CHAPTER-9 Chalcolithic Cultures Revision or Short Notes for UPSC/IAS Exam ( Ancient History)

CHAPTER-9

Chalcolithic Cultures

SHORT NOTES (PRELIMS + MAINS)

1. Chalcolithic Settlements-

• end of the Neolithic period saw the use of metals. The metal first used was copper, and several cultures were based on the use of copper and stone implements. Such a culture is called Chalcolithic, which means the copper– stone phase.
• Chalcolithic stage is applied to the pre- Harappan phase. In India, settlements relating to the Chalcolithic phase are found in southeastern Rajasthan, the western part of MP, western Maharashtra, and in southern and eastern India.
• In south-eastern Rajasthan, two sites, one at Ahar and the other at Gilund, have been excavated. They lie in the dry zones of the Banas valley. In western MP or Malwa, Kayatha and Eran have been excavated. Malwa-ware characteristic of the Malwa Chalcolithic culture of central and western India is considered the richest among Chalcolithic ceramics, and some of this pottery and other related cultural elements also appear in Maharashtra.
• The most extensive excavations have taken place in western Maharashtra. Several Chalcolithic sites, such as Jorwe, Nevasa, Daimabad in Ahmadanagar district; Chandoli, Songaon, and Inamgaon in Pune district; and also Prakash and Nasik have been excavated. They all relate to the Jorwe culture named after Jorwe, the type-site situated on the left bank of the Pravara river, a tributary of the Godavari, in Ahmadnagar district. The Jorwe culture owed much to the Malwa culture, but it also shared elements of the Neolithic culture of the south.
• The Jorwe culture, c. 1400 to 700 BC covered modern Maharashtra except parts of Vidarbha and the coastal region of Konkan. The Jorwe culture was rural, some of its settlements, such as Daimabad and Inamgaon, had almost reached the urban stage.
• All the Maharashtra sites were located in semi-arid areas mostly on brown–black soil which had ber and babul vegetation fell in the riverine tracts. In addition to these, Navdatoli situated on the Narmada. Most Chalcolithic ingredients intruded into the Neolithic sites in south India.
• Several Chalcolithic sites have been found in the Vindhyan region of Allahabad district. In eastern India, Chirand on the Ganges, Pandu Rajar Dhibi in Burdwan district and Mahishdal in Birbhum district in West Bengal. Additional sites have been excavated are Senuar, Sonpur, and Taradih in Bihar; and Khairadih and Narhan in eastern UP.
• Chalcolithic people used tiny tools and weapons made of stone in which the stone blades and bladelets were an important element. Certain settlements show a large number of copper objects as the case with Ahar and Gilund, which were situated more or less in the dry zones of the Banas valley in Rajasthan.
• other contemporary Chalcolithic farming cultures, Ahar used no microlithic tools; stone axes or blades are absent here. Objects relating to it include several flat axes, bangles, several sheets, all made of copper, there is also a bronze sheet.
• people of Ahar practised smelting and metallurgy from the very outset, and the original name of Ahar is Tambavati or a place that has copper. The Ahar culture is dated to between c. 2100 and 1500 BC, and Gilund is considered a regional centre of it. Gilund shows only fragments of copper it had a stone blade industry.
• Flat, rectangular copper axes have been found in Jorwe and Chandoli in Maharashtra, and copper chisels in Chandoli. The people of the Chalcolithic phase use different types of pottery, one of which is called black-and-red seems to have been widely prevalent from nearly 2000 BC onwards. The habitations found in Bihar, Rajasthan, MP, Maharashtra and West Bengal.
• People living in Maharashtra, MP, and Bihar produced channel-spouted pots, dishes-on stand, and bowls-on-stand. Black-and-red-ware pottery from Maharashtra, MP, and Rajasthan was painted.
• people living in the Chalcolithic age in south-eastern Rajasthan, western MP, western Maharashtra, and domesticated animals and practiced agriculture. They reared cows, sheep, goats, pigs, and buffaloes, and hunted deer. The people of Navdatoli also produced ber and linseed. Cotton was produced in the black cotton soil of the Deccan, and rai, bajra, and several millets were cultivated in the lower Deccan.
• In eastern India, fish hooks have been found in Bihar and West Bengal, where rice was also found. Most settlements in the Banas valley in Rajasthan are small, but Ahar and Gilund spread over an area of nearly four hectares. The Chalcolithic people were generally not acquainted with burnt bricks, which were seldom used, as in Gilund around 1500 BC.
• The people in Ahar lived in stone houses. Of the 200 Jorwe sites discovered so far, the largest is Daimabad in the Godavari valley. Daimabad is famous for the recovery of many bronze goods, some of which were influenced by the Harappan culture.
• At Inamgaon, in the earlier Chalcolithic phase in western Maharashtra, large mud houses with ovens and circular pit houses have been discovered. In the later phase (1300–1000 BC) a house with five rooms, four rectangular and one circular was found. This was located at the centre of the settlements, and may have been the house of a chief. The granary, located close to it, may have been used for storing tributes in kind.
• Inamgaon was a large Chalcolithic settlement with over a hundred houses and numerous grave sites. It was fortified and surrounded by a moat. They manufactured beads of semiprecious stones such as carnelian, steatite, and quartz crystal, and the people knew the art of spinning and weaving because spindle whorls have been discovered in Malwa.
