NATURE OF SOURCES AND HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION

Material Remains

The methods of archaeology help us to recover the material remains of the past, relating to ancient, medieval, and modern periods of our history. In India and many other countries, archaeology is used to study prehistory and ancient history. Prehistory is concerned with the period for which there are no written sources, and history is basically based on written material. Prehistoric sites differ from historical sites in several respects. Generally, they are not in the form of prominent habitation remains, but principally of fossils of humans, plants, and animals. They are found on the hill slopes of plateaus and mountains, and on the banks of nearby rivers with terraces, and comprise sundry fauna and flora. More importantly, numerous stone tools from the Stone Age have been found at these sites. The remains of tools, plants, animals, and humans from the pre-ice age indicate the climatic conditions that prevailed at the time. Although writing was known in India by the middle of the third millennium BC in the Indus culture, it has not so far been deciphered. Thus, though the Harappans knew how to write, their culture is placed in the proto-historic phase. The same is the case with the Chalcolithic or copper-Stone Age cultures which had no writing. Decipherable writing was known in India only in the third century BC with the Ashokan inscriptions providing solid evidence for historical reconstruction from that. time. However, despite the critical use of Vedic and post-Vedic literary sources for history in pre-Ashokan times, archaeology remains a very important source for historians.

The ancient Indians left innumerable material remains. The stone temples in south India and the brick monasteries in eastern India still stand to remind us of the great building activities of the past. However, the major part of these remains lies buried in mounds scattered all over India. (A mound is an elevated portion of land covering the remains of old habitations.) It may be of different types: single-culture, major-culture, and multi-culture. Single-culture mounds represent only one culture throughout. Some mounds represent only the Painted Grey Ware (PGW) culture, others Satavahana culture, and yet others that of the Kushans. In major-culture mounds, one culture is dominant and the others are of secondary importance. Multi-culture mounds represent several important cultures in succession which occasionally overlap with one another. As is the case with the Ramayana and Mahabharata, an excavated mound can be used to understand successive layers of the material and other aspects of a culture.

A mound can be excavated vertically or horizontally. Vertical excavation means lengthwise digging to uncover the period-wise sequence of cultures; it is generally confined to a part of the site. Horizontal excavation entails digging the mound as a whole or a major part of it. The method may enable the excavator to obtain a complete idea of the site culture in a particular period.

As most sites have been dug vertically, they provide a good chronological sequence of material culture. Horizontal diggings, being very expensive, are very few in number, with the result that the excavations do not give us a full or even adequate picture of material life in many phases of ancient Indian history.