DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

NOTES TO CHAPTER II 51
castes many generations ago; but such possibilities become rarer every year. The
tribesman has now to join the agricultural proletariat as an individual.
3. Dendrochronography is the measurement of sequences in tree-rings, from
wood in different monuments. White ants and the climate make this difficult in India.
Carbon 14 technique is useful, though less accurate, and made rather difficult by air
contaminated because of atomic explosions for * experimental’ purposes.
4. Henri Frankfort : Studies in the early pottery of the near East {R. Anthr. Inst,
London, occasional papers 6 (1925), 8 (1927)] established the still accepted pottery,
index for Mesopotamia. R.E.M. Wheeler made it possible by excavations at
Arikametfu in 1945 to extend the method to India, by noting Arretine (Italic) pottery
in Indian strata. For Meso-potamian archaeology, cf. Seton Lloyd : Foundations in
the dust (Pelican Books A 336). Excavations at Jarmo and Melefaat collated with the
most archaic Hassuna pottery establish the sequence from a pre-pottery stage to the
literate urban cultures of Mesopotamia.
5. A good survey is to be seen in the Indian Government publication : Archaeology
in India (1950) and Al 9. Special articles in Ancient India (of which the^ first 11
numbers were available at the time of writing) are also valuable, as being written from
the modern point of view. F. R. Allchin’s note (Trans. All-India Oriental Conference,
1955) Neolithic culture in India : a resurvey of evidence summarizes most of the
available information. My gratitude is expressed here for stimulating discussions with
Dr. and Mrs. Allchin, who also verified my finds of stone-age tools and corrected the
old-fashioned terminology.
6. Cf. Khwaja Muhammad Ahmad, Preliminary excavations at prehistoric sites
near Janampet; an undated, perfunctory report. A great deal of unsystematic work
conducted under the auspices of various colleges and universities is as deplorable.
Any reader who rushes to do his own digging should first study L. Woolley’s Digging
up the past (Pelican A 4) and Wheeler’s Archaeology from the earth (Pelican A 356),
which has special value for Indian excavations. The only caution to add is that
current Indian technique (e.g. pottery) must also be studied.
7. Best described in H. de Terra & T. T. Paterson : Studies in the Ice age in
India and associated human cultures^ which surveys the oldest sites.
8. The one I know best was on a farm owned in 1931 by one Mclsaacs, on the
road from Bangalore to Magatfi.
9. My informant, Dr. C. V. Najarajan, pointed out the actual boulder, but I have
not explored the cave, nor found it described anywhere.
10. This alone would suffice to dispose of Freud’s theory of Totem and Tabu,
which seems quite arbitrary from the ethnographer’s point of view. It was shown by
B. Malinowski in his Dynamics of cultural change that the Oedipus complex and
corresponding “incest motives” are replaced by others in a matrilineal or matrilocal