Archaeology

Two Rats in My Room

A

Poem

By

Ajay Pratap

Two rats of a decade,
These marvellous brown things,
Have been in my room,
As intelligent beings.

They have studied me,
And I have done the same,
They however is famous,
Coz they is better at the game.

They upsets my ink-well,
Me bottle of water,
And nameless other mischiefs,
Recounting which is a tall-order.

But when they done some mischief,
With objects of consequence,
I had to feed dem,
Raat-Kill,
To preserve my perseverance.

Indeed this was done,
Nearly a decade ago,
But they they only burped,
Just a moment ago
After consuming this lethal-dose,
They retreated quietly,
And cut-my bathroom hose.

Then I bought a metal-trap,
But as the lord above chose,
That trap was never-used,
Which got me confused,

Then they bit and chewed,
The edges of my tiffin,
And thus conveyed the message,
For what they was really lookin.

So there is peace amongst us now,
As I feed dem every-day,
Cereals and vegetables,
And what have you,
So none of us come to harm's-way,
And it’s all cock-a-doodle-doo.

Lest I forget this daily routine,
A gentle bite to me toes,
Or, another completely destroyed tiffin,
Serves me as a daily reminder,
That, dey, is more, intelligent, than, dim.

Ajay

Some Book Reviews of Fiction

English, August: An Indian Story, Upamanyu Chatterjee. Penguin.

It is very difficult for a non-English literature person to review a literary work of the quality that is this book. However, let us invoke academic democracy that allows us, from time to time, to shed the garb of the specialist and act like normal people. This may give us the lee-way we need to justify whatever we write about Upamanyu’s Chatterji's excellent debut novel of the late 1980s. At a time when most of our young students are inclined to "Take the Civil" Chatterji's novel should come as an eye-opener to what there is in this line of service beyond the imagined fat pay packets! Upamanyu's work is by no means meant to be a manual for administrators or young administrators as was Kautilya’s Arthasastra. It is really the reminiscences of a king...just as if Chandragupta Maurya were to write about the Mauryan period rather than Kautilya....which in fact is not the case! In my limited understanding of Indo-Anglian Literature in English, whether prehistoric, colonial, or postmodern, writing provides catharsis, and that seems to be the main purpose of English, August!

The protagonist in this story is a young recruit into the elite Indian Administrative Service also know as IAS. August is a thoroughly urban-bred boy who finds his first posting in Madna, a little district headquarter in the middle of nowhere in particular. The story revolves around the experiences of Augustya with local administration and is about Augustya finding his feet in this unlikeliest of locales given his deep disgust for all that Madna has to offer.

There is something in the repeated flights of the protagonist Augustya Sen, mostly from rural locales of Madna, to the metropolis whether Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata, that smacks of a certain unabashed truthfulness that a lot of urban Indians suffer from claustrophobia while out in the open and conversely a lot of rural Indians feel the same when they visit the great urban jungles.

There is nothing wrong in either of such protagonists running from dislikable locales, on account of them all being runners, which incidentally Augustya is! However, Augustya Sen is also a chatterer. He is constantly muttering (albeit only in his thought world!) to himself, and thus exercising self-reflexivity in situations that he finds thoroughly dislikable such as committee meetings, Revenue Meetings etc. Even in a work of fiction to impart such fallibility to a character is surely a first in such modern Indo-Anglian fiction that I have read. I mean the consistency with which Augustya is able to do this should by far out-rival the same talent in any other fictional character created thus far. A sort of Indian Walter Mitty. All in all this is a great debut novel.

The Hungry Tide

As a student at Cambridge, once while I was deeply lost in the University Library Stack-Area, I happened to stumble upon an unlikely reading in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society - A Captain someone had written an article on the freshwater dolphins that are commonly found all along the river Ganges in India. He had described the provenance and the habits of this creature and had even provided a diagram of a skeleton of one such dolphin, from which it was easy to infer that this is after all what we saw cavorting in the river from the roof-tops of our school in Patna, and from the shores of the Ganges at Bhagalpur, in Bihar.

