Western India: Balathal to jorwe

In western India, extending from Balathal and Ahar in southeastern Rajasthan southward to Songaon on the upper Krishna River in Maharashtra, the archaeological record reveals a number of closely related Chalcolithic cultures dating from 3500 BC in the north, continuing to an ultimate phase of decline and abandonment late in the second millennium Bc.18 These cultures have copper tools of Harappan derivation, hence there is strictly speaking no Neolithic in this region, although there is a Neolithic to the south, as there is in northeastern India. The west coast of India, as indeed also the east coast, is currently a region almost devoid of archaeological information pertinent for early agricultural questions.

Into this monsoonal region focused on the rather dry Deccan Plateau spread the farming economy characteristic of the Harappan in Gujarat, complete with the Southwest Asian cereals and legumes, the African and native millets, and rare occurrences of rice, the latter for instance at the site of Dangawada in Madhya Pradesh, directly dated by C14 to almost 2000 BC (IAR 1982-83:144). With it came an animal economy dominated, as in the Indus Valley itself, by cattle, with sheep and goats usually in minor proportions. Black cotton soils were favored for settlement, usually near rivers so that agriculture could proceed with irrigation when necessary. Traces of an irrigation canal have been discovered at Inamgaon in Maharashtra. Presumably, as in the Late Harappan, a double-cropping economy was practiced, together with a good deal of cattlebased pastoralism in drier regions.

The cultures concerned are normally differentiated through minor variations in pottery typology, but most Indian archaeologists regard them all as very closely related to one another. Vasant Shinde (2000, 2002) divides the Chalcolithic sequence of western India into a number of phases running successively from 3500 BC onward, being represented first by the PreHarappan basal layer at Balathal in Rajasthan, then the successive Kayatha, Ahar, Malwa, and Jorwe ceramic complexes, culminating in the final decline of Jorwe settlements around 1000 BC, just before the dramatic cultural changes of the Iron Age. For our purposes the details of these successive ceramic phases

are not essential, except to note that many artifact types do show fairly obvious relationships with the Pre-Harappan and Harappan cultures of the Indus region. These include black-on-red painted and wheel-made pottery, pottery kilns and clay ovens, pressure-flaked lithic blade industries, simple copper tools made mostly in open molds, clay models of bulls and humans, urn burials of children, mud or stone-walled rectangular houses, lime plastered floors, and even Harappan-like defended enclaves ("citadels") located in third millennium Bc layers at Balathal and Daimabad.

The Balathal "citadel" was quite a remarkable construction, enclosing an approximate square of 600 square meters, with stone-faced mud walls 7 meters wide at the base and 4 meters high, the whole filled from top to bottom with cow dung cakes after its abandonment. As V. N. Misra (2002) notes, this construction is rather an enigma, but its cow-dung fill is reminiscent of the ashmound sites in Karnataka that are about to be described below. These Chalcolithic settlements were up to 20 hectares in size (Daimabad), often with houses arranged in rectilinear blocks separated by lanes, as at Inamgaon, a 5- hectare site that appears to have been fortified with a mud wall with rubble bastions and a ditch (Dhavalikar et al. 1988).

The essential question with this western Indian Chalcolithic complex is to determine how it relates to the Pre-Harappan and Harappan sequences on the one hand, and to the southern Neolithic cultures that lay beyond it on the other. Most observers clearly favor either direct derivation from the Pre-Harappan and Harappan cultural traditions, or very strong influence from them (e.g., Dhavalikar 1988, 1994, 1997; V. N. Misra 1997, 2002; Shinde 2000, 2002). Yet there seems to be more to the western Chalcolithic than just an Indus Valley overflow. For instance, non-Harappan types of circular houses with wattle and daub walls are present in Navdatoli in Madhya Pradesh, and in the basal layer at Balathal in Rajasthan (ca. 3200 Bc). They later became entirely dominant in the Late Jorwe phase in Maharashtra during the late second millennium BC (Dhavalikar 1988). At face value this might mean little, but there is at least a hint here of a "native" element not immediately derivable from the sidewalks of Mohenjo-Daro. V. H. Sonawane (2000:143) notes that circular huts also appear in several sites of the Post-urban Harappan Phase in Gujarat, again suggesting that these Chalcolithic cultures contained an ethnic tradition not simply derivable from the Harappan.

