Prehistoric India: Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Chalcolithic Cultures

Anthropology Optional › Paper II › Unit 01: Evolution of Indian Culture and Civilization

1.1 Prehistoric (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Neolithic-Chalcolithic) Protohistoric (Indus Civilization): PreHarappan, Harappan and postHarappan cultures. Contributions of tribal cultures to Indian civilization.

Official Syllabus: Paper II, Unit 1.1

This article covers the prehistoric part of the syllabus line; the Indus civilization is in 1.1b and tribal contributions in 1.1c. The world framework of the Stone Age is in Paper 1, Units 1.8a–1.8c; here India is read as a set of regions with their own histories.

1. Studying Prehistoric India: Evidence, Sequence and Regions

1.1 The evidence: material culture

Material culture means the physical things a society makes and uses: tools, houses, pots, ornaments, graves and art. For prehistory it is the only evidence.

• What it tells us: a stone tool shows technology (how it was made), economy (what it was used for) and contact (where its stone came from); a grave with ornaments shows belief in an afterlife and sometimes status.
• How it is read: through stratigraphy (the order of layers), typology (classifying objects by form), dating (Paper 1, Unit 1.8a) and the study of bones, seeds and sediments.
• Why anthropology matters: objects do not speak for themselves. Ethnoarchaeology, the study of living communities to learn how objects are made and used, helps read them: bored stones like Upper Palaeolithic ones are still used as net-sinkers by Yanadi fishermen of Andhra Pradesh (see 1.3).

1.2 The Indian sequence at a glance

The table gives the broad stages; notice how much they overlap.

Stage	Indian dates (approximate)	Hallmark	Key Indian sites
Lower Palaeolithic	1.5 million to 200,000 years ago	Hand-axes and cleavers; choppers	Attirampakkam, Isampur, Soan, Bhimbetka
Middle Palaeolithic	385,000 to 40,000 years ago	Flake tools on prepared cores	Nevasa, Attirampakkam, Jwalapuram, Dhaba
Upper Palaeolithic	45,000 to 12,000 years ago	Blades, burins, first art	Patne, Kurnool caves, Belan, Baghor
Mesolithic	10,000 to 2000 BC (later in places)	Microliths; lake and dune camps	Bagor, Langhnaj, Sarai Nahar Rai, Damdama
Neolithic	7000 BC (north-west) to 1st millennium BC (north-east)	Ground axes, farming, herding	Mehrgarh, Burzahom, Koldihwa, Utnur
Chalcolithic	3000 to 700 BC	Copper with stone blades; painted pottery	Ahar, Gilund, Navdatoli, Inamgaon

An Indian stage is a way of life, not a fixed date: the north-west farmed by 7000 BC while the north-east still foraged, and ways of life ran in parallel.

1.3 Why India does not fit the European ladder

• The ladder: John Lubbock, an English naturalist, coined “Palaeolithic” and “Neolithic” in Prehistoric Times (1865). The scheme assumes every region passes through the same stages in the same order.
• The Indian reality: B. Subbarao, an Indian archaeologist, divided the subcontinent in The Personality of India (1956) into areas of attraction (river plains that drew people and ideas), areas of relative isolation and areas of isolation (hills and forests where old ways lasted longest). This explains why foragers survived beside farmers.
• The anthropologist’s critique: N.K. Bose, the Indian anthropologist, excavated Stone Age sites at Kuliana (Mayurbhanj, Odisha) with Dharani Sen (1948) and treated the region as its own cultural universe, while V.D. Krishnaswami of the Archaeological Survey fitted finds from the Kortallayar valley into African and European stages. D.K. Bhattacharya, an Indian prehistorian, argued that change has many causes (subsistence, population, social complexity and ideology), so one environment can produce different cultures.

1.4 H.D. Sankalia and the pioneers

Robert Bruce Foote, a British geologist, found the first Palaeolithic tool in India at Pallavaram near Chennai (1863). H.D. Sankalia (1908–1989) of Deccan College, Pune, then made prehistory a field science.

• Discoveries: led the First Gujarat Prehistoric Expedition (1941–42), finding Langhnaj; identified a separate Middle Palaeolithic at Nevasa (1950s); found tools at Pahalgam in Kashmir; excavated about twenty sites, including Navdatoli, Ahar and Inamgaon.
• Method: read Godavari gravels as wet phases and silts as dry phases, and built laboratories of geomorphology, palaeobotany and archaeozoology, making Indian archaeology multidisciplinary.
• Writings: Prehistory and Protohistory of India and Pakistan (1963) and Born for Archaeology (1978); he trained three generations of archaeologists.

