An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology v1.c9.s17.103

v1.c9.s17.103

To turn to the typological and architectural features of the megalithic monuments, with their ecological trends and structural classification. In the pioneering days terms like kistvaen, barrows, dolmens, etc., were used in an undefined manner. Later on Krishnaswami, 1949, under the ASI, mapped out the distinctive zones of megalithic types in Tamil Nadu and its neighbourhood and standardized the use of two terms, the port-holed slab cist and the dolmenoid cist, with common features like port-hole (or its corresponding member), passage, capstone and burial contents. Without going into the debatable details of the subtypes evolved for some regions [4.17.8], it may be stated with a fair degree of certainty that both the dolmen and cist prevail in Tamil Nadu, with a separate urn or sarcophagus [12.9] container placed within the megalith, apart from direct burial in the cist chamber, secondary and fractional burial of the skeletal remains being the outstanding trait. A frequency count of the burials for a limited area like Chingleput or Dt Pudukkottai would show that invariably both in the dolmens and stone circles with urn burials, as different from vast and free urn fields prevalent in the three lowest Dts, viz. Madurai, Ramnad and Tirunelveli, multiple burial was practised. This means that any single grave, at any given site, was the resting place of the accumulated remains of the members either of a family or of a filiated generation, thus leading to the absence of any continuous use of the same burial more than once. This implies that chronologically speaking each site had a time spectrum and might have lasted for nearly half a century. By and large, as already stated, the temporal range of the megalithic (or allied urn burial) usage in Tamil Nadu should be deemed as having lasted from *c.* 5th century B.C. to 2nd century A.D.