In India, structure threatens prehistoric sites

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Shreya Dasgupta

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Each night, after archaeologist Shanti Pappu and his colleagues return to the house for the night, two guards patrol the team’s excavation: a patch of dry scrub near the village of Sendrayanpalayam, a two-hour drive from Chennai in southern India. Without such surveillance, it may be interrupted without problems.

To the left of the dusks dug conscientiously, for example, there is an excavation well, dredging to remove sand and gravel for a public works task before researchers begin their excavations in 2019, says Pappu, founder of the Sharma Center for Heritage Education in Chennai. I fix a similar example of excavation in the earth, or a passerby that randomly collects exposed artifacts, basically stone tools, made through human ancestors tens or thousands of years ago to dig tubers and cut meat, would disrupt the meticulous excavation procedure that is an integral component of the team’s research.

“We dig very, very slowly, just five centimeters at a time, making sure nothing is altered around the stone tool,” says Annamalai, a member of the one-name excavation team, speaking through an interpreter. But an excavator, he adds, suddenly destroys.

Unaltered plots are important for significant prehistoric research. A stone tool or fossil is as smart as the context in which it is located, either on the floor surface or under the deep floor. Disturbed artifacts are like pages randomly extracted from an e-book: smart for a brilliant quote worth reviewing, but dead to perceive the whole story. And anything that interferes with the location of the artifact can radically replace researchers’ interpretation of how human ancestors lived in the area.

However, much of the land that houses the country buried beyond is interrupted and remodeled for a fashion progression: agriculture, roads, infrastructure and expanding cities. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in particular, the government lobbied for more roads, commercial corridors and giant hydroelectric dams, even proposing adjustments to existing legislation on the coverage of environmental and archaeological heritage to make it less difficult for companies to get away with it.

Protecting prehistoric sites can involve years of litigation over land acquisition, as well as battling encroachments. And vandalism and theft is rampant across sites and monuments. The ephemeral nature of the sites is a major roadblock to the slow, deliberate pace of fieldwork for prehistoric research, which often spans decades.

These studies are just an educational exercise, says Katragadda Paddayya, professor emeritus at Deccan College in Pune. “We have a wonderful diversity of languages, cultures and ethnic groups,” Paddayya says.

“Archaeology, history and anthropology,” he adds, “have a great role to play in enlightening society about what India is: a region of immense diversity and that there are various archaeological and anthropological processes of this diversity.

Sites like Sendrayanpalayam can simply involve responses to the region’s role in human evolution, Pappu says, as can its best-known counterpart, Attirampakkam, about four kilometres away. Attirampakkam has been a home for archaeologists since 1863, when British geologist Robert Bruce Foote first discovered stone equipment in the area. More recently, studies through Pappu and Kumar Akhilesh, director of the Sharma Center, have catapulted the site to a prominent place abroad by reporting that the first humans in Attirampakkam were manufacturing and innovating stone equipment even before similar equipment had spread through migratory humans. outside of Africa.

But those sites for sustained, long-term studies are hard to find. Many of the sites Paddayya discovered in Karnataka when he began his box studies in the 1960s are now rice paddies, for example, thanks to extensive irrigation channel networks. In 2018, an independent researcher noted that the structure of a medical school and a government hospital had begun at a vital prehistoric site in Maharashtra before the domain could be studied in detail. And in central India, a site called Hathnora, which produced the country’s oldest known fossil of human ancestors, is unprotected on the banks of the Narmada River, threatened by relentless erosion and human turmoil.

Even the official archaeological heritage is not safe. In 2019, India’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Prahlad Singh Patel, said in the upper space of parliament that more than three hundred monuments and sites classified according to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), the government firm that manages the country’s archaeological heritage, had been invaded in one way or another.

As sites containing evidence from beyond India disappear, researchers wonder whether complex questions about the beyond of humanity can be answered. “We can’t say we don’t need this progression, because other people’s well-being and progression is just as important,” Paddayya says. But given the scale of this progression, “many sites are being destroyed.”

The Indian subcontinent is located among several regions with rich histories about human evolution, says Parth Chauhan, assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Education and Scientific Research, Mohali. There are Africa and Europe to the west and Southeast Asia to the east, all of which are home to some of the oldest specimens of Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of fashionable humans who have traveled the planet for 1.8 million years and the first known human being. species to appear. outside of Africa. Indian data can theoretically link records between these regions. It can also show whether the subcontinent is a means of dispersal of primitive and fashionable humans.

For more than two decades, using complex techniques to date sites, researchers who read prehistoric sites have presented a safer picture of when human ancestors might have lived on the subcontinent. In 2011, Pappu’s team reported that early humans, perhaps Homo erectus, manufactured giant stone equipment in Attirampakkam 1.5 million years ago, in the Early Stone Age or in the Early Paleolithic. Scientists have dated the Karnataka and Punjab sites to 1.2 million years and more than 2 million years respectively, the latter claim has been questioned.

While existing studies are helping fill the gaps in the early days of the region, studies say this is not enough. The dates of the individual sites should be taken with reservation, says Paddayya. To perceive the origin of the ancient Stone Age cultures in India, we want dozens of dates, and many other spaces want to be studied in detail, he adds.

Pappu agrees. The Sendrayanpalayam site is well preserved and represents a slightly different environment compared to Attirampakkam. Studying more such options can help show when and how humans were given to live and adapt in southern India.

But the fate of other sites remains uncertain. In eastern India, several ancient prehistoric sites in the Ayodhya Hills in West Bengal are now agricultural fields, says Bishnupriya Basak, associate professor of archaeology at the University of Kolkata who has spent more than 20 years documenting small stone equipment in the area. The only prehistoric spaces that have not been remodeled are those found in very rugged terrain where it is difficult to plow the land.

