A History of Agriculture in India v1.c25.s2.4

v1.c25.s2.4

A detailed study of the skeletal material (Bernhard, 1967) obtained from the graves indicates the presence of two dominant groups of foreign peoples in the graves: *Eurydolichomorph* or Proto-Europoid in Period I and *Leptodolichomorph* or the Mediterranean in Period III, ‘closely connected the southern migration of foreign people into the Pakistan-India sub-continent which began in the second millennium B.C. and continued in the first’. On the basis of this evidence, the excavator felt that these migrations represented two waves of invasions of the plain grey ware-using people, the first associated with copper or bronze in about the middle of the second millennium B.C. and the second with iron in the beginning of the first. On circumstantial evidence, the people associated with these migrations are identified with the Aryans, the two waves being further explained by the use of the words *ayas* (generally taken to be copper) in the Rig-Vedic literature, and *tamra-ayas* (copper) and *krishna-ayas* (iron) in the later Vedic.²