DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

18 TRIBES AND IMPLEMENTS [2.1
producers were also clustered together in what we would now call clanunits
of several families, though the concept of family or individual
parenthood had not then always developed.
This is known from two different sources. The first is tribal remnants,
to be observed even today all over India, which (through inertia,
tribal solidarity, common ritual) stubbornly remain food-gatherers. 1
Should increasing scarcity of unoccupied land, game, natural products,
force them to drift into developed areas, they generally continue to
gather food by begging or pilfering. The customs of such tribes show that
they had formerly other methods of gathering food; they usually
hunted or snared game, or grubbed in the forests. The tools these people
use, unless forced by hunger to participate for a while in agricultural or
other labour2 are few and very simple. Though these implements are
now of iron or steel, it is clear that the users themselves cannot
manufacture their tools, nor could they possibly have manufactured
them in the past without fundamental change in their manner of life. The
modern, enveloping, far more advanced society furnishes both metal
and tool. At this stage, the second source of information — archaeology
— steps in to tell us that in digging up the past, we come down at a
certain (variable) level to strata which show no metal tools at all. Yet,
below the metal-age layers, there are clearly marked ancient deposits
showing occupation by human beings who used stone tools : scrapers,
cleavers, hand-axes, knife-like flakes, arrow-heads, microliths of not
clearly proven use — all unquestionably the work of human hands.
Many of these imply the additional use of wood, as for example the
arrow-heads, or microliths that must have been sickle-teeth set in a
wooden holder, others which might have been hafted or used to build
up compound harpoon-or javelin-heads on a wooden base coated with
gum. These archaeological strata are not easy to date absolutely f
s but
the layers give a well-defined chronological sequence; their collation
over .many different places is the basic method of studying pre-history
; 4 both techniques were brought into archaeology from geology.