Prehistoric India: Neolithic, Chalcolithic and megalithic

The New Stone Age (Neolithic): the first farmers

The Neolithic brought the biggest change in human history: farming. People grew crops, kept cattle, sheep and goats, made pottery, polished their stone axes (called celts), wove cloth and lived in villages of mud houses. Settled life gave them a food surplus, meaning more food than they needed right away. With spare food, some people could become potters or traders, and over time some families grew richer than others.

The earliest farming village in the subcontinent is Mehrgarh in Balochistan (now in Pakistan), from about 7000 BCE. People there grew wheat and barley and kept cattle, sheep and goats. In the middle Ganga plain and the Vindhyas, sites such as Lahuradewa and Koldihwa show early rice. Neolithic cultures grew up in several regions, each with its own character.

Prelims 2021 listed the pair Burzahom Rock-cut shrines (a place and what it is known for). That pair is wrong: Burzahom is a Neolithic village of pit dwellings, homes dug into the ground to keep out the Kashmir cold. The other two pairs, Chandra-ketugarh (Terracotta art) and Ganeshwar (Copper artefacts), are right, so the answer is 2 and 3 (option d). Learn each site with its age and its signature find.

What UPSC asks

Prelims: site and feature pairs (Burzahom, 2021). Mains: why the switch to farming mattered. Next likely: early rice and evidence of taming animals.

Copper-using villages and megalithic burials

The Chalcolithic (‘copper-stone’) cultures used copper alongside stone tools. “Chalco” means copper. Most were villages, outside the Harappan cities, and some lasted long after the Harappans declined. They made painted pottery (black-and-red ware is common), grew crops including rice, wheat and pulses, and kept cattle. Copper came from the Aravallis and other sources.

Prelims 2024 gave four sites in a table, and two rows are right: Inamgaon (Maharashtra) as a Chalcolithic site and Mangadu (Kerala) as a Megalithic site, so the answer is 2 and 3 (option b). Inamgaon, near Pune, was a large Jorwe village with a wall around it and a channel to water the fields. Its people buried the dead in urns (large pots) below the floors of their houses.

Megaliths are graves or memorials marked by large stones (“mega” means big). Most Indian megaliths belong to the Iron Age, from about 1000 BCE to the early centuries CE, and are concentrated in the Deccan and the south. The main types are easy to picture:

• Stone circles: a ring of boulders around a grave.
• Cists: stone boxes buried in the ground.
• Dolmens: a flat capstone resting on upright slabs, like a stone table.
• Menhirs: single tall standing stones.
• Urn burials: the dead placed in big pots, as at Adichanallur in Tamil Nadu.

Iron tools, horse equipment and black-and-red ware were buried with the dead, which tells us people believed in some life after death. Brahmagiri, Junapani (near Nagpur), Mangadu and Marayoor (Kerala) are well-known sites.

What UPSC asks

Prelims: site, State and culture tables (2024). Mains: copper-using villages beside and after the Harappans. Next likely: megalithic finds in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.