CHALCOLITHIC AND EARLY AGRARIAN COMMUNITIES

Detailed chapter description

“Chalcolithic” is used here in its conventional archaeological sense for assemblages in which copper appears alongside stone, bone and other technologies. It does not name an ethnicity, language, polity or biological population. In the Middle Ganga Plain, copper is often scarce, while black-and-red ware, microlithic or ground-stone tools, bone implements, wattle-and-daub architecture and farming evidence continue from earlier contexts. For that reason the term is most useful as a descriptive chronological label, not as a claim that metal transformed every aspect of life at once. The excavated sequences do not support a simple staircase in which a Neolithic village abruptly becomes Chalcolithic after the arrival of copper. At Chirand, Chechar–Kutubpur and comparative sites farther south and west, older technologies persisted. House construction remained largely organic; microliths and bone tools continued; cultivation, fishing and animal use remained central. The significant change is therefore an enlargement and recombination of technological and economic repertoires rather than the instantaneous replacement of one system by another (Singh 2004; Archaeological Survey of India 1962–63, 1968–69). There is no single Chalcolithic date range that can be imposed on the whole Middle Ganga Plain. Site sequences begin and end at different times, radiocarbon programmes are uneven, and older excavations were often dated primarily by ceramic comparison. Recent reassessments of Early Farming and Chalcolithic chronologies in the Ganga Plain emphasize precisely this diversity. Senuwar, for example, provides a well-studied comparative sequence from Early Farming into a developed agrarian/Chalcolithic phase, but its dates cannot simply be copied onto north-Bihar or Bhagalpur sites (Singh 2004; Pokharia and colleagues in Indian Archaeology 1990–91; comparative discussion in recent radiocarbon reassessments).