2. The Palaeolithic of India: A Regional Synthesis

The techniques and general stages are in Paper 1, Unit 1.8b; this section reads the record region by region.

2.1 The north-west and sub-Himalaya: the Soanian

Example first. On the terraces of the Soan, an Indus tributary on the Potwar plateau (Pakistan), the Yale–Cambridge expedition of Helmut de Terra and T.T. Paterson (1935) found pebble choppers (flaked on one face) and chopping tools (flaked on both faces). At Chauntra, hand-axes and cleavers lay among the same pebble tools.

• The original scheme (report 1939): Pre-Soan (rolled flakes of doubtful human work), Early Soan (choppers, chopping tools), Late Soan A (refined pebble tools, Levallois flakes) and Late Soan B (flakes and blades; some texts add an “Evolved Soan”), each tied to a glacial stage.
• The two-culture idea: the American archaeologist Hallam Movius (1948) placed the Soanian in an Asian chopper-chopping tool complex (with the Anyathian of Burma, Choukoutienian of China and Patjitanian of Java), apart from the Acheulian hand-axe world. India seemed to hold two cultures: the Soanian north and the Madrasian (Acheulian) south.
• Why it collapsed: the British mission of Robin Dennell and Helen Rendell (1980s) found no independent Soanian; V.N. Misra (1989) showed the terraces are erosional and cannot date their tools; and most dated pebble-tool assemblages are younger than the Acheulian. The Soanian is now read as a raw-material and activity facies (a local variant): where rounded quartzite cobbles abound, people made choppers.
• Indian Siwaliks: in the Beas–Sutlej and Hoshiarpur–Chandigarh Siwaliks, G.C. Mohapatra (1976) found Soanian sites in the duns (inner valleys) and Acheulian sites on the frontal ridges.
• Kashmir: tools at Pahalgam in the Liddar valley (Sankalia) and at Pampore with broken elephant bone (see Contemporary Developments) show people inside the Himalaya by the Middle Pleistocene.

The table sets the two “traditions” side by side. The contrast was once read as one of peoples; it is now one of stone and task.

Feature	Soanian (north-west)	Madrasian / Acheulian (peninsula)
Typical tools	Pebble choppers and chopping tools, flakes	Hand-axes and cleavers on large flakes
Raw material	Rounded quartzite cobbles	Quartzite slabs, limestone, basalt
Old view	A separate Asian tradition (Movius)	The African–European hand-axe tradition
Present view	A facies of the Acheulian world, mostly younger	The earliest dated occupation of India

2.2 Peninsular and South India

• Attirampakkam (Kortallayar valley, Tamil Nadu): found by Foote in 1863, re-excavated by Shanti Pappu and colleagues. Hand-axes are dated by cosmogenic burial dating to about 1.5 million years (Science, 2011), and Levallois tools to 385,000–172,000 years (Nature, 2018). Why it matters: Acheulian makers reached India almost as early as they appear outside Africa, and the Middle Palaeolithic began here as early as in Africa.
• Hunsgi–Baichbal valleys (Karnataka; K. Paddayya): at Isampur, a quarry-workshop of limestone slabs, cores and half-made bifaces, dated by ESR to about 1.2 million years, shows the whole knapping process; Paddayya read the valley as a settlement system of seasonal camps.
• Kurnool caves (Andhra Pradesh): Muchchatla Chintamanu Gavi (M.L.K. Murty, 1970s) gave rare Upper Palaeolithic bone and antler tools. Renigunta has an early blade-and-burin industry. Jwalapuram has Middle Palaeolithic tools below and above the ash of the Toba eruption of about 74,000 years ago (Michael Petraglia and colleagues, 2007).

Significance: South India gives the earliest dates for humans in South Asia, shows long continuity (Lower to Middle Palaeolithic at Attirampakkam, Middle to Upper at Jwalapuram), and shows that raw material and landscape, not separate “races” of toolmakers, shaped the tools.

2.3 Central, western and eastern India

• Narmada valley: Hathnora gave the only hominin skull of its age in South Asia (see 1.2).
• Bhimbetka (Raisen, Madhya Pradesh; V.N. Misra and V.S. Wakankar): shelters used from the Acheulian to the microlithic. Misra’s late Acheulian stage (thin bifaces, many cleavers, Levallois) is best seen here, against an early stone-hammer stage with many choppers.
• Son and Belan valleys (G.R. Sharma; the American prehistorian J. Desmond Clark; J.N. Pal): a sequence from Acheulian to Mesolithic. At Dhaba, one Middle Palaeolithic industry lasts from 80,000 to 65,000 years, across the Toba ash (Chris Clarkson and colleagues, 2020).
• Thar margin: at Didwana (Singi Talav, the 16R dune), occupation came and went with wet monsoon phases.
• East: Kuliana (Odisha) and Sisunia (West Bengal): Acheulian and pebble tools on laterite gravels. Gaps: the Ganga plains (deep alluvium), Kerala and the west coast, and most of the North-East.

