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History of Technology in India, Vol. I: From Antiquity to c. 1200 A.D. v1.c17.s1: A. The Nature of Evidences

History of Technology in India, Vol. I: From Antiquity to c. 1200 A.D. v1.c17.s1

Language
English

A. The Nature of Evidences

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There are several kinds of evidences regarding the production fabrication and uses of gems and minerals in ancient India:

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(i) *Archaeological Excavations*: This is an on-going tradition of research unearthing material traces of old civilizations. The pre-Harappan sites like Mehargarh, the Harappan, post-Harappan and the Historical period sites have shown a bewildering variety of gems, minerals, artifacts and metals, derived from specific minerals, and also many archaeomaterials. A central issue is whether some of the materials were imported from outside the international borders or fabricated out of ores and minerals mined from the Indian subcontinent. The question of ore-artifact correlation has been widely debated and would be briefly examined in this paper.

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(ii) *Evidences of Industrial Activities*: A special feature of some of the excavated sites is the existence of industrial sectors related to manufacture of beads, metals etc., showing furnaces and residual slags and waste products. These confirm the nature of indigenous activities.

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(iii) Mining Archaeology: This is a new field of research in India. While there are many which are believed to be ‘ancient’, the dates of their excavations are not established in all cases. We report in Table 1, a gist of the important C-14 dates of some of the ancient mines. The earliest date (of 1260 B.C.) reported so far corresponds to Rajpura-Dariba of Rajasthan. Mining in ancient India has been reported in detail elsewhere (Singh, R.D.)

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(iv) Literary Evidences: Spanning from Ṛgveda to Rasaratnasamuccaya we have a huge amount of Sanskrit literature corresponding to a period of two to three millennia, which contains many details regarding our subject. There are also Pali, Greek, Roman and Arab literatures describing the widespread uses of gems and minerals in ancient India.

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We have prepared a comprehensive report on minerals and metals in ancient India and submitted the same to the Indian National Science Academy (Biswas, A.K., 1991). Our treatment here contains only a very small segment of the above report. The details of ancient mining and metallurgy in India are covered elsewhere in this book by Singh, Agrawal and Prakash. This paper seeks to fill certain gaps between mining and metallurgy, and is devoted to the raw material aspects rather than fabrications (lapidary) or smelting (to metals).

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