South Indian megalithic culture

“South Indian megalithic culture” is an archaeologists’ name for the Iron Age tradition of the south of the Indian subcontinent in which the dead were buried in graves built or marked with large stones, or in clay urns. The Iron Age in India followed the Bronze Age and partly corresponds with these megalithic cultures of South India. Megaliths of many kinds are found across South Asia, some dated before 3000 BCE and, by recent findings, to 5000 BCE in southern India; the oldest are in central India and the upper Indus valley.

The south’s Iron Age is hard to date. Radiocarbon dates of c. 3345–2953 BCE from charcoal at Sivagalai in Tamil Nadu have been used to claim very early iron smelting, but they are disputed: rice from an intact burial urn with iron artefacts at the same site gave dates of c. 1248 and 1155 BCE, and scholars point to disturbed layers, mixed material and a selective emphasis on the earliest samples. Some dates from Mayiladumparai suggest an Iron Age beginning around 2172 BCE, an interpretation still under discussion. Hallur in Karnataka and Adichanallur in Tamil Nadu, more securely dated, are generally placed around 1000 BCE.

The graves were studied early. Adichanallur first drew attention in 1876, and Alexander Rea of the Archaeological Survey of India investigated it between 1899 and 1905. At Brahmagiri in Karnataka, Mortimer Wheeler’s excavation of 1947 helped establish the culture sequence of south Indian prehistory.

The best-studied sequence is at Brahmagiri, a granite outcrop in Chitradurga district rising about 180 metres above the surrounding plains. Wheeler found ten domestic structures there and divided the site into three periods: a Neolithic or Neolithic-Chalcolithic Period I, a Megalithic Period II and an early historical Period III. The polished stone axes of the earlier levels show that farming and herding communities had lived in the area before the megalithic period.

The people of the megalithic period at Brahmagiri used iron for farming tools such as sickles and for weapons such as spears, swords and arrowheads. Their pottery included deep hemispherical bowls, funnel-shaped lids, shallow dishes and three-legged pots, in polished black and red ware, all-black ware and dull-red ware. Wheeler dated this period to between the 2nd century BCE and the middle of the 1st century CE.

Adichanallur, in Thoothukudi district, lies about 15 kilometres from Korkai, the capital of the Early Pandyan Kingdom, and spreads across 114 acres. Elsewhere in Tamil Nadu, Kodumanal has the earliest reliably dated iron furnace in the state, from the 5th century BCE. Beads of magnesite, agate and carnelian have been found at Brahmagiri.

Many of the megaliths are tied to death. A large share of South Asian megaliths are assumed to be linked with burial or with rites after burial, including memorials for people whose remains may or may not be present. Following Moorti, they are classed as sepulchral, holding the remains of the dead with funerary objects, and non-sepulchral, large patterned arrangements of stones over a wide area, a type associated with astronomy and cosmology.

At Brahmagiri a cemetery of 300 tombs held burials in rectangular stone cists, cist-circles (stones surrounding granite cists) and pit-circles, with vessels bearing graffiti, stone beads and iron and copper tools. In the megalithic period the dead were laid in stone cists or pits surrounded by a circle, or concentric circles, of boulders, with funeral pots, iron implements and beads. At Adichanallur skeletons were buried in clay urns; some 169 urns with human skeletons were found in 2005. Konthagai, near Keezhadi, is believed to be the burial site of Keezhadi’s inhabitants.

Giant stone figures in human form also stand in megalithic burial grounds. Rao and Upinder Singh note that it is unclear what they symbolise; they may have been connected with ancestor worship. Recent work at Brahmagiri has found rock shelters with rock-art panels of the Iron Age, and cupules carved on megaliths and granite boulders.

Iron is the culture’s defining material. Graves and settlements yield iron sickles, spears, swords and arrowheads, and at Adichanallur the diggers of 1876 found iron knives, short sword blades and hatchets, with earthen pots of better quality than those sold in the bazaars of the time. Alexander Rea’s 1915 catalogue of the antiquities of Adichanallur and Perumbair lists large amounts of bronze, iron, gold and pottery, though the recent excavations there have yielded mainly earthenware. Black and red ware, a South Asian earthenware made by several cultures over a long span, is associated with the megalithic period.

Many pots carry marks. Megalithic graffiti symbols, found mostly on potsherds in Central India, South India and Sri Lanka, usually at burial sites, are tentatively dated from 1000 BCE to 300 CE. Scholars have tried to decipher them since 1878, but there is no consensus on whether they are undeciphered writing, graffiti, or symbols with no sound value. In 1960 B. B. Lal found that 89% of the symbols he surveyed had counterparts in the Indus script; Iravatham Mahadevan linked them to it, while K. Rajan sees them as the beginning of the later Brahmi script. In the layers of a site, sherds with symbols lie lowest, then sherds mixing symbols with Brahmi or Tamil-Brahmi, and at the top Brahmi or Tamil-Brahmi alone. Some urns at Adichanallur bear writing in Tamil-Brahmi.

The tradition crossed the sea. The graffiti symbols occur in Sri Lanka as well as in Central and South India, and a variant of black and red ware marks Sri Lanka’s Early Iron Age (900–600 BCE), together with horses, paddy fields and iron tools. At Anaikoddai in Jaffna the skeleton of an Early Iron Age chief was buried with a seal engraved in Tamil-Brahmi, “Ko Veta”, assigned to the 3rd century BCE; ko means “king” in Tamil.

Within India, Brahmagiri shows the south meeting the north. In 1891 Benjamin L. Rice found rock edicts of the Emperor Ashoka there, which name the locality Isila and mark the southernmost extent of the Maurya Empire. From the graffiti marks B. B. Lal concluded that the Indus Valley Civilisation and the later megalithic period shared a common culture, and in 2019 sherds with graffiti closely resembling Indus signs were excavated at Keezhadi; others see the marks as socio-religious symbols with no alphabetic value. Mahurjhari, near Nagpur, became a major centre of bead manufacturing in the early historic period.

The megalithic period shades into recorded history. At Brahmagiri, Wheeler’s Period III, an early historical culture, brought pottery made on fast wheels, coated russet and painted with white geometric designs, and ornaments of shell, glass and gold. On the inscribed sherds, Brahmi and Tamil-Brahmi gradually replace the older marks, and from around 300 CE the symbols disappear from grave sites.

The sites remain matters of public interest in Tamil Nadu. In 2019 the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court received carbon dates of 905–696 BCE for Adichanallur, judged the site one of the earliest in the state, and criticised the Archaeological Survey of India for leaving the samples undated for more than 15 years; it had earlier ordered the 114-acre site fenced and guarded. In 2023 the foundation stone was laid for an on-site museum at Adichanallur, one of the first in India, and the Keezhadi Heritage Museum, opened the same year, is to show urns from Konthagai. Rea’s finds are said to be in India; Jagor’s went to the Ethnological Museum of Berlin.