2.4 The Middle Palaeolithic: position, features and makers

• Position: in the Deccan rivers Sankalia found a lower gravel with Acheulian tools, a middle gravel with flake tools and a silt above with microliths. The flake industry sits between them, so he called it the Middle Stone Age (later “Middle Palaeolithic”).
• Features: after Parth Chauhan (2006): smaller tools, a shift from big bifaces to flake tools (scrapers, points, borers), more prepared-core working (Levallois, discoid) and fine-grained stone such as chert, jasper and chalcedony. Sankalia’s “Nevasian” was later shown by Sheila Mishra (1995) to include late Acheulian material.
• Distribution: Luni valley and Didwana; the Belan, Son and Narmada (Samnapur); the Godavari basin; the Eastern Ghats.
• Makers: unknown, since no fossil lies with the tools; some suggest early modern humans, others archaic humans. Neanderthals never lived in India.

2.5 The Upper Palaeolithic: distribution and features

The Upper Palaeolithic was recognised late in India because Indian sites lacked Europe’s bone tools and cave art. The table shows where it is known and what each region adds.

Region	Sites	What the region shows
Belan and Son valleys	Chopani-Mando, Baghor I, Lohanda Nala	Blades and burins; a possible shrine
Upland Maharashtra	Patne (S.A. Sali)	Engraved ostrich eggshell, about 25,000 years old
Eastern Ghats	Renigunta, Kurnool caves	Backed blades; bone and antler tools
Central India	Bhimbetka, Mehtakheri	Blade industries; early microliths

• Tools: parallel-sided blades from prismatic cores, burins (chisel-edged tools for bone and wood), backed blades (probably arrow inserts) and bored stones.
• Art and belief: Patne gives the earliest dated Indian art object. At Baghor I (Son valley), a circular platform held a natural triangular stone with concentric bands; the excavators (Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, J. Desmond Clark, J.N. Pal and G.R. Sharma, 1983) noted that local Kol and Baiga people still worship such stones as the Mother Goddess.
• Environment: wild buffalo, Bos namadicus and hippopotamus show grassland with forest; ostrich eggshells at over 40 sites (about 40,000–25,000 years) show a drier west.
• Microliths early: at Dhaba about 48,000 years and Mehtakheri about 45,000 years ago. Why it matters: in South Asia the microlith is an Upper Palaeolithic invention, perhaps marking modern humans.

2.6 What makes the Indian Palaeolithic distinctive

1. Raw-material control: coarse quartzite dominates, and cleavers on large flakes are a regional hallmark.
2. Mixed assemblages: pebble tools with hand-axes (Chauntra), Levallois within the late Acheulian, microliths within the Upper Palaeolithic; so the Indian Palaeolithic is neither chronologically nor culturally uniform.
3. Few fossils and dates: acidic soils destroy bone, and many surface sites are assigned a stage by typology alone.
4. Monsoon, not ice: occupation followed wet and dry monsoon phases; the old glacial and pluvial schemes are abandoned.

3. Prehistoric Rock Art of India

Example first. On a shelter wall at Bhimbetka, stick-like hunters with bows and barbed spears surround a huge red bison; nearby, people dance in a line holding hands and a man climbs a tree for honey: a hunter-gatherer world drawn by its own members.

3.1 Discovery and distribution

• Discovery: Archibald Carlleyle found painted shelters with microliths in the Kaimur hills of Mirzapur in 1867–68, about twelve years before the paintings of Altamira in Spain were found (1879). V.S. Wakankar found Bhimbetka in 1957.
• Main zones: the Vindhya, Satpura and Kaimur sandstones, the Chambal valley, the Kumaon hills, and the granite hills of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh (Kupgal, Piklihal).
• Correction: Jogimara cave is in the Ramgarh hills of Surguja, Chhattisgarh, and its paintings are early historic, not prehistoric; Kupgal is in Karnataka, not Telangana.

