The Southern Indian Neolithic-Iron Age transition demonstrates considerable regional variability in settlement location, density, and size. While researchers have shown that the region around the Tungabhadra and Krishna River basins displays significant subsistence and demographic continuity, and intensification, from the Neolithic into the Iron Age ca. 1200 cal. BC, archaeological and chronometric records in the Sanganakallu region point to hilltop village expansion during the Late Neolithic and 'Megalithic' transition period (ca. 1400-1200 cal. BC) prior to apparent abandonment ca. 1200 cal. BC, with little evidence for the introduction of iron technology into the region. We suggest that the difference in these settlement histories is a result of differential access to stable water resources during a period of weakening and fluctuating monsoon across a generally arid landscape. Here, we describe well-dated, integrated chronological, archaeobotanical, archaeozoological and archaeological survey datasets from the SanganakalluKupgal site complex that together demonstrate an intensification of settlement, subsistence and craft production on local hilltops prior to almost complete abandonment ca. 1200 cal. BC. Although the southern Deccan region as a whole may have witnessed demographic increase, as well as subsistence and cultural continuity, at this time, this broader pattern of continuity and resilience is punctuated by local examples of abandonment and mobility driven by an increasing practical and political concern with water. Indian Prehistoric and Protohistoric Antiquities: Notes on Their Ages and Distribution. Madras: Government Museum). Robert Bruce Foote provided the first detailed descriptions of a range of archaeological sites across the southern Indian peninsula during the nineteenth century, including the early village sites of the Deccan plateau. Of particular interest to him was the Kupgal Hill site complex, described in the opening passage, which provided evidence for a significant stone tool production industry, referred to by Foote as a 'celt factory'. Of notable attention in Foote's account of this site is its remarkable degree of preservation. While recognising the long time period that separated the Kupgal Hill celt factory remains from his own era, Foote was struck by the fact that it appeared to be 'in much the same condition as it had been left'. Subsequent years and particularly the last few decades have seen growing destruction of the Kupgal Hill sites as a result of increasingly industrial-scale granite quarrying (Boivin et al. 2004); however, there remain relatively undisturbed parts of the locality where contemporary researchers can still observe a remarkable degree of preservation. Pockets of surface features, including stone axe production 'camps', stone terraces, quarries and ringing rock sites appear to have been abandoned a few decades, rather than millennia, ago. Although researchers since Foote have often described this preservation, they have not evaluated its implications. In t...
Excavation on the site of an extension to Cramond Kirk Hall has provided new evidence for the layout of the defences of the Roman fort, the route of the road immediately beyond it and for the phases of Roman military occupation at Cramond postulated by previous excavators. The features encountered included a broad right-angled ditch, possibly part of the outer defences, turning at this point to run parallel with the road into the fort. Three much slighter parallel ditches or gullies at the south end of the site are tentatively identified as drainage features beside the Roman road which, on this interpretation, would lie just beyond the limit of excavation. At a later date, the ditch had been allowed to silt up and features including pits and a stone box-drain were cut on a different alignment, through the fill of the earlier ditch; a well was also cut across two of the roadside ditches. These later features appear to represent encroachment of extramural settlement on the defences during the Severan occupation, at a time when a large defended annexe had been constructed to the east of the fort.
A group of four pits was excavated on a low gravel terrace above the floodplain of the River Kelvin to the north of Kirkintilloch, East Dunbartonshire (National Grid Reference NS 6677 7518). One pit contained sherds from four collared urns, while another contained fragments from a fifth collared urn. Radiocarbon dating suggests an 18th-16th century BC date for these features. Whereas almost all known collared urns accompany cremations, this was not the case with the material from Inchbelle Farm, and alternative reasons for the deposition of the pottery are discussed.
Drumquhassle is one of the series of 'glen-blocking' forts positioned along the edge of the Highlands, little investigated but long thought to be associated with the campaigns of Agricola. New evidence for the history of the fort has accumulated in recent years from metal-detecting, field-walking and a watching brief in the adjacent quarry. This confirms the fort as being Flavian in date, with no sign of later reoccupation. Many of the finds recovered were from an annexe outside the fort recognised from cropmarks, and the possible significance of this structure is discussed.
Excavation on the site of an extension to Cramond Kirk Hall (NGR: NT 1907 7685) has provided new evidence for the layout of the defences of the Roman fort, the route of the road immediately beyond it and for the phases of Roman military occupation at Cramond postulated by previous excavators. The features encountered included a broad right-angled ditch, possibly part of the outer defences, turning at this point to run parallel with the road into the fort. Three much slighter parallel ditches or gullies at the south end of the site are tentatively identified as drainage features beside the Roman road which, on this interpretation, would lie just beyond the limit of excavation. At a later date, the ditch had been allowed to silt up and features including pits and a stone box-drain were cut on a different alignment, through the fill of the earlier ditch; a well was also cut across two of the roadside ditches. These later features appear to represent encroachment of extramural settlement on the defences during the Severan occupation, at a time when a large defended annexe had been constructed to the east of the fort.
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