge of protohistory and early history. In the work of excavation itself, he introduced scientific methods of stratification, recording, etc., and so ‘modernized’ Indian archaeology. Realizing the role of universities in the development of archaeology as a discipline he made a strong plea for the participation of Indian universities in archaeological field-work with the result that many universities thereafter entered the field. Another noteworthy contribution from Wheeler was the starting of *Ancient India*, the bulletin of the Archaeological Survey of India, which was a venture ‘to put archaeology regularly on to the bookstalls, and to interest the educated Indian public in the current work relating to the exploration and conservation of the heritage of material culture'.