21 highlights
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It was a coconut thief who helped discover southern India’s most controversial ancient settlement.
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The Black and Red Ware potsherds had been raked up by a rogue JCB machine that dug up earth to service the brick industries around the area. Astonishingly, the machine had partially uncovered an elaborate 2000-year-old brick structure facing north-east.
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The dates of the settlement broadly coincided with what was known as the Sangam period, a glorious phase of Tamil art and literature that centred around ancient Madurai.
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The Sangam Era texts suggested a rich vein of indigenous literature that thrived in southern India even as Sanskrit was evolving elsewhere.
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“Keeladi was proof of a lavish life that people led during the Sangam Era,” S. Annamalai told me.
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Until Keeladi was discovered, archaeologists by and large believed that the Gangetic plains in the north urbanised significantly earlier than Tamil Nadu.
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Over six seasons, nothing that could be characterised as an object of worship emerged from the Keeladi excavations. This seemed to be further evidence that Keeladi could not be linked to the Vedic civilisation of the riverine plains of North India, considered the wellspring of Hinduism.
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In subsequent seasons of the Keeladi dig, archaeologists discovered that Tamili, a variant of the Brahmi script used for writing inscriptions in the early iterations of the Tamil language, could be dated back to the sixth century BCE, likely a hundred years before previously thought.
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He had a theory about why there were so many official explorations across river valleys in the northern part of the country. “In the north, when the Harappa and Mohenjodaro sites fell within Pakistan’s borders, a void was felt in India about losing a precious heritage. This was the reason for a spurt in in-depth archaeological research linked to river valleys such as Sindhu and Ghaghara and of the civilisation that thrived along the banks of Yamuna, the Ganga and Narmada plains.”
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They pored over materials from Sangam literature and oral traditions. They compared it with satellite images and spoke to the elderly in one village after another, asking them whether they had seen any “pazhaya porutkal”—old artefacts—around.
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As the team continued its search, an elderly man who had been watching them for a while approached them. “We told him we were looking for old artefacts. He went home and returned with a Black and Red Ware jar.”
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Ramakrishna’s eyes widened as he saw the object. He asked the old man how he’d come upon a 2000-year-old artefact. “When I dug up the foundation to build my house, I found a lot of broken pots,” he said. “Generally, anyone who digs around this area finds some, but they throw it away. I kept this because it was so beautiful.”
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“There have been excavations done all over Madurai,” he joked as we drove over a large pothole near the Meenakshi Amman Temple
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“People have a very romantic notion of what archaeologists do,” K. Saktivel, an archaeologist in charge of the neighbouring Agaram site laughed. “But we all sweat like crazy down in those pits.”
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“Currently, there is no system in place for the government to provide money in exchange for the land. The agreement between the landowner and the government stretches for a period of nine months,” explained Mathan. At the end of the season, the trenches are closed, and the land is returned to the owners.
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The dig is conducted according to the Wheeler method, named after Mortimer Wheeler, the last British director-general of the ASI. The workers dig a trench within a series of squares that vary in size inside a larger grid. These vertical slices provide a cross-section for archaeologists to compare adjacent layers of earth.
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There was one breakthrough. Six carbon samples from Keeladi were flown to Florida. An advanced dating process suggested that the samples were from between the sixth and third century BCE—yet another reinforcement of the thesis that Tamil Nadu had experienced a second urbanisation like the Gangetic Plains.
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The petrous is a crudely shaped bone that protects the inner ear. It’s densely packed with DNA. In recent times, the petrous has been preferred by genetic scientists working to extract ancient DNA
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Scientists have taken some samples to the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in Lucknow.
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The Vaigai explorations have unearthed many similarities with the Indus Valley: graffiti symbols on potsherds, urban planning features, brick dimensions, terracotta objects, bangles made of conch-shells, carnelian beads, agate.
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On a notepad, Asaithambi had drawn several diagrams to explain the Wheeler method of digging trenches. “But tell me this. When you ask any child from any culture across the world to draw the sun, they will draw it the same way,” he said as he doodled a sun. “Why then this obsession to fight over who came first? Aren’t we all the same?”