3.2 Bhimbetka and the rock art of central India

• Site: about 750 shelters, over 400 painted, near Bhopal; a UNESCO World Heritage Site (2003), occupied from the Acheulian to historic times.
• Periods: after Wakankar and Yashodhar Mathpal, whose thesis (1978; book 1984) copied the paintings to scale:

Period	Style and colours	Themes
Upper Palaeolithic	Linear figures in green and dark red (dating debated)	Large patterned animals; stick-like hunters and dancers
Mesolithic (largest group)	Small figures in red ochre and white; naturalistic animals, stylised humans	Group hunting, traps, honey collection, dances, masked figures, family scenes, burials
Chalcolithic	Similar but cruder; pots and metal tools appear	Exchange with farmers of the Malwa plateau
Historic	Red, white, yellow; schematic	Riders on horses and elephants, warriors

• Pigments: red from haematite, white from limestone, green from a green rock; ground and mixed with water and perhaps animal fat or resin, applied with fibre brushes. Up to twenty layers overlap, so superimposition gives a relative sequence.
• Oldest claims: cupules (small hammered cups) in the Auditorium cave and at Daraki-Chattan (Chambal) are claimed by Robert Bednarik and Giriraj Kumar as the world’s oldest rock art; the claim is debated because cupules are hard to date.

3.3 Prehistoric rock art of Uttarakhand

• Lakhudiyar (“a lakh caves” in Kumaoni), on the Suyal river about 16 km from Almora on the Almora–Barechhina road, is the richest site: paintings in black, red and white of dancers holding hands, human and animal figures (a fox-like animal, a many-legged lizard), wavy lines and groups of dots. Superimposition runs black, then red, then white.
• Other sites: Lwethap, Phalsima and Petshal near Almora; Gwarkhya at Kimni (Chamoli); Hudoli (Uttarkashi).
• Date and meaning: the group dance dominates; some link the art to the megalith-builders of the first millennium BC, others place its earliest layers in the Mesolithic. The hand-in-hand dancers recall the Kumaoni Jhora and Chanchari circle dances, a continuity used cautiously to read the paintings.

3.4 What the paintings mean

Rock art is read as a record of daily life, as hunting and fertility magic, as ritual and shamanism (masked, trance-like dancers, as among the San of southern Africa) and as social markers of groups. Each has limits, so most scholars combine them; rock art remains the only direct window onto the ideas of Indian hunter-gatherers.

4. The Mesolithic of India: Regional Variation and the Road to Settlement

Microliths are geometric (lunates, triangles) or non-geometric (blades, points), set in wood or bone as composite tools (tools of several parts).

Example first. At Damdama, beside an old oxbow lake in Pratapgarh district, Uttar Pradesh, Allahabad University (1982–87) excavated 41 graves with about 46 skeletons, including double and triple burials, dug inside the camp among hearths, burnt bones, querns, microliths and bone tools. A people who buried their dead where they lived were already half-settled.

4.1 Regional variation

The Mesolithic took a different form in each environment.

Region	Key sites (excavator)	Setting	Distinctive features
Western India	Langhnaj (Sankalia), Bagor (V.N. Misra)	Dunes by seasonal lakes	Wild game; sheep and goat at Bagor; flexed burials
Ganga plain	Sarai Nahar Rai, Mahadaha, Damdama (G.R. Sharma, J.N. Pal)	Oxbow lakes	Big game, fish, turtle; cemeteries in camps
Vindhya–Belan	Chopani-Mando (G.R. Sharma)	Shelters, terraces	Huts, wild rice, early pottery
Central India	Bhimbetka, Adamgarh (R.V. Joshi)	Sandstone shelters	Rock art; claimed domestic animals
Eastern India	Birbhanpur (B.B. Lal, 1957)	Damodar laterite	Quartz microliths; post-holes
South India	Teri sites (Zeuner and Bridget Allchin, 1956)	Red coastal dunes, Tirunelveli	Quartz microliths; coastal foraging

Where water and food lasted all year (Ganga lakes, Rajasthan dunes), people stayed long, built floors and buried their dead; where they had to move, sites are small. Raw material also varied: chert and chalcedony in the west and centre, quartz in the south and east.

4.2 Western India: Langhnaj and Bagor

• Langhnaj (Mehsana, north Gujarat): a fossil sand dune by a seasonal lake, found by Sankalia’s expedition (1941–42).
  • Tools and fauna: geometric microliths (many lunates); rhinoceros, boar, deer, nilgai, tortoise and fish.
  • People: over a dozen mostly flexed skeletons, studied by Iravati Karve and later by Kenneth Kennedy (1965); some skulls show injuries.
  • Phases and date: an aceramic (pottery-less) phase, then pottery and ground stones; dates around 2400–2200 BC. Why it matters: foragers lived here while farming villages flourished nearby, showing coexistence.
• Bagor (on the Kothari, Bhilwara; V.N. Misra, 1967–70): Phase I (about 5000–2800 BC) has stone-paved floors, microliths, and wild deer and boar beside sheep and goat; Phase II adds pottery and copper arrowheads; Phase III, iron. Foragers slowly borrowed herding, pottery and metal from neighbours.

