| |
ARCHAEOLOGY: THE AHARS
Were they the first planners?
If Balathal surprised
archaeologists with its skeletons, Gilund has excited them with its massive
burnt-brick structures. A sand, clay and lime mix was used as plaster.
Even Balathal and Ojiyana had sun-dried mud-brick and stone structures
and fortifications. The findings club Ahar sites in the same category
as the Harappans who were, until now, the only known pre-iron people known
to have used these techniques.
In stone structures, mud bricks were often used
to raise partition walls. In Balathal, the 2,500 B.C. fortification phase
reveals a succession of stone structures inside the fortification and
below the wall that ran around the residential complex. There are high-built
stone platforms on the eastern edge. This implies that people knew of
stone architecture when the settlement began around 3,500 B.C. though
fortification began later. Wooden beams and rafters made the roof, capped
by mud in case of stone walls and by thatch in case of smaller structures
of wooden posts and mud walls. Mud and cow dung were used as plaster-as
villagers use them even today. Locally available granite and gneiss rock
were used in construction and the average size of stone blocks was 25
cm long, 20 cm wide and 15 cm thick. The mud bricks were often of the
same length but narrow and slimmer. As the copper tools were too small
for quarrying, people apparently heated rocks with fire to create cracks
and poured water to loosen the stones, using stone hammers and copper
and wooden wedges to remove the stone blocks.
 |
|
|
FLINT STONES: Shards of stone from an Ahar site
|
|
The Balathal and Gilund settlements also show
incipient planning with a wide street and a narrow lane dividing the residential
complexes. At Balathal, there are remains of a wall that probably surrounded
the residential complex and a fortified structure in the centre of the
habitation. Like Harappan citadels, it is built over mud-brick platforms,
and fortification walls are broadened towards the base. Gilund had long
and wide parallel walls. Shinde who began excavations at the site with
a University of Pennsylvania team says, "Gilund is emerging as an
urban centre of the Aharites." One complex is of 8,000 sq ft, and
there are more like it around. Apparently, it was controlling the settlements
around it with its own organisational set-up of a chiefdom-based society
but the construction activity was influenced by Harappa. Says Shinde:
"The Harappans did help them flourish but the farmers retained their
culture intact.'' Chairman of the Archaeological Society of India S.P.
Gupta says, "The Harappan model of city planning has a clear impact
here.''
It was a mixed economy based on farming, stock
raising, hunting, fowling and fishing. There was sufficient agricultural
surplus to undertake fortifications as in Balathal. P.K. Thomas and P.P.
Joglekar of Deccan College studied animal remains and found domesticated
animals accounted for 73 per cent of bones, sheep and goat 19 per cent,
buffalo only 3 per cent. Wild animals such as nilgai and blackbuck constituted
5 per cent. Remains of pig, fish, turtle and molluscs were also found.
A large number of bones were charred and split open, perhaps to extract
arrows. M.D. Kajale of the same college found that the cultivated plants
included wheat, barley, lentil, common pea, finger millet and Italian
millet. Hooja points out that at Ahar, rice was also grown. The rotis
were made, as they are today, on earthen tawas, food cooked on U-shaped
chulhas, and lentils and cereals grounded in pounders and querns-handmills
of stone.
What happened to them?
Aharites abandoned the sites in 1,800 B.C.,
a period by when Harappa had also declined. Apparently, it was climatic
changes or natural calamities that compelled Aharites to quit farming
which might not have remained remunerative in that area. Their economies
must have been hit by the decline of Harappa too. So either they left
for other places for farming or took to cattle and stock raising.
Balathal, for example, remained unoccupied until
300 B.C., when in the Mauryan era, some people re-occupied the sites.
Lalti Pandey of the Institute of Rajasthan Studies says of these people
that "they knew of iron smelting and manufactured iron implements''.
Two iron smelting furnaces have been found in Balathal in this phase.
It is around this period's layer that the fifth skeleton was found.
In Mewar, there is a long and continuous history
of human habitation. It seems that influenced by Ahar culture, hunter-gatherer-herders
of the region took to farming and became the forerunners of today's rural
society in southern Rajasthan. Mishra says others took to stock breeding
and became Gadris (shepherds) and Rabaris (camel breeders). Then there
are communities like the Gemetis, Meghwals and Bawarias who continue to
practise their traditional occupation of hunters to this day. Some of
them used to eat carrion until a few decades ago. The odhnis of Gameti
women bear a tell-tale resemblance to the trademark red-and-black pottery
of Ahar culture. And evidence of the folk religion of the Ahars survives
among the Kalbelias, the community to which the dancer Gulabo, famed in
Rajasthani folklore, belonged. The Ahars aren't dead. They still live
among us.
|
|
METRO TODAY
Web
Exclusives