But most of all, I am an Amitav Ghosh fan, and read The Hungry Tide recently, a book that deals with Gangetic Dolphins. It is about the Sunderbans Delta of the Great Ganges; what life (human and animal) obtains there and their interactive dynamics. It is absolutely transporting as most Indian associate the name of the Sunderbans with the royal Bengal tiger and hence never even considers venturing into that area. His protagonist is a girl Ph.D. student working on such dolphins. As Amit Da is an anthropologist himself, he has managed to describe her trials and tribulations (in the novel) as she trails the very elusive dolphins and the not so elusive locals who are forever trying to do her out of her money! Absolutely transporting. of course Amit Da, as he says somewhere in this work, has put in considerable field research on freshwater dolphins, if not in the Ganges delta then somewhere else in Southeast Asia. What I like most about this work is his eye for the correct sort of detail and his background knowledge of the subject. Such that the reader of his work emerges a little wiser than when he started. In a recent television interview with Barkha Dutt Amit Da has shared his liking for the subaltern. Among other quotable quote from this excellent interview session is "I do not paint any perfect characters as in real life there are hardly any".

The Pilgrimage

I also happened to read Paolo Coelho's The Pilgrimage. I have also read parts of The Alchemist, and two others of his works, however, it is this work of his that I feel is of greater significance than the others.

Astounding. Just when I thought that modern Europe is all about machines and material culture comes a book that takes us into the contemporary inner spiritual cultures of Europe. The kind of pilgrimages, revelations and magic that we hear exists only in exotic locales like the Orient. At least it helps establish that no all of contemporary Europe lives in her cities.

I hope this is not blasphemy of any sort when speaking about a work of the great Coelho, that his novel smacks a little of the Castaneda genre of Don Juan books.

Italo Calvino - Mr. Palomar

This is a book and an author very much to my liking. This is his very first work that I have read. In fact the book contains something about Mrs. Palomar as well. So Mr. Palomar, who is a quintessential dreamer, is also suitably domesticated. Thank heaven's that Mr. Calvino lives in Italy, else in this work, Mr. Palomar could easily have drifted into an existentialistic character. No, he appears to be firm, detached, purposeful and organized even in his dreaming, whether he is dreaming as he is watching the sea waves, the skies, his garden, or listening to the blackbird (the latter being the most interesting story according to me in the pages that I have read until now because it is certainly a relevant idea of Calvino that if the blackbird could speak the human language then humans could learn from her all the nature's secrets, and conversely if humans could whistle like the blackbird then she could learn all the secrets of human culture! This is an adorable construct and explains the nature/culture dichotomy better than most books on anthropology. I welcome pontificators like Mr. Palomar.

Leaves From My Mirzapur Field Diary

Friends,

Welcome here to some anecdotes which I shall hope shall thrill you to some extent. However, whether that happens or not, please rest assured that such stories as I shall try to recount here, are all almost true.

Keywords: Black Buck, Wild Dogs, Birds, Indian Grey Wolf, Nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus), Mongoose

The Vindhyan countryside, heading southward from Benaras, is simply glorious. Even if the actual forest cover has depleted and shrunk miserably. The Imperial Gazetteer of Mirzapur is a very good place to start to acquaint yourself with this district. Archaeologists tend to become naturalists more from necessity than choice.

Several times, in my archaeological work in Mirzapur, and thus and therefore, in the course, several times, of having driven upwards of 150 kilometers in a day, the mind tends to wander, although this condition is alleviated somewhat by some small gossip with students accompanying, some tea at a wayside Dhaba, it is just sheer pleasure to behold a very large herd of the very large and sturdy Nilgai, who quite suddenly stampede helter-skelter, as once upon a time we saw, while surveying within a few miles of Sidh Nath Ki Dari. Our Indian Grey Wolf sighting was deep inside the Barkacha Reserve Forest. As my students and I were returning bone-tired after miles of trekking and recording rock-art data, our field guide tapped me on my shoulder gently and then whispered, "Sahab, Janwar!". My first thought was to say a quick prayer as my adrenalin jumped just in case it was a 500 kilogram striped big and very very clawy sort of Janwar. Then, he pointed towards it and my student and I were very very lucky to have our first sighting of a fully grown Grey Indian Wolf. It stood very still, turning its head backwards to take a good look at us. Then his curiosity satisfied, he looked forward and loped-away for his evening constitutional.

(Contd.)
..................

Thank you.

Ajay

Pleistocene Rock Art of India

by

Ajay Pratap,
Professor,
Project Director,
ICHR, Rock Art of Mirzapur Project,
Department of History,
Faculty of Social Sciences,
Banaras Hindu University,
Varanasi - 221 005

Friends,

Every Project Director, such as I, of a field-survey based project, The Documentation and Analysis of the Rock Art of Uttar Pradesh with Special Reference to the Rock Art of Mirzapur District, Uttar Pradesh, in this case, is basically in a multivariate situation, and thus some questions, even older ones, find the context of expression, only when the post-fieldwork stage of analysis of the data collected is reached. Given below are some outstanding questions from mine. In an attempt to find probable answers to these I tend to think that we shall have to re-read what Mr. Robert Bednarik has had to say about the Pleistocene Rock Art of India. Thus, and therefore, I shall have to search the JSTOR to see if I may be able to find that relevant reading. Kindly wait for this upload!

