Briefly comment on the Middle Palaeolithic culture in India

For long time this specific stone age was not separately identified in India. The primary reason for this was not having a specific stratigraphic context for this in our country. Flakes of 5-8 cm length, often finely retouched into tool types have been recorded from as early as 1932 when Cammiade collected a large number of prehistoric tools from Andhra Pradesh. Since flake tools also form a part of Lower Palaeolithic culture, their occurring in a separate and younger context only can be taken to represent Middle Palaeolithic culture. Cammiade's collection was sent to Burkitt in London for analysis. Since the tools were of unknown context Burkitt divided them in clusters of core, flake, blade and microliths. To avoid giving a culture nomenclature Commiade and Burkitt called them as series I, series II, series III, and series 1V respectively. Twenty nine years later India hosted the World Archeology Congress and the problem of terminology for Indian prehistory was discussed both at formal and informal level during this time. Several rivers had already been surveyed by then and it was found that majority of these rivers maintain only two gravels belonging to Pleistocene period. The first gravel yields core tools and the second and last gravel yielded flake and blade tools. Three fold divisions were not possible when we have only two stratigraphic units. Subbarao and Bridget Allchin suggested that because of this we have no possibility of naming Lower Middle and Upper Palaeolithic like we have in Europe. Instead Indian Palaeolithic should be considered as having two divisions- Early Stone Age and Middle Stone Age. Such nomenclature was in use in South Africa not so much for the lack of a stratigraphy but for the continuation of flake tools with blade tools well within late Pleistocene. Consequently, both in South Africa and as also in India the existence of a true Upper Palaeolithic was denied. Another 20 years later in 1980 G.R. Sharma described three implementiferous gravels form the river Belan in Allahabad. The third gravel not only yielded blade tools but could also be confirmed as a Pleistocene episode because of a radio carbon date of 19000 BC. Thus, there was now no difficulty in dividing Indian Palaeolithic into the European pattern of three fold structure, i.e. Lower Palaeolithic, Middle Palaeolithic and Upper Palaeolithic. Because of these later developments many consider Middle Stone Age and Middle Palaeolithic as synonyms. It should be important to point out here that this is not exactly correct. Because if we use the term Middle Stone Age we deny the existence of Upper Palaeolithic while if we use the term Middle Paleolithic it means we do accept the existence of a separate tradition of blade tools.

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