• Cotton flax and silk threads made of cotton silk and of semal silk (cotton tree) have been found in Maharashtra. Eastern India produced rice; western India cultivated barley and wheat. In Maharashtra, people buried their dead in urns beneath the floor of their house in the north-to-south position. Some copper objects were deposited in the graves obviously for the use of the dead in the next world.
• Terracotta figures of women suggest that the Chalcolithic people venerated the mother goddess, and some unbaked nude clay figurines were also used for worship. A figure of the mother goddess, similar to that found in western Asia, has been found in Inamgaon.
• In Malwa and Rajasthan, stylized bull terracottas show that the bull was the symbol of a religious cult. Both the settlement pattern and burial practices suggest the beginnings of social inequalities in Chalcolithic society. A kind of settlement hierarchy is visible in several Jorwe settlements of Maharashtra.
• In Inamgaon, the craftsmen lived on the western fringes, and the chief probably at the centre; this suggests social distance between the inhabitants. In the graves at Chandoli and Nevasa in western Maharashtra, some children were buried with copper-based necklaces around their necks, others had grave goods consisting only of pots.
• At Inamgaon, an adult was buried with pottery and some copper. In one house in Kayatha, twenty-nine copper bangles and two unique axes were found. At the same place, necklaces of semiprecious stones such as steatite and carnelian beads were found in pots.
• A site at Ganeshwar which is located close to the rich copper mines of the Sikar–Jhunjhunu area of the Khetri copper belt in Rajasthan. The copper objects excavated from this area include Arrow heads, spearheads, fish hooks, colts, bangles, chisels, etc. A terracotta cake resembling the Indus type was also found.
• There were also many microliths that are characteristic of the Chalcolithic culture. The OCP (Ochre-Coloured Pottery) which is a red-slipped ware often painted in black and largely in vase forms. As the Ganeshwar deposits are ascribed to 2800–2200 BC, they by and large predate the mature Harappan culture.
• Ganeshwar principally supplied copper objects to Harappa. The Ganeshwar people partly lived on agriculture and largely on hunting. Although their principal craft was the manufacture of copper objects, they were unable to urbanize. The Ganeshwar assemblage was neither urban nor a proper OCP/Copper Hoard Culture.
• With its microliths and other stone tools, much of the Ganeshwar culture can be considered a pre-Harappan Chalcolithic culture that contributed to the making of the mature Harappan culture. Thus, the pre-Harappan phase at Kalibangan in Rajasthan and Banawali in Haryana is distinctly Chalcolithic. So too is the case with Kot Diji in Sindh in Pakistan.
• Pre-Harappan and post-Harappan Chalcolithic cultures and those coexisting with the Harappan have been found in northern, western, and central India. An example is the Kayatha culture c. 2000– 1800 BC, which existed towards the end of the Harappan culture. It has some pre- Harappan elements in pottery, but also evidences Harappan influence.
• The Malwa culture (1700–1200 BC) found in Navdatoli, Eran, and Nagda is considered to be non-Harappan. That is also the case with the Jorwe culture (1400–700 BC) which encompasses the whole of Maharashtra except parts of Vidarbha and Konkan.
• In the southern and eastern parts of India, Chalcolithic settlements existed independently of the Harappan culture . The Chalcolithic settlements of the Vindhya region, Bihar, and West Bengal too are not related to Harappan culture. Various types of pre-Harappan Chalcolithic cultures promoted the spread of farming communities in Sindh, Baluchistan, Rajasthan, and elsewhere, and created conditions for the rise of the urban civilization of Harappa.
• Mention may be made of Amri and Kot Diji in Sindh; Kalibangan and even Ganeshwar in Rajasthan. It appears that some Chalcolithic farming communities moved to the flood plains of the Indus, learnt bronze technology, and succeeded in setting up cities.
• Some work has been done on the Chalcolithic sites in the mid-Gangetic valley where 138 sites have been located. 854 Neolithic sites were found in south India. Of 138 sites, only fourteen sites in UP and Bihar have been excavated so far and these show little use of copper. The Chalcolithic sites of the mid-Gangetic zone and those of West Bengal relate to c. 1500–700 BC or even later.
• Pandu Rajar Dhibi and Mahishdal are important sites in West Bengal. All these sites of the mid-and lower-Gangetic area used more stone tools and fewer copper ones, the latter being very sparse though some fish hooks have been found. Chalcolithic cultures in central and western India disappeared by 1200 BC or thereabout; only the Jorwe culture continued until 700 BC.
• The stone boulders are known as megaliths (literally big stones). These were carefully arranged by people, and were used to mark burial sites. The practice of erecting megaliths began about 3000 years ago, and was prevalent throughout the Deccan, south India, in the north-east and Kashmir.[NCERT-CLASS-VI CHAPTER-5]
• Brahmagiri-one skeleton was buried with 33 gold beads, 2 stone beads, 4 copper bangles, and one conch shell. Other skeletons have only a few pots.[NCERT-CLASS-VI CHAPTER-5]
• Inamgaon-It is a site on the river Ghod, a tributary of the Bhima. It was occupied between 3600 and 2700 years ago. Here, adults were generally buried in the ground, laid out straight, with the head towards the north. Sometimes burials were within the houses. Vessels that probably contained food and water were placed with the dead. One man was found buried in a large, four legged clay jar in the courtyard of a five-roomed house (one of the largest houses at the site), in the centre of the settlement. This house also had a granary. The body was placed in a crosslegged position.[NCERT-CLASS-VI CHAPTER-5]

