Prehistoric Settlement and Subsistence

Detailed chapter description

Prehistory in the Mithila–Vajji–Anga study region cannot be written as the early chapter of a community whose later name is already known. The archaeological record precedes the historical identities, states, literary languages and social classifications that dominate later periods. Accordingly, this chapter asks a narrower but more defensible set of questions: where are prehistoric occupations actually documented; what kinds of settlement and subsistence can be reconstructed from stratified evidence; what remains uncertain because alluvial processes have buried, eroded or displaced sites; and which wider Middle Ganga or Himalayan comparisons illuminate the problem without becoming substitutes for local evidence. The principal direct anchors used here are the Patu/Rato Khola lithic complex in eastern Nepal, Chechar–Kutubpur in present Vaishali district, and Chirand in north Bihar. Wider sites such as Lahuradewa and Senuwar are used comparatively and are labelled as such. Terms such as Mithila, Videha, Vajji and Anga belong to historical geographies whose documentary visibility is much later than the Stone Age occupations considered here. A lithic scatter in the Siwalik foothills is not evidence of an early ‘Maithil’ population, and a Neolithic settlement in modern Vaishali district is not automatically a settlement of the later Vajjian republic. Modern political borders are equally anachronistic as cultural boundaries for the early Holocene. The historian may use present district and national names to locate evidence, but those labels describe where the site is now, not who prehistoric inhabitants believed themselves to be. This distinction is more than terminological caution. It changes the kinds of conclusions that can responsibly be drawn. Archaeology can reconstruct technologies, diets, settlement forms, seasonality, environmental choices and sometimes exchange or mobility. It is usually much less secure for language, ethnicity, caste, political identity or named religious affiliation in periods without writing. Those later categories will enter this volume only when the evidence capable of supporting them appears.