Friends,
1. In association with my Ph.D. student, Shri Anand Prakash Pathak, I have just yesterday, concluded a third (the second this winter season!) fieldwork at the above-given site. This was mainly a documentation fieldtrip, with such field-surveying as goes, hand in hand, with documentation. With the permission of a very kind Forest Department Officer, we proceeded to our survey. For instance, we were equipped, this time, with a digital camera, to take close-up shots of the elephant shelter (WYN 1) which is about fifty feet high from the ground, and ofwhich we couldnotobtain good shots in the first-everfield-trip. This shelter is not easily climbable, and therefore, a zoomed picture was the only recourse. We went, first, to this groupof shelters, and got the required digital-images. I have since seen the results, they are almighty good. We have taken pictures, also, of the various evidences of weathering at the elephant-rock shelter, and, the ecological setting of this painted shelter. As before, in this fieldtrip, we found several fading or faded paintings, even at the elephant rock, which we missed in the first-ever field-trip, (wait for picture upload). We proceeded next to WYN 2, having previously taken a detour, crossed-over the river channel, and surveyed the opposite bank of the stream, which we have not so far done. Here there is significant soil-deposit, no doubt by the stream, and there are shallows created by ephemeral pools of water. perhaps, here we could take a trench with appropriate permissions.
Recording evidence at WYN 2, with a digital 3x camera was a great delight. The images could be seen, onsite, under magnification, and so making perceivable, many minute details, that misses the natural vision. We have, that is my student and field-assistant (wait for picture uploads!) managed, to document extensively, in still and video, the painted panel that you see in the Antiquity article...link given below.
I shall try to upload both still-shots and video.
Thanks.
ap, 09
2.In association, with my Ph.D. student, Shri Anand Prakash Pathak, I have, just yesterday, concluded, the second season of fieldwork, at Wyndham Falls, Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh; where significant clusters of prehistoric painted rock-shelters were located by us in the 2008 field season and now reported in Antiquity: http://antiquity.ac.uk/antiquityNew/projgall/pratap321/
As we were surveying, nearly till sun-down, the landscape, for urban-breds,like us, became slightly scary, as, at sundown, we were able to see, wolves, running around. Here and there, there was evidence, that a lot of local cattle, that was sick, got chewed by these wolves. Parts of mandibles, femurs, tibia and fibulae, bones, that were pretty obviously gnawed, to a perfection, gnawed bones, were, lying on the forest-tracks, available for examination. There have been some archaeologists, who have studied the gnawing-marks, of bones, in contemporary contexts, to understand scavenging behaviour of small predators like Wolves, Hyena, and Jackals, even rodents and their various subspecies; and have compared them to gnawing marks, that are found on bones, recovered from archaeological excavations. A usual methodin such studies is the microwear analysis where artefacts are examined under a suitable magnification provided by a hand-lens or a lowpower (that is say upto 100x microscope).
A comparison of these gnawing-marks, in the two contexts, ancient and modern (that is the archaeological), allows us to establish, which species, was being preyed upon by which.
A very large femur bone, lay, right next to a crevice in a boulder, along the river at Wyndham. Our field assistant, much to our chagrin tried to incite the wolf from its lair. The wolf was stuck fast, without any growling etc., inside its layer, and we requested our field assistant, to desist from antagonizing it, and moved on with the survey. The surprising thing, though, is that as yet, even in two seasons of fieldwork, we have not located, as yet, any stone-tools whatsoever! The pictures that you are seeing do not,by a long-shot, suggest that these could have been made by a Subsistence-Farmer group. For very simply the landscape evidence is also against it. The terrain is far too rugged and rocky for any significant economic practice other than Hunting-Fishing-Farming. Yet, in a close-look, at the long painted panel here given,I was able to discern that in the scene with flying arrows and the like,at the very right margin of the painting, there appears to be a depiction, which we couldnot previously understand, but which on this newest examination, seems to depict,a sort of house, with people sitting inside it, and the first of the archers is standing just outside of it, with his back, to this, hut, and firing arrows to the front of him, at a group of people who are quite away from the first archer and the house, and are firing arrows in the direction of the house. We now have anearly perfect tracing of this panel, and so, we, may study, the associations, with ease.
ap, 2009.