Here are some odd-bodd questions:

1. Did the painters of prehistory already know that Haemetite drawings on rocks tend to wither and waste-away if they are exposed to the elements?

2. How else do we explain most of the paintings at Likhaniya Dari, Chuna Dari, Wyndham, Morhana Pahar to have been executed inside (of cave shelters) so to speak?

As the tradition of painting on rocks, some argue (Bednarik, ????), started in India, sometime in the upper palaeolithic, there is all the reason to believe that there gradually grew cumulative experience regarding the propensity of various types of coloring material when applied to rock surfaces.

3. So it is that a majority of paintings at the sites named above are positioned in locations so that they have the natural advantage of protection from the weather.

4. To what extent suggested by hypothetical images are hypothetical animals are intentionally or un-intentionally simulated or suggested?

5. To what extent in the Vindhyan Rock Art sites the play with images suggest creative imagination to the extent that the painted icon or panel supersedes or goes beyond the concern of realistic depiction?

Hi,

I am uploading, most tentatively, some very interesting papers of Mr. Robert Bednarik, who is a world acknowledged authority on rock art, and, this is for such readers of this blog who do not already know of it. If I were you, I would start reading it backwards. First, the section on "Discussion", on page 9, and then whichever way you may please. This is insofar as the very first of these papers is concerned. I shall provide some comments on the others. Side by side, I've here uploaded some primary data pertaining to our own project and its outcomes in order to determine whether at least at the WYN 3 shelter the rock painting, or at least a few of them, actually date to the Late Pleistocene.

It would appear from the dates provided by Ruman Bannerjee that these calcite deposits are almost 14,000 B.P. to 12,000 years B.P. old and are therefore certainly of the late or terminal Pleistocene in age.

I shall be happy to hear from anybody on this subject at apratap_hist@bhu.ac.in.

Thanks.

Ajay,

Courtesy URL: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~auranet/eip1/shared_files/reddy3.pdf

Courtesy JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20474997.pdf

Consulted on 12.1.2013

Courtesy JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25800655.pdf?acceptTC=true

Consulted on 12.1.2013

Courtesy JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40463849.pdf?acceptTC=true

Consulted on 12.1.2013

Courtesy JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40467339.pdf

Consulted on 12.1.2013

(Proper references to be provided. Kindly wait!)

Consulted on 7.1.2013 and 11.1.2013

Subsequent to Mr. Robert Bednarik's hope expressed in the article above I am taking the liberty of posting here Dates provided (ICPMS and U-TH) for Calcite Samples of Wyndham 3 by Mr. Ruman Bannerjee, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, United Kingdom, who visited our project sites Likhaniya Dari (LKH 1), Chuna Dari (CHD 1 and CHD 2), and Wyndham 3, 4 and 5 sites, in August-December 2010.

The first of these dates and the .pdf file thereof came through to us, sometime in December 2011, and the other a month or so ago. I have used these here with the author's permission, and shall cite their proper reference in due course.

Thank you.

Ajay

Calcite Deposits and Rock Paintings at CHD 2

Calcite Deposits and Rock Paintings at WYN 3

Palaeolithic Panel (?) at Likhaniya Dari LKH 1 site

Another view of this painted panel

How come we find Pleistocene deposits of this type here has been discussed by us elsewhere (Pratap, n.d.). Here in brief, we would like to reiterate that the Geomorphic processes operating in the Mid-Ganga Valley during Terminal Pleistocene caused repeated cycles of desiccation and hydration leading to the formation of Calcareous deposits in hardpan and kankar formations within the Ganga Valley (Pandey 2010), and in the Vindhyan Highlands just South of the Middle Ganga Valley these same Geomorphological processes led to the leaching of the calcareous salts from the thin highland soils leaving behind film-like deposits of Ca CO3 at places like Wyndham Waterfalls and Chuna Dari where these deposits are found today.

However, if as we have argued there did exist a Palaeolithic or at best an Upper Palaeolithic Population in the Highlands Vindhyas then they must have inhabited diverse locations within this vast 1200 square miles area and must therefore have left behind such paintings of their period, which with or without the benefit of these calcareous deposits in each and every case can and may be identified as contemporary with these other paintings which we may no doubt argue as being of Palaeolithic in origin.