4.3 The Ganga basin: artefacts, fauna and skeletons

The lake sites of Pratapgarh district give the richest human skeletal record of Mesolithic South Asia.

• Artefacts: geometric microliths of chert and chalcedony carried from the Vindhyas; bone and antler points; querns and mullers; hearths; bone and antler ornaments.
• Fauna: wild cattle and buffalo, deer, boar, rhinoceros, elephant, fish and turtle; charred wild grain at Damdama: a mosaic of wetland, grassland and forest around permanent lakes.
• Human skeletal remains: the table compares the three cemeteries.

Site	Excavation	Burials	Notable finds	Date
Sarai Nahar Rai	1971–73	11 graves, about 15 people; one with four	Head to the west; an arrow-tip in one skeleton	About 10,000 years (one date, doubted)
Mahadaha	1978–79	28 graves, 30 people; man and woman together	Antler ornaments; butchering area	About 6,300 cal BP (AMS)
Damdama	1982–87	41 graves, about 46 people; triple burial	Bone points, hearths, wild grain	About 8,600–8,900 cal BP (AMS)

• What the bones say: the American physical anthropologists Kenneth Kennedy and John Lukacs, with J.N. Pal, found the people tall and robust, with few dental caries, as expected from a forager’s diet poor in cultivated starch.
• Why it matters: cemeteries inside camps, grave goods and joint burials imply belief in an afterlife, strong kin ties and attachment to a place.

4.4 The Vindhya–Belan valley

The Belan, a tributary of the Tons near Prayagraj, gives the most complete Stone Age sequence in one area, from Lower Palaeolithic to Neolithic (G.R. Sharma, 1970s).

• Chopani-Mando: from large flakes and blades, through an early Mesolithic, to an advanced Mesolithic with geometric microliths, beehive-shaped huts, common hearths, heavy anvils, ring-stones (perhaps digging-stick weights), hand-made cord-impressed pottery and husks of wild rice.
• Significance: it shows in one valley how hunters became semi-sedentary and then farmers (Koldihwa and Mahagara nearby); it shows pottery before farming; and the Kol of the region still collect wild rice and build similar huts.
• Correction: Chopani-Mando does not have “the earliest pottery in the world”; pottery in China (Xianrendong, about 20,000 years) and Japan (Jomon, about 16,000 years) is far older.

4.5 Was the Mesolithic the first step to settled life?

Older scholars called sites such as Langhnaj and Birbhanpur “Proto-Neolithic“: not yet farming, but on the way. The evidence points both ways.

For a transition	Against a simple transition
Long stays: floors, hearths and cemeteries at the Ganga lakes and Bagor	Most groups stayed mobile; the Ganga sites were seasonal to semi-permanent
Wild rice and querns (Chopani-Mando, Damdama)	Gathering wild rice is not cultivation
Sheep and goat at Bagor, cattle at Adamgarh	Identifications are doubtful; animals may come by exchange
Pottery in late phases	Pottery can be borrowed from farmers

The answer is regional. In the Belan valley and Ganga plain, Mesolithic people took the first steps to sedentism (living in one place) and plant use, and so fed into the Neolithic. In western India and the south, foragers coexisted with farmers and borrowed from them: a parallel way of life. Their ecological adaptation to the wetter early Holocene was broad-spectrum foraging, composite tools and seasonal moves.

5. The Neolithic of India: Many Roads to Farming

The theories of why farming began are in Paper 1, Unit 1.8c; this section compares the Indian regions.

5.1 The “Neolithic Revolution” in India

• Definition: V. Gordon Childe, the Australian-born archaeologist, called the shift to food production a “revolution” (Man Makes Himself, 1936) because it changed population, property and society. The British prehistorian Miles Burkitt listed four traits: agriculture, domestic animals, ground and polished stone tools and pottery.
• The Indian evidence: the traits appear not together and not at once: Mehrgarh farmed for a millennium without pottery, Belan foragers made pottery before farming, and Kashmir’s first phase was aceramic and mostly hunting.
• Revolution or evolution? Revolutionary in its consequences (villages, surplus, inequality); slow and regional in its pace. Childe’s statement holds for the outcome, not the process.

