An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology v1.c9.s7.34

v1.c9.s7.34

The last item on our list of the Copper/Bronze Age cultures is the black-and-red culture (non-Harappa, non-Megalithic). Black-and-red ware has been found in varied cultural associations in 26 different contexts, its shapes differing from culture to culture. Singh, 1979, pp. 267-83, after an exhaustive review of the ware, comes to the inevitable conclusion that it has neither a typological nor a cultural personality. Here we are concerned only with the black-and-red ware that followed the OCW in the Ganga-Yamuna doab, only at two sites—NOH and ATRANJIKHERA—and forms a distinct level preceding the PGW, which is practically the sole justification for regarding it as a separate culture in the Ganga-Yamuna valley. At other PGW sites it forms an integral part of the assemblage of the PGW and associated wares [11.14], persists in the NBPW levels as well and shares its shapes with the PGW and NBPW. Its pre-PGW phase must have been of short duration, and while not much is reported about the cultural equipment of the level bearing it, it could not have materially differed from that of the PGW.