1. Importance of the Chalcolithic Phase-

• They were the first to use painted pottery. In south India, the Neolithic phase imperceptibly faded into the Chalcolithic, and so these cultures are called Neolithic– Chalcolithic.
• In other parts, especially in western Maharashtra and Rajasthan, the Chalcolithic people seem to have been colonizers. Their earliest settlements were in Malwa and central India, such as those in Kayatha and Eran; those in western Maharashtra were established later; and those in Bihar and West Bengal much later.
• settlements at Kayatha and Eran in MP, and at Inamgaon in western Maharashtra, were fortified. On the other hand, the remains of structures in Chirand and Pandu Rajar Dhibi in eastern India were poor, indicating post-holes and round houses.
• In Maharashtra, the dead body was placed in the north–south position, but in south India in the east–west position. There was virtually complete extended burial in western India, but fractional burial in eastern India.

Limitations of Chalcolithic Cultures-

• Perforated stone discs alone were tied as weights to the digging sticks which could be used in slash–burn or jhum
• Intensive and extensive cultivation on the black soil required the use of iron implements which rarely occured in the Chalcolithic culture.
• The rate of infant mortality was very high.

1. The Copper Hoards and the Ochre-Coloured Pottery Phase-

• Over eighty copper hoards consisting of rings, celts, hatchets, swords, harpoons, spearheads, and human-like figures have been found in a wide area ranging from West Bengal and Orissa in the east to Gujarat and Haryana in the west, and from AP in the south to UP in the north.
• The largest hoard comes from Gungeria in MP
• A substantial number of copper hoards are concentrated in the Ganga–Yamuna doab; Ochre-Coloured Pottery sites have been found in the upper portion of the doab, but stray copper hoards have been discovered in the plateau areas of Jharkhand and other regions, and many copper celts in the Khetri zone of Rajasthan.