|
The Iron Age in the Indian subcontinent succeeds the Late Harappan (Cemetery H) culture, also known as the last phase of the Indus Valley Tradition. There has been fresh evidence for even earlier iron-working in India. Technical studies on materials dated c. 1000 BCE at Komaranhalli (Karnataka) showed that the smiths of this site could deal with large artifacts, implying that they had already been experimenting for centuries (Agrawal et al. 1985: 228-29). Sahi (1979: 366) drew attention to the presence of iron in Chalcolithic deposits at Ahar, and suggested that “the date of the beginning of iron smelting in India may well be placed as early as the sixteenth century BCE” and “by about the early decade of thirteenth century BCE iron smelting was definitely known in India on a bigger scale”. [1] The earliest Iron Age site in South India is Hallur, Karnataka at around 1000 BC. References
Specialized Crafts and Culture Change: The Indus Valley Tradition and the Indo-Gangetic Tradition in South Asia. In The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity, edited by G. Erdosy, pp. 213-257. Berlin, W. DeGruyter.
–1976. The beginning of iron in India. Antiquity 4: 114-124. –1992. The Early Use of Iron in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. –1999. India An Archaeological History. Delhi: Oxford University Press Notes
See also
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.