The third volume of Beyond Stones and More Stones, edited by well-known archaeologist Prof. Ravi Korisettar, is as rewarding as the earlier two. It has 11 chapters with 35 scholars as contributors from all around the world. The focus of this volume is on “site-specific studies in Indian archaeology,” while the earlier ones had focused on prehistory and then, domestication of plants and animals.
If there is a broad theme underlying the structure of the book, it would be transitions: from the Acheulian to the Palaeolithic; from hunting and gathering to farming; from the Neolithic to the Iron Age; and from the ancient to the medieval. Trying to grasp the nature of these transitions by studying specific sites and the processes they underwent makes the findings and the learnings from them very tangible. The papers also lay out, in great detail, the latest methods and technologies used in the excavation of Palaeolithic, Neolithic and medieval sites, the majority of them in the southern Deccan. This would, of course, be of enormous help to students and practitioners of archaeology in India.
The Bhimbetka rock paintings in Madhya Pradesh exhibit the earliest traces of human life. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Marbles and beads found at Nagaruru neolithic site in Kurnool district, Andhra Pradesh. | Photo Credit: special arrangement
Millets, monuments
The paper titled ‘Unfolding the Landscape of Southern Neolithic: Recent Explorations at Tekkalakota’ by Namita Sanjay Sugandhi and V. Shobha, for example, puts across how prehistoric and protohistoric communities in the southern Deccan are a marked contrast to contemporaneous societies in other parts of the subcontinent, a distinction that the authors say, lasted well into the early medieval period. Some of these unique factors would include forms of monumentality (from ashmounds to megaliths), processes of domestication (millets, for example), early metallurgical production and symbolic expression.
A view of the 5000-year-old ashmound located between Ballari and Hosapete. | Photo Credit: special arrangement
The chapter titled ‘From the Southern Neolithic to the Iron Age: A View from Kadebakele’ authored by K.D. Morrison, et al, is equally illuminating, with its focus on how the Iron Age in the southern Deccan differed from the Neolithic, with larger settlements, new technologies of metal working and new forms of ritual practices. “Indeed, the Iron Age is often seen as a key transitional moment in Indian history, marking the inception of social inequality as well as large proto-urban settlements.”
Burzahom, the Neolithic site in Srinagar. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
‘A Reappraisal of Kashmir Neolithic’ by Yatoo et al — the result of a Kashmir Prehistory Project carried out in association with Australian archaeologists — has established a four-hold developmental sequence of cultures dating from the 4th millennium BCE. AMS dating at the Yunteng site seems to support the introduction of broomcorn millet into Kashmir in the mid-2nd millennium BCE, most likely from China via Central Asia. The data also suggest that Northern Neolithic sites were dispersed widely across the Kashmir Valley as large agricultural villages.
Settling down
Prehistoric rock paintings found on a rock shelter at Hastallapur, Medak district, Andhra Pradesh. | Photo Credit: G. Krishnaswamy
The insightful paper titled ‘Piklihal Revisited’, authored by Fuller et al, focuses on the Neolithic and Early Historic crop assemblage and the evolution of farming in the southern Deccan. It says: “Thus on the grounds of such comparisons, we can conjecture that cultivation of native pulses must have begun no later than 2500 BCE and could stretch back 500 to 1000 years before that. What this implies is that our evidence from Piklihal indicates a period of transitioning towards more agricultural commitment and sedentism around 2000 BCE.” It also suggests that a move away from making ashmounds might have been a result of this: “The increased investment to agriculture is likely to have included increasing use of animal dung as manure especially if fields were cropped in both summer and winter seasons.”
Fragments of pottery and neolithic tools unearthed in Periyapatna taluk of Mysuru district. | Photo Credit: special arrangement
The two papers that the book opens with, on Lower to Middle Palaeolithic tool technologies at sites in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, confirm the gradual nature of the transitions from one stage to another.
A Neolithic celt (tool) from 2900 BC found at Chanugondla village in Gudur Mandal of Kurnool district. | Photo Credit: Subramanyam U.
Preserving sites
Inscriptions of Emperor Ashoka on a rock boulder at Maski, Raichur. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Many chapters, such as those on the rock art of Maski in northern Karnataka and also on that of the Aravallis; a third one on the megalithic landscape of south India; and a fourth on the Neolithic ashmounds of southern India, pay much attention to the new techniques that are being used to survey, document and analyse these important sites before they are lost altogether. To an extent this is true also of the Johansen and Bauer paper on the settlement, land use and the making of political landscapes of the Raichur doab. Hopefully, these studies will provide the impetus for many more such exercises across a number of other archaeological sites that are in danger of disappearing due to population growth and development. The paper on ashmounds (Madella, et al) which summarises the work of a project titled ‘The Herders’ Monuments’ emphasises the importance of systematic integrated data collection and points out that “all sites visited in 2003 were at least partly destroyed.”
On the whole, the third volume of Beyond Stones and More Stones lives up to its track record, and will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of all scholars of history and archaeology.
Beyond Stones and More Stones, Volume 3; Edited by Ravi Korisettar, The Mythic Society, Bengaluru, ₹2,000.
The reviewer is the author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors And Where We Came From, 2021.