Lack of site preservation affects research, Basak says. “If I need my student to do a phD at Ayodhya Hills, in places I haven’t studied in more detail, it would have nothing to do with the preservation of a site, because they’re related to agriculture.”

Formal coverage, however, is a major challenge in India, says AMV Subramanyam, superintendent archaeologist of ASI’s Chennai Circle. Land is valuable, and the acquisition of land from private owners or other government departments for ASI coverage may involve years of bureaucratic litigation and obstacles.

Arguments for site preservation can be difficult to formulate in a densely populated country where millions of people live in poverty. In the Pallavaram domain of Chennai, for example, he gained prominence after Foote, the 19th-century British geologist, discovered stone equipment there the same year as his remarkable discovery Attirampakkam, ASI and local citizens have been at odds for years. In 2010, the government passed a law banning the structure in two spaces of Pallavaram considered archaeologically former, while restricting these paintings to less than 650 feet more. Residents and developers with land around those sites responded with mass protests and demands.

“At least 10,000 families who have built houses on plots are affected, they cannot make adjustments to their homes,” said V. Ramanujam, then vice president of pallavaram’s Federation of Civic and Social Associations, to the Times of India in 2013. .

G.Vijaya, whose circle of relatives has lived in Pallavaram for more than five decades, told the Times of India in 2016 that land fees had fallen due to a ban on construction-related activities. “We cannot sell part of our land to marry our daughters,” Vijaya said.

In 2018, ASI eased restrictions. “Someone had filed a petition to remove the shield from the site. The court asked us to investigate and provide the main points of the site,” Subramanyam said. After some forensic excavations, he says, “we introduced the court that, the site was invaded, has an archaeological prospect that remains.” While researchers are definitive in some areas, Subramanyam says, they can’t protect the entire site.

Versions of this territorial dispute have taken a position in the country.

In fact, in terms of formal coverage, monuments such as the temples of the most recent history can gain more easily advantages from coverage under ASI than ancient Paleolithic sites. “A monument is a smaller domain and you can obviously delineate the domain,” subramanyam explains. “You can also set a site, but it can be enlarged by several hectares. Some sites have more than a hundred acres. Getting this total domain under ASI is a challenge. But even lists don’t guarantee genuine coverage. Across the country, the ASI is suffering to locate resources to manage heritage sites and without good enough coverage, sites are vandalized, and artifacts and fossils are stolen for collection or non-public sale.

This apathy towards prehistoric sites and artifacts, Pappu says, is due to the lack of awareness of what prehistoric sites are, what they constitute and their importance. Pappu and his colleagues called it “Taj syndrome,” in reference to India’s disproportionate attention to the glamorous monuments of the recent past, such as the impressive Taj Mahal. “No one will pay attention,” he says, to non-monumental heritage.

Prehistoric sites tend to be subtle, devoid of the tangible and hot features that are presented through recent ancient sites, such as charming architecture, striking statues or murals. Archaeologists have also largely failed to communicate the price of prehistory to the public, Chauhan said.

Correcting this would require an extensive outreach program, Akhilesh says. “Protection through other local people is more vital in my opinion,” Pappu adds. “They are aware, they are proud of their heritage, and that’s it.”

Widespread awareness, according to experts, requires persistent and specific efforts. In and around Attirampakkam, this was partly imaginable due to its long history of studies. Since the Foote scale in 1863, several archaeologists have studied the region’s Stone Age cultures and hired local villages to help with fieldwork.

At the excavation sites of Pappu and Akhilesh, it is the box staff, all from the surrounding villages, who are regularly guilty of conscience. When you visit a local network member, street pastor, or curious farmer, a staff member explains what the team is doing and why. “It may not be entirely accurate,” Pappu says. “But the vital thing is that even if there are mistakes in what he says, he is able to explain it to everyone who comes locally, and they know the heritage of their own region.”

Children and teachers also make a stopover at Pappu sites, and find not only their local heritage, but also what should and should not be done, such as resisting the temptation to collect stone equipment in their neighborhood.

For Chauhan, too, public awareness among local communities is an integral component of the studies and preservation of its examination sites. “We hope that one day other people in the region will worry in the long run and possibly graduate in archaeology and do their own studies,” he says.

But in some places, where land conflicts are widespread, even well-publicized awareness campaigns would possibly not be enough to maintain heritage sites. “There is a tendency that in some spaces they are willing to cooperate with archaeologists. In other spaces, they are not willing to cooperate,” Chauhan says. “It’s a cultural and regional imbalance.”

Where other people are willing to cooperate, it will also involve land developers and government agencies, Chauhan says.

While countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and South Korea have laws that require progression projects to evaluate the sites they target for archaeological tissues and to assess how their activities would possibly be, existing Indian legislation to protect archaeological heritage is inadequate. for prehistory. Sites. Currently, only progression projects within 985 feet of SITES and monuments protected by ASI may have a legal obligation to submit and have an effect on the evaluation. A physically more powerful law, Pappu says, “would not only help with immediate documentation and the recovery of archaeological sites, but would also have huge prospects of creating jobs for archaeologists and the local community.

In the absence of new laws, researchers like Chauhan are working with other experts to compile a list of sites like Hathnora that need urgent protection. They are also looking for local and state government techniques to see if those sites can be in any way, he says.

More and more interactions with local communities, government agencies and developers can be essential to read India’s remote past. “Those who are guilty of reading the heritage also have a social responsibility in addition to excavations; they will also have to perceive that the heritage we examine is ultimately the heritage of the people, and that all the data we collect will have to return to the general public,” Paddayya said. “Governance in the country becomes much easier.”

Cibe Chakravarthy contributed to the report.

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