Unit I.

b ) Sources of historical reconstruction (up to 600 BCE)

Singh, Upinder. (2008). A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the
Stone Age to the 12th Century. Delhi: Pearson Longman. (Introduction and
Chapter 1.) (Available in Hindi)

Archaeology is a seperate branch of social science which helps for the

reconstruction of early history, to a great extent.

Material remains are usually seen buried inside the elevated portion of land, called
mounds.

Artefact is any object that is made with human hands.

Industry - Similar artefacts made of the same material found at a site comprise an
industry.

Eg- microlith industry, blade industry

Assemblage - All the industries found at a site form its assemblage

Culture- The term culture has two connotations, culture includes all patterns of
people’s learnt behavior, the ways of thinking and doing things that they learn
from the social group of which they are a part. The rhythms and patterns of society
can be studied. It can be applied to archaeology as well.

An archaeological culture refers to when several assemblages are found at several

sites are said to belong to the ‘same archaeological culture’.

Field archaeology deals with the exploration and excavation of sites.

Sites – are places where the material remains of past human activity can be
identified.

LANDSAT imagery – is a remote sensing technique, where the scanners of

LANDSAT satellites create digital images of the earth’s surface and can help
identify features such as ancient river courses, canals, embankments and buried
settlements.

Full form: Land Remote-Sensing Satellite

Meaning of Landsat: Any of various satellites used to gather data for images of
the Earth's land surface and coastal regions. These satellites are equipped with
sensors that respond to Earth-reflected sunlight and infrared radiation.

(The Landsat program is the longest-running enterprise for acquisition of satellite

imagery of Earth)

Problems faced by archaeology:

Archaeological reconstruction depends on the kind of material that is preserved

and this in turn depends on the objects themselves and so environmental factors,
particularly soil and climate. Inorganic materials like stone, clay and metal objects
are more likely to survive in the archaeological record.

Tropical regions with heavy rains, acidic soils, warm climates and dense vegetation
are not favourable for preservation.

Sites can get destroyed by the forces of nature (e.g, floods, tectonic movements
and volcanic eruptions). They are also very often destroyed by people when they
clear land for farming or build houses, factories, roads and dams.
Stratigraphic Context of artefacts: The precise level at which they were found
and what other kinds of things were found along with them.

The basic principle of stratigraphy is that if there are different layers, strata, or
level at a site, the lower ones are older.
Horizontal excavation – where a large surface area is exposed

Synchronic – as it is at a particular point of time

Vertical excavation – where the digging involves a small surface area

(diachronic- studying changes through time)

The new trends in archaeology include:

Landscape Archaeology: Landscape archaeology studies the probable distribution

of sites in a region, where the landscape itself can be reconstructed by Human
geographers who have contributed a great deal to the study of prehistoric
subsistence patterns.
Regional surveys: are conducted by walking over carefully selected sections of an
area, observing the distribution and nature of surface features and finds. These are
recorded and the surface finds collected.

Marine/ Maritime Archaeology: is the study of the history and material

remains of people and their activities on, under, near or associated with the
sea. This includes shipwrecks, submerged settlements and buildings in and
around coastal areas.
Scientific Techniques in Archaeology

Dendrochronology, Carbon-14 dating, Thermoluminescence, potassium

argon, uranium series

Archaeometry refers to a range of scientific techniques and analyses involving the

use of measurement to analyse ancient objects or materials. For eg: the chemical
analysis of pottery and metal artefacts can help us to know how they were
produced.

Palaeontology - is the study of the remains of the dead organisms over a large
span of time.

Faunal analysis gives information about the animals people hunted and
domesticated, the age of animals at the time at death, and the diseases that affected
them. The bones of wild and domesticated animals can also be identified.

The traditional method of dating that was used by prehistorians was the method of
“relative chronology”, the chronology based on the twin principles of stratigraphy
and typology of tools, implements and other material remains.

[Basic principle of stratigraphy]

Lowest layer – earlier in date

Above it- later in date

Dendrochronology

Some kinds of forest trees have clearly defined annual rings of growth in their
trunk. The thickness and shape characteristics of these rings vary in detail and are
dependent on environmental moisture and other factors during the period of their
growth. By counting the number of these rings in the cross-section of a tree cut on
a known date, one can easily determine the age of the given tree. Archaeological
materials when accompanied with such trees are dated accurately by this method.

The dating is based on the growth of yearly rings on certain long-lasting trees, as
old as 8000 years.
Carbon-14 dating – For dating the evidence for the remoter periods where neither
of these evidences are present an alternative method was required.

Prof. Willard P Liby of the University of Chicago, developed the radioactive

carbon-14 (C14) method to determine the absolute age of prehistoric site. The
principle behind this technique is as follows:

The carbon-14 originally produced in the environment is equally distributed among

all living things and maintained at a constant level till their death.

When an organism dies it stops taking in C14 and that which is present begins to
decay at a constant rate. After 5568+- 30 years C14 reaches its ‘half-life’ which
means that at this point there is only half of this left as there was in the organism
when it died.

https://youtu.be/phZeE7Att_s

Box on pg 38 (U Singh)

Thermoluminescence dating

While C14 dating technique could be used only on organic materials (bone, wood,
etc.). The TL method is helpful in dating inorganic objects such as pottery. It is
found abundantly at the archaeological sites. At the time of pottery making, the
 clay entraps certain minerals having electrons. When a sample is heated in the lab,
it will release accumulated energy in the form of light which can be measured to
indicate the period when it was first baked.

