The basic aim of the present volume is to offer an archaeological history of the Indian subcontinent from prehistory to the early historical stage. A purely archaeological history of a given landscape or a region is considered important even in countries like Greece and Italy where the richness of the textual sources is infinitely more detailed and specific than available for ancient India. In the vastness of the Indian subcontinent, where the archaeological and biogeographical ingredients of a landscape-based history are still minimal, a broad sweep of its archaeological past covering all its regions may be an important exercise to demonstrate what archaeology has to offer beyond the narrow parameters of texts. The main focus of such exercises should be a clear assessment of the available knowledge at every step, and flowing through it all and integrating its different components and phases will be a perspective of the long-term settlement history of the land in its multiple strands of development. The land will always flit in and out of the archaeological narrative of the present volume. A Maori proverb says that land is a mother which never dies. Dharitrior the earth is a mother in the Indian tradition too.
The structure of the narrative is simple. We introduce the land mass and some of the major geographical parameters and concepts affecting the study of its archaeology and ancient history. Although the palaeolithic sequence is rich in its regional details, the focus is not on the typological and stratigraphic successions of different areas but on what is known about it in absolute historical terms. The same is more or less true of the mesolithic situation, but here the cultural data are more detailed and the continuity of tradition more marked. The transition to food-production is an important post-mesolithic issue, and while underlining the probable existence of the multiple lines of the beginning of this tradition in the subcontinent, we focus on the growth of the wheat—barley—cattle—sheep—goat farming tradition in the north-west and discuss how this led to the Indus civilization. The archaeological issues related to this civilization will be closely examined. At the next stage our attention will be focused on the growth of agricultural settlements beyond the distribution area of the Indus civilization, and we shall argue that it was the interaction between this civilization, and the advanced hunter-gatherers and the marginal agricultural producers in the rest of the subcontinent, which led to the formation of an agricultural base in all the major agricultural areas and laid down the basis of the subsequent early historic urban growth in the Ganga plains and elsewhere. The archaeological dimensions of early historic India will be considered, although not in detail but with reference to some of their salient features and the totality of the relevant assemblage. Finally, it may be worthwhile to take stock of some general issues regarding our exclusively archaeological history of the land.