It is the emergence and consolidation of village-farming communities area by area which gives this period its tremendous character and significance. ‘This period is one of the most significant ones in Indian history because this seems to be the period in which much of the base of modern village India was laid.’ In fact, it is with reference to modern rural India that the period assumes its great character: the same types of regional village houses and regional crop patterns, the same dependence on cattle, the same locations, the persistence of much of the old craft activities, the consolidation of the major lines of movement along which both raw materials and finished goods were traded and exchanged and perhaps the same framework of ritual behaviour. The last feature may not be as clear as the rest, but what we have in mind here is a recurrent emphasis on presumably sacrificial offerings in fire-pits, representations of phallus, and the emergence of terracottas of a kind which forms a significant component of the folk religious life of an Indian village. The element of continuity in craft tradition is manifest in the pre-industrial modes of the technology of bead-manufacture, preparation of miscellaneous stone objects including saddle querns and muilers, smelting and processing of different metals which are still pursued by metalsmiths in different areas in an essentially pre-industrial way and many other ways of doing things in the broad spectrum of pre-industrial village life. There was no isolated village community; the list of raw materials used by them proves more than anything else the extent of their network. Both on the local and regional levels trade was practised, and as far as different metals and raw materials such as lapis lazuli are concerned, there was trans-regional trade too. There is no reason to postulate that the society was egalitarian. There was a distinct two-tier site hierarchy, and combined with the miscellaneous bits of information on fortification walls, embankments, ditches, etc. this supports the notion of ‘chiefdom’ at this stage. The distribution of sites conforming to modern administrative territories seems to suggest the existence of nascent political units. The long crop lists also serve the purpose of demonstrating that in many areas double-cropping was practised and this, in turn, implies that some local irrigation systems were in place. Finally, we draw attention to the dissemination of some copper object types from the southern Haryana–upper Ganga area to Gujarat, Kerala and southern Tamil Nadu along well-defined routes through Malwa and the Deccan. The date of this movement, as we have argued, falls in the first half of the second millennium BC and clearly imparts the image of the subcontinent as a whole opening up in a way which we did not observe before. This process of opening up becomes clearer as more data accumulate; pottery types seem to get distributed with bewildering rapidity and major sites crop up in areas where none was suspected before (cf. ‘chalcolithic’ black-and-red ware and earlier sites in Orissa, ‘chalcolithic’ sites in the Sonbhadra area on the way to central India). When the early historic period emerges in the Ganga plain and elsewhere, it does so in the secure context of a subcontinent that we now know.