5.2 The regional centres

The table compares the main regions; notice the direction of contact in the last column.

Region	Key sites	Date (approximate)	Crops and animals	Hallmark and contacts
North-west	Mehrgarh (J.-F. Jarrige)	From 7000 BC	Barley, wheat; zebu, sheep, goat	Mud-brick granaries; West Asian crops
Kashmir	Burzahom, Gufkral	2800–1700 BC	Wheat, barley, lentil; sheep, goat	Pit dwellings, bone tools; Central Asian, Chinese links
Vindhya–Belan	Koldihwa, Mahagara	Disputed	Rice; cattle, sheep, goat	Cattle pen; rice husk in pottery
Middle Ganga	Chirand, Senuwar; Lahuradewa	2000–1500 BC (Lahuradewa claimed earlier)	Rice, wheat, barley, lentil	Bone and antler tools
East and North-east	Kuchai (Odisha); Daojali Hading, Sarutaru (Assam)	2nd–1st millennium BC	Rice (assumed)	Shouldered celts, cord-marked pottery; South-East Asian links
South	Sanganakallu, Utnur, Kupgal, Budihal, Maski, Hallur, Nagarjunakonda	2800–1200 BC	Horsegram, mung, millets; cattle	Ashmounds

The north-west and Kashmir look west and north; the east and north-east look to South-East Asia and south China; the Ganga valley and the south built on local plants and cattle. India had several centres of food production.

North-west. At Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Pass, Period I (about 7000–5500 BC) was aceramic, with mud-brick houses, granaries, six-row barley and wheat, and a shift from wild gazelle to domestic goat, sheep and zebu; shrinking zebu size points to local domestication. It leads into the Early Harappan (see 1.1b).

Kashmir: the pit-dwellers.

• Burzahom (near Srinagar; excavated by T.N. Khazanchi of the Archaeological Survey, 1960–71): aceramic and ceramic Neolithic, then Megalithic and early historic periods.
• Pit dwellings: round or oval pits dug into loess (wind-blown silt), narrow at the mouth and wide at the base, some about 4 m deep, with post-holes for a roof, steps and hearths. Why pits: warmth in the freezing Kashmir winter. Robin Coningham and T. Sutherland (1997) suggested some were storage pits, but hearths and tools inside support use as dwellings.
• Gufkral (A.K. Sharma, 1981–82): an aceramic Period IA (about 2800–2350 BC, calibrated) with pits, red-ochre floors, bone tools, wild animals and collected cereals; pottery in IB; farming and wool weaving by IC; menhirs and copper in Period II.
• Distinctive finds: bone tools; pierced stone harvesters and dog burials like those of north China; trepanned skulls (holes cut in the skull); a Kot Diji-type pot and carnelian beads from the Indus; parallels with Sarai Khola in Swat. Kashmir was a meeting ground of north China, Central Asia and the Indus.

Vindhya–Belan and the middle Ganga. Koldihwa and Mahagara gave rice husk in pottery and a cattle pen, but their very early dates are not accepted by most specialists. Lahuradewa (Rakesh Tewari) has rice dated to the 7th millennium BC, which the British archaeobotanist Dorian Fuller thinks may be wild. Chirand (Saran, Bihar; B.S. Verma) and Senuwar have mud floors, mixed crops and a fine bone and antler industry.

The North-East.

• Sites: the Pakistani archaeologist A.H. Dani (1960) divided the region into six zones (Cachar, Sadiya, Naga, Khasi and Garo hills, Brahmaputra valley). Daojali Hading (Dima Hasao, Assam; M.C. Goswami and T.C. Sharma, 1961–63) gave the first stratified Neolithic of the region: double-shouldered celts, cord-marked pottery, querns and tools of fossil wood. Others: Sarutaru (S.N. Rao), Garo hills, Napachik (Manipur), Chungliyimti (Nagaland).
• Date: OSL on Daojali Hading pottery gave 2,700 ± 300 years (Sukanya Sharma and Pankaj Singh, 2017): the north-eastern Neolithic is late, not 5000–2000 BC as once guessed.
• Origin: Sankalia looked to south-west China, Dani to Burma, T.C. Sharma to the Hoabinhian-rooted Neolithic of South-East Asia: all to an eastern source.
• Continuity: jhum (shifting cultivation) of the hill peoples has been read as a survival of Neolithic farming (S.K. Roy), but direct rice evidence is still lacking.

The South.