Therefore, `style' or `style in rock art' comes to our aid, as do the method of contextual analysis. Just as there are many elements of style in common between selected motifs, icons and panels at all our sites, similarly the evidence of faunal exploitation at the Damdama site also comes to our aid. Within the Mesolithic layers excavated at Damdama, the earliest of layers show a high density of the bones of Black Buck Deer. The panel at LKH 1 given above in fact does contain two depictions of what we think is are Black Buck Deer. Hence, to our most tentative hypothesis, that amongst the very many paintings and compositions found in the rock paintings at Likhaniya Dari, or LKH 1 Site, of which some are clearly early historic in origin, this one, the one with the Blackbucks and numerous very elementary, comparative to the later paintings here, and elsewhere in the ites we have studied thus far in the Vindhyan Ranges, is possibly not only the oldest, but is also Palaeolithic.

Bibliography

Banerjee, R. (In preparation) Rock Art (India) as the Medium for Social Change. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Bristol: University of Bristol.

Bednarik, R.G. 2008. More on Rock Art Removal. The South African Archaeological Bulletin 63(187): 82-4.

Bednarik, R.G. 1994. Art Origins. Anthropos 89(1/3): 169-80.

Bednarik, R.G. 1994. The Pleistocene Art of Asia. Journal of World Prehistory 8(4): 351-75.

Bednarik, R.G. 2003. A Major Change in Archaeological Paradigm. Anthropos 98(2): 511-20.

Bednarik, R.G. 2008. More on Rock Art Removal. The South African Archaeological Bulletin 63(187): 82-4.

Pandey, R.P. 2010. Late Quaternary Formations in the Ganga Valley. Tripathi, V and Upadhyay, P. (Eds.) Archaeology of the Ganga Basin: Paradigm Shift. Delhi. Sharada Publishing House. 79-82.

Pratap, A. Mss. Some Considerations of the Rock Art of Chambal Valley. Seminar Presentation. Center for South Asian Studies. University of Cambridge.

Pratap, A. Mss. The Rock Art Imagery of Vindhyas, Uttar Pradesh. Powerpoint presentation made to the CABA (Central Advisory Body of Archaeology), Archaeological Survey of India, 29th October 2011, New Delhi.

Pratap, A. 1993. Rock Art of Chambal Valley. Inside Outside. Mumbai.

Pratap, A. and Kumar, N. 2009. Rock art at Wyndham Falls, Mirzapur, India. Antiquity’s Project Gallery: http://antiquity.ac.uk/antiquityNew/projgall/pratap321/

Pratap, A. 2011a. Recent Surveys at Likhaniya Dari, Chuna Dari, Wyndham Falls and Morhana Pahar, Uttar Pradesh. Vikramshila Journal of Social Sciences. Bhagalpur.

Pratap, A. 2011b. Prehistoric Rock Art Imagery of the Vindhyas, Uttar Pradesh. In Ancient India. New Series 1. Archaeological Survey of India. New Delhi.

Thomas, P.K., Joglekar, P.P., Misra, V.D., Pandey, J.N., and J.N. Pal, 2002. Faunal remains from Damdama: Evidence for the Mesolithic Food Economy of the Gangetic Plain. pp.366-380. In Misra, V.D. and Pal, J.N. (Eds.) Mesolithic India. University of Allahabad. Allahabad.

.............

Contd.)

Thank you.

Ajay

Renfrew, C., Mountjoy, P.A., French, E., Younger, J.E., Cherry, J.F., Daykin, A., Moody, J., Morgan., L. Bradford, N., Macfarlane, C., Torrence, R., Gamble, C., Whitelaw, C. 1985. The Archaeology of Cult: The Sanctuary at Phylakopi. The British School at Athens. Supplementary Volumes. No. 18. Pp. i-xiii. 1-70. 71-513

Courtesy URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40856003.pdf?acceptTC=true

Renfrew, C., Brodie, N., Morris, C., Scarre, C., Barber, R.L.N., Cherry, J.F., Davis, J.L., Daykin, A., Evans, R.K., Morgan, L., Mountjoy, P.A. Vaughan, S.J., Williams, D., Winder, N., Bailey, A. S., Brice, W., Cameron, M., Dickinson, O.T.P.K., French, E., Gamble., C., Hood, M.S.F., Jones, E., Maniatis, Y., Musgrave, H., Stos-Gale, Z., Tite, M.S. 2007. Excavations at Phylakopi in Melos 2007. The British School at Athens. Supplementary Volumes. No. 42. Pp. v-xvi. 1-521.