1. (A stable subatomic particle with a charge of negative electricity, found in all atoms and acting as the
primary carrier of electricity in solids)
Potassium-Argon (K-Ar dating method): This method is used to determine the
age of a rock by measuring the proportion of potassium (K40) and argon in the
volcanic ash containing prehistoric remains. With this method dates can be
obtained for volcanic rocks older than about 100,000 years.

https://youtu.be/lfj9M7lKLcI
Palaeomagnetic dating

It is based on the analysis of particles contained in the sediments which can

indicate the time when the old rocks containing human artifacts or fossils were
formed. It can only be used to date very old deposits from hundreds of thousands
years ago to millions of years ago. It is used on magnetized sediments, volcanic
lava and baked clay.

https://youtu.be/-dme8x-bERA
New Techniques

Remote sensing from a high altitude through LANDSAT (a name for a US satellite
that records earth’s natural resources using a remote sensing apparatus)

In this system scanners record infra-red radiation from earth’s surface and convert
them electronically into photographic image.

SONAR – “sound navigation and ranging”. It sends out sharp pulses of sound
which are reflected back when they strike back an object undersea and these
vibrations are used to calculate the range and direction of the object. It is useful for
marine archaeology and has helped in locating shipwrecks and undersea sites in
different parts of the world.

Interpreting Archaeological evidence

During the 1960s – new archaeology which is now known as and a school known
as ‘processualism’ or processual archaeology emerged. This approach focuses not
on the mere physical description of tools, pottery and other material remains, but
aims to analyse them to understand the process of socio-economic change and
process. It raises questions about life-patterns of the ancient humans and then tries
to look for their answers in material remains. It attempts to deal with such diverse
issues as mechanism of trade and exchange, social inequality, role of political
authority, etc. It views culture as a “system” having various “sub-systems” or
components such as society, economy environments and argues that it is the
interaction and relationship between them that leads to change.

Processual archaeology attempts to utilize the knowledge from other disciplines

particularly anthropology (Anthropology is the study of humanity, concerned with human
behavior, human biology, and societies, in both the present and past, including past human species.)

to analyse the prehistoric remains. The processual archaeology also puts greater emphasis on the
environment to determine the animal and vegetal food resources of the early man. Thus subjects
such as palaeobotany and palaeozoology are also drawn into the study of archaeology.

Processual archaeology involves the scientific method. All data is still important to the processual
archaeologist, but the facts aren't good enough alone: an explanation of the data is required. Artifacts
were used to determine how the people who created or owned such artifacts lived and thought.

https://youtu.be/octSnS00oeg

Post –Processualism challenged the methods and goals of processualism. It first

raises hypothetical questions and then looks for their answers in the ancient
remains. It advocates that the archaeology of a region should be viewed in the
context of history of the people concerned rather than from an alien point of view.
It believes that each area follows its own path of development, and argues that the
cultural traditions are generated independently.
Post-processualism stems from processualism. In fact, it is a criticism of its predecessor in that it
challenges if we can know the lifestyle and belief systems of an ancient culture correctly at all. It's safe
to say that the post-processualists sees all cultural-historical and processual archaeology as
interpretations of the ancient through a modern lens.

Cognitive archaeology – deals with the ways of thinking, belief and religion, Eg:
Archaeology that is pertaining to the study of ancient religions.

Ethno-archaeology

Ethnography is the study of living cultures and communities.

Ethno-archaeology studies the behavior and practices of living communities in

order to interpret the archaeological evidence related to communities of the past.
Different Forms of archaeological sources

Tools and weapons: An important development in the post-1950 archaeology in

India has been a clear cut demarcation and identification of Palaeolithic (Origin:
From Greek palaios ‘ancient or old’) period in three successive phases – Lower,
middle and upper. These phases were marked by gradual, stage by stage, progress
in type and technology of tools from hand axes to flake-based tools.
The palaeolithic sites are being studied today not from the viewpoint of tool
assemblages alone; there are attempts to study the subsistence patterns of these
settlements.
The Microliths were ascribed to a separate phase known as the Mesolithic Period,
as a period of transition between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic period
Tool making in India

https://youtu.be/Fe-uaWRIiPM
There are a large number of Neolithic cultures in India, and the development of
tools that reflect the development of plant domestication in various sites. The
different kinds of tools include the ground stone tools (ground stone is a category
of stone tool formed by the grinding of a coarse-grained tool stone, either purposely or incidentally)
Pottery is now being treated as a means to highlight the change and continuity in
material life of the people in the light of contemporary literature.

Neolithic Pottery
Indus pottery (Black and Red Ware)

Ornaments and Beads

Town layout/planning

There is a fairly wide range of variations in the Harappan settlements. There

were some basic similarities and some differences in the details. There are
details available about water disposal through drains, cess-pits (a pit for the
disposal of liquid waste and sewage a pit for the disposal of liquid waste and sewage) and
soakage jars.

Water management included dams across rivulets (Dholavira) and wells in

many places. All settlements were integrated into the landscape and the
character of the city did not depend on the size of the settlement. The cities
had a common feature of an organized layout.

Seals and sealings

There are different kinds of seals and also the seal impressions that have been
identified in the Indus sites. The number of seal impressions is much lesser
than the number of seals. There are different kinds of seals, like square and
cylindrical. There are animal as well as human representations on seals. A
large number of animals both real and mythical have been represented on
these seals.

Burials and Skeletal remains

The cemetery area at Dholavira lies to the west of the fortified area. There are
rectangular burial pits lined with cist (stone) blocks. They do not contain any
physical remains but are part of a mortuary practice.

Ritual objects

Art objects (painting and sculpture)

Structures – houses

The housing material included bricks of standardized measurements, stones

set in mud-mortar and large scale stone-cutting and polishing where
necessary.
Glossary

Fossil: The remains or impression of a prehistoric plant or animal embedded in

rock and preserved in petrified form.

Hominid- Species similar to humans

The group consisting of all modern and extinct Great Apes (that is, modern
humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans plus all their immediate
ancestors).