• Ashmounds: in the dry Bellary–Raichur region, beside hilltop villages, lie mounds of burnt cattle dung. Raymond Allchin, the British archaeologist who dug Utnur (1957), showed they were cattle pens whose dung was burnt periodically. Radiocarbon work by Dorian Fuller, Nicole Boivin and Ravi Korisettar (2007) shows each mound grew over a few generations and was often followed by a village, so the burning may have been a founding ritual.
• Crops: native horsegram, mung and small millets (browntop, bristly foxtail); wheat and barley came from the north in the early second millennium BC.
• Correction: ragi (finger millet, from East Africa) was not “one of the earliest crops”; early reports misidentified native millets.
• Society and art: a butchery floor at Budihal (K. Paddayya) suggests feasting; bruisings of humped cattle on the dolerite boulders of Kupgal, some of which ring when struck, link art, cattle and ritual (Boivin, 2004).

5.3 Neolithic tool typology and technology

Example first. To make an axe at Sanganakallu, a worker flaked a dolerite block into shape, pecked it all over with a hammerstone, ground it on a wet sandstone slab and finally polished it. Grinding grooves still mark rocks near many southern sites.

• Why these steps: pecking and grinding allowed tough, fine-grained rocks (dolerite, basalt; shale and fossil wood in the North-East) to be used; where stone was scarce, as in Kashmir and the Ganga valley, bone and antler took its place.

Most tools worked wood, because farmers cleared forest and built houses.

Tool	Form	Use	Region
Celt / axe	Ground, edge across the long axis	Felling, clearing	All regions
Shouldered celt	Narrowed butt for hafting	Woodworking, hoeing	North-East, Odisha
Ring-stone	Perforated round stone	Digging-stick weight	Belan, Kashmir, south
Quern and muller	Slab with a rubber	Grinding grain	All farming sites
Harvester	Pierced rectangular knife	Cutting cereal ears	Kashmir

5.4 Socio-cultural characteristics

• Settlement and economy: villages of round huts or mud-brick houses, cattle pens, mixed farming with hunting continuing, and storage that made surplus possible.
• Society and religion: kin-based villages with crafts (pottery, bone tools, weaving); grave goods and the Budihal feast hint at leaders but not classes; burials inside settlements and cattle-centred ritual; exchange of carnelian and lapis lazuli.

6. The Neolithic-Chalcolithic and Chalcolithic Cultures

6.1 The cultures outside the Harappan zone

Each is named after a type site and known by its painted pottery.

Culture	Region and sites	Date (approximate)	Hallmarks
Ahar–Banas	Rajasthan: Ahar, Gilund, Balathal	3000–1500 BC	White-painted black-and-red ware; copper smelting
Kayatha	Chambal: Kayatha (V.S. Wakankar)	Late 3rd millennium BC	Chocolate-slipped ware; copper axes
Malwa	Navdatoli, Eran, Nagda	1700–1400 BC	Orange pottery painted black
Jorwe	Jorwe, Inamgaon, Daimabad, Nevasa, Chandoli	1400–700 BC	Red ware painted black; urn burials
Eastern	Pandu Rajar Dhibi, Chirand II	2nd millennium BC	Black-and-red ware; rice

They share one way of life: village farming with cattle, sheep and goat, chalcedony blades with a little copper (largely from the Khetri belt), kiln-fired pottery, mother-goddess and bull cults, and child burials in urns under floors.

6.2 The Deccan Chalcolithic

Example first. At Inamgaon, on the Ghod river about 89 km east of Pune, Deccan College (H.D. Sankalia, M.K. Dhavalikar and Z.D. Ansari, 1969–82) excavated about 134 houses and 266 burials. In the Early Jorwe phase a large house with grain pits stood at the centre, artisans lived on the edge, and an embankment and channel diverted floodwater to fields. In the central house a man was buried seated in a four-legged urn.

• Sequence: Savalda (about 2200–1800 BC), Late Harappan (at Daimabad), Malwa (1600–1400 BC), Early Jorwe (1400–1000 BC), Late Jorwe (1000–700 BC).
• Daimabad (S.A. Sali, 1976–79): the largest Jorwe village and the southernmost site with Harappan material; its four bronzes (an ox-drawn chariot, rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo), found in 1974, are of debated date.
• Society: a settlement hierarchy, craft quarters and public works; Dhavalikar read Inamgaon as a chiefdom, whose hereditary leader controlled the surplus.
• Religion and burial: mother-goddess and headless female figurines, fire altars and a bull cult; adults buried extended under floors with pots of food and water, children in twin urns mouth to mouth: belief in an afterlife.
• Decline: in the Late Jorwe most villages were abandoned; at Inamgaon houses shrank to round huts and sheep and goat replaced cattle, because of a drier climate after about 1000 BC.