Courtesy URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40856115.pdf?acceptTC=true

In discussing the problems in interpreting archaeological finds at this site called Phylakopi at Melos in Greece, the authors have this to say, presumably about one class of objects found commonly in these excavations, whose report we are here trying to review:

"How, for instance, does one recognise the archaeological evidence of religious behaviour, of cult practice, for what it is? On what grounds, for instance, is one pit, with animal bones and a few artifacts, dismissed as domestic refuse, as another is seen as a ritual deposit with evidence of sacrifice? In what circumstances shall we regard small terracotta representations of animals and men as figurines, intended as offerings to the deity, and when shall we view them as mere toys for the amusement of children?" (Pp. 2)

There is, apparently, a redemption to this problem, as the authors, on page 3 of this report suggest "Fortunately, in the case of early Aegean cult practices, there is a formidable body of scholarship available to draw upon..." and what this formidable body of evidence is may be read directly from this excavation report at the bottom of this page where an interesting notion or concept called Contextual Analysis (emphasis is mine) is cited. What, we may well ask, is indeed what is this Contextual Analysis, sticking still with the issue at hand, which the Archaeology of Cult at the Aegean, which is Greek or Greece to me, dig at Phylakopi?

Archaeology always has been and shall remain a discipline in which the nature and function of artefacts found at a site is in the ultimate analysis figured-out by the Archaeologist by looking at the relation of that object with other objects found in that dig and which belong to the same set or class of objects, as well as others. This is in the first instance of the deductive ladder of inference which Archaeologists anywhere in the world follow. Very often, this object or many other objects may be an exception to the rule and eventually do not form formidable sets, i.e., they are exceptions in that there may be only one or two of them, as compared with hundreds or more of objects of another set or class. To ascertain the nature and function of this second type of object or objects the Archaeologist may look at other parameters of his/her site: soil profile, hydrology, broadly speaking the ecological picture of his/her site, in an effort to ascertain the significance of the low frequencies with which these "exceptions" occur.

In both cases, perhaps, we may say that whatever conclusion the archaeologist concerned has arrived at about the objects derived from their digs, has been arrived at by looking at the context in which the objects from his/her dig have been found.

The introductory chapter on page 5 of this splendid excavation report then begins to give the reader such as I a clear view of the Aegean World and it's material correlates, in this case a sanctuary at which some cult or the other was practiced in Ancient Greece. As a Teacher of Ancient Indian History, it is the Greek Connection of Ancient India with Ancient Greece, and correspondingly, the connection of Ancient Greece or Hellenistic Greece, with the Western World, which attracted first my attention to this report.

For it is common knowledge that the florescence of civilization in the European World is traced classically to have derived from Greece (see Renfrew, C. earlier volume entitled The Emergence of Civilization. Reference to be cited). However, as no culture is an island, the impact India and Ancient Greece had on each other may no doubt be enriched, in my view, by looking at Ancient Greece, as Colin Renfrew et. al. bring to us, through this excavation report, and hence my choice of this, and it's appended text for review over here.

The analysis of the excavation finds in which the excavator's have determined that some sort of a sanctuary and a cult to have existed at Phylakopi. Even if just to defend the citation of my own publication in the bibliography to this post, I must of needs state that Colin Renfrew in his a lecture which my article cited below has attempted to review did also refer to Phylakopi in it and showed us its cult objects, a lecture at which indeed I was present. Thus it is that Phylakopi is of interest to me as are its sanctuaries and cult objects.

Read-on.

....................

Bibliography

Pratap, A. 2012. A Discussion of Professor Lord Colin Renfrew's Public Lectures. Vikramshila Journal of Social Sciences. 9 (2): 9-12.

Pratap, A. 2012. A Discussion of Professor Lord Colin Renfrew’s
Lectures held on the Occasion of the Archaeological Survey of India’s
150th Anniversary Celebrations. Saiddhantiki. 5 (15): 134-8.

Renfrew, C. et al. 1985. The Archaeology of Cult: The Sanctuary at Phylakopi. The British School at Athens. Supplementary Volumes. No. 18. PP. i-xiii. 1-70. 71-53.

Renfrew, C. et al. 2007. Excavation at Phylakopi in Melos 1974-77. The British School at Athens. Supplementary Volumes. No. 42. PP. v-xxv. 1-521.

...............

(Contd.)

Thank you,

Ajay