Southern India

In Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu, the picture is slightly different from that just described for western India. We have no good Neolithic data from Kerala, and Sri Lanka seems only to have been settled by farmers during the Iron Age, after 1000 Be. Virtually the whole archaeological record in the south comes from the dry monsoonal regions in the southern inland part of the Deccan Plateau. In northern Karnataka, the earliest Neolithic sites appear to have been based on cattle pastoralism, and date back to about 2800 Be. A classic site in this series is the Utnur ashmound, which had a sub-rectangular stockaded enclosure about 60 meters long fenced with palm trunks, sufficient in area for perhaps 500 cattle. Inside the stockade was a thick layer of burned cow dung, with several hoof impressions. Dwelling huts (presumably circular) were constructed between the enclosure and a separate outer stockade (Allchin 1963; Allchin and Allchin 1982:123).

Another ashmound site at Budihal, dated to 2300 BC, had possibly four cattle pens, of which the major excavated example (Budihal Locality 1) contained a 3- meter-high mound of burned dung, an adjacent animal pen fenced by a rubble embankment, and a flanking habitation area of about 1.3 hectares with the stone foundations of rectangular and oval houses. The dung is believed to have been derived from nocturnal cattle-corralling, perhaps burned periodically to reduce flies. Such periodic burning suggests that the dung was not in demand as fertilizer, thus that field agriculture might have been absent. However, the plant remains from Budihal do contain some barley, horse gram, bean, and millettype seeds, so we cannot assume that these people were purely pastoralists (Paddayya 1993, 1998; Kajale 1996b).

The ashmound sites contain querns, stone axes, a blade industry, and pottery comprising plain gray, incised, and painted wares, handmade and not kiln-fired in the earliest layers. Antecedents are obscure, but the recently excavated nonashmound site of Watgal, near Budihal, has a number of features reminiscent of Chalcolithic sites further north in the Deccan - a child urn burial and clay-lined basins paralleled at Inamgaon, and painted pottery, including some in Jorwe style (Deavaraj et al. 1995; DuFresne et al. 1998). Budihal has also yielded urn

burials of children. Watgal, which has occupation dating from as early as 2700 BC, also has remains of a rather interesting plant found widely in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific - the betel nut.

Elsewhere in southern India, Neolithic occupation sites such as Hallur, Tekkalakota, Paiyampalli, Brahmagiri, and Sanganakallu (Figure 4.7) have varying combinations of painted pottery, child urn burials, blade industries, circular houses with bamboo walls (Tekkalakota and Sanganakallu), and cattle figurines. Most of these sites appear to have commenced occupation in the early second millennium Bc, with copper appearing fairly soon after this date in sites such as Ramapuram, Hallur, and Maski. In general, the focus on domesticated cattle, painted pottery, and circular houses links this region loosely with the northern Deccan Chalcolithic sites, and indeed in some sites there is a fairly late spread of Jorwe-type ceramics, particularly into northern Karnataka. Plant remains from these southern sites include the native grams and millets (with apparently no African millets present until 1500 Bc), with less frequent occurrences of wheat, barley, and rice (Kajale 1996b; Venkatasubbaiah and Kajale 1991; Korisettar et al. 2002; Fuller 2003).

As far as origins of the southern Neolithic and Chalcolithic are concerned, the radiocarbon series indicates a slight time-cline from north to south, from Rajasthan to Karnataka, between about 3000 and 2500 BC. This suggests that the whole series may belong to a single episode of agricultural dispersal. There is considerable local variation, but over such a vast area this is to be expected. However, the possibility that southern India also witnessed an independent domestication of a number of local and relatively minor millets and grams has recently been suggested. If Fuller's (2003) suggestions of a native and independent South Indian course toward plant domestication, dating from about 2800 BC in the ashmound phase, prove to be correct, then our understanding of the South Asian Neolithic will be greatly enriched.