6.3 Rajasthan and Malwa

• Ahar (Udaipur), Tambavati (“place of copper”), smelted local ore. At Gilund, a building of parallel mud-brick walls held a clay bin with most of the site’s 249 clay sealings (seal impressions), with designs paralleled at Indus sites and in Central Asia’s Bactria–Margiana complex: a non-literate village culture with stores under elite control (V. Shinde and G. Possehl).
• Balathal (V.N. Misra) was a fortified village; a skeleton of about 2000 BC shows the oldest known leprosy (Gwen Robbins and colleagues, 2009). Eran had a rampart and moat.

6.4 Significance of the Chalcolithic

1. The base of rural India: mixed farming, cattle, craft specialists and village shrines continued into later villages.
2. Neighbours of the Indus: they traded with the Harappans and carried on after the cities declined.
3. Complexity without cities: Gilund’s sealings and Inamgaon’s chiefdom show ranking and public works before peninsular urbanisation.

The Copper Hoards and Ochre-Coloured Pottery of the Ganga–Yamuna doab belong to the post-Harappan horizon and are in 1.1b.

Key Terms

Term	Meaning in simple words
Material culture	The physical things a society makes and uses
Soanian	Pebble-tool (chopper) industries of the Soan valley and Siwaliks
Madrasian	Older name for the Acheulian hand-axe industries of South India
Facies	A local variant of a culture caused by raw material or activity
Levallois	Shaping a core so that one flake of planned shape can be struck off
Burin	A chisel-edged stone tool for cutting bone and wood
Microlith	A tiny stone blade, 1–5 cm long, set into arrows and sickles
Sedentism	Living in one place for most or all of the year
Aceramic	Without pottery
Celt	A ground and polished stone axe or adze
Ashmound	A mound of burnt cattle dung at Southern Neolithic sites
Cupule	A small cup-shaped hollow hammered into rock
Chiefdom	A ranked society led by a hereditary chief who controls surplus

Contemporary Developments

• Pampore, Kashmir (2024): a Palaeoloxodon elephant skull with 87 stone tools and humanly broken bone, about 300,000–400,000 years old, is the earliest Indian evidence of exploiting an elephant carcass (Ghulam Bhat, Advait Jukar and colleagues, Quaternary Science Reviews, 2024).
• Daojali Hading (2025): a new survey found a furnace and iron slag with celts and cord-marked pottery, confirming a settled village with early metal-working.
• Chennanur, Krishnagiri (2025): an OSL date of about 8450 BC for a microlithic layer shows some 10,000 years of occupation in Tamil Nadu.
• Attirampakkam (2018) and Dhaba (2020): Levallois tools by 385,000 years and an industry continuing across the Toba eruption have reshaped the Middle Palaeolithic.

Diagrams to Master

1. Topic map: the six blocks from evidence to Chalcolithic.
2. Soanian vs Madrasian: tools, raw material, Movius‘s view, facies view.
3. Rock art phases: Bhimbetka’s periods and colours; Lakhudiyar dancers.
4. Ganga-plain Mesolithic: three lake sites with graves and dates.
5. Neolithic regions: sites, crops and direction of contact.
6. Deccan Chalcolithic: Savalda → Jorwe, and the Inamgaon plan.

Revision Grid

Scholar	Work (year)	Key idea
Robert Bruce Foote	Pallavaram hand-axe (1863)	Beginning of Indian prehistory
De Terra and Paterson	Studies on the Ice Age in India (1939)	Soan sequence tied to glaciations
N.K. Bose and D. Sen	Excavations in Mayurbhanj (1948)	A region as its own cultural universe
Hallam Movius	Two-culture hypothesis (1948)	Chopper-chopping tools vs hand-axes
B. Subbarao	The Personality of India (1956)	Areas of attraction and isolation
Raymond Allchin	Utnur (1957)	Ashmounds as burnt cattle pens
H.D. Sankalia	Prehistory and Protohistory of India and Pakistan (1963)	Middle Palaeolithic; multidisciplinary archaeology
A.H. Dani	Prehistory and Protohistory of Eastern India (1960)	Six zones of the north-eastern Neolithic
M.K. Dhavalikar	Inamgaon (1969–82)	A Chalcolithic chiefdom
Fuller, Boivin and Korisettar	Southern Neolithic dates (2007)	Native crops; ashmounds as founding rituals

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