This book presents a comprehensive history of Iron Technology in India. It covers the long span of Indian history stretching over roughly three and a half millennia from the first half of the second millennium BCE to pre-modern times. One can trace the development of iron technology from the humble beginnings in a chalcolithic milieu followed by the technological evolution reaching the peaks of iron technology of the colossal structures of the Delhi Iron Pillar weighing several tons by early centuries of the Christian Era. The metallurgical expertise and the ingenuity of artisans find expression in the production of wootz steel swords with their intriguing rippling patterns. These swords and daggers were highly prized in the ancient world. They were marketed by the enterprising sailors of the Middle East at lucrative profits. The sword of Tipu Sultan is indeed a legend. The iron and steel industry in India was flourishing till the eighteenth-nineteenth century CE. The quality of the product was superior enough to be prized by the European world, viz. by the Dutch, the Spanish and the British up to pre-modern times. Iron produced at Tendukhera was imported by Britain to be used in bridges across Menai Strait and also in the London Bridge. However; one perceives a decline in traditional iron industry during the British period. Iron working could manage to survive till a few decades back among the ethnic societies who had been engaged in it for generations. The book incorporates results of a first-hand study of these traditional iron-workers, who may be termed as bearers of the legacy which had a glorious past but a very uncertain future.

This volume highlights the extraordinary richness, diversity, and extensive distribution of iron ores in India, along with the equally rich, diverse, and widely scattered preindustrial tradition of iron and steel manufacture. Archaeologically, Chakrabarti demonstrates how by c. 1000 B.C. the major areas of the subcontinent passed into a full-fledged Iron Age, and how the process must be considered to have begun around the middle of the second millenium B.C. This book shows how the antiquity of Indian steel-making and examines literary sources which throw light on the use of iron in Indian agriculture.

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This study aims at using and understanding man-land relationships in order to better comprehend the megalithic burials of Tamil Nadu.

This introduction for engineers examines not only the physical properties of materials, but also their history, uses, development, and some of the implications of resource depletion and materials substitutions.

Numerous metallic artefacts, deposited in a hoard in ancient times, came to light by chance on the campus of the Sultan Qaboos University in Al Khawd, Sultanate of Oman. Mostly fashioned from copper, these objects compare well with numerous documented artefact classes from south-eastern Arabia assigned to the Early Iron Age (1200–300 BCE).

This book offers a critical synthesis of the archaeology of South Asia from the Neolithic period (c.6500 BCE), when domestication began, to the spread of Buddhism accompanying the Mauryan Emperor Asoka's reign (third century BCE). The authors examine the growth and character of the Indus civilisation, with its town planning, sophisticated drainage systems, vast cities and international trade. They also consider the strong cultural links between the Indus civilisation and the second, later period of South Asian urbanism which began in the first millennium BCE and developed through the early first millennium CE. In addition to examining the evidence for emerging urban complexity, this book gives equal weight to interactions between rural and urban communities across South Asia and considers the critical roles played by rural areas in social and economic development. The authors explore how narratives of continuity and transformation have been formulated in analyses of South Asia's Prehistoric and Early Historic archaeological record.

The Vedic Age completes the first set of three monographs in the People's History of India series. It deals with the period c. 1500 to c. 700 bc, during which it sets the Rigveda and the subsequent Vedic corpus. It explores aspects of geography, migrations, technology, economy, society, religion, and philosophy. It draws on these texts to reconstruct the life of the ordinary people, with special attention paid to class as well as gender. In a separate chapter, the major regional cultures as revealed by archaeological evidence are carefully described. Much space is devoted to the coming of iron, for the dawn of the Iron Age - though not the Iron Age itself - lay within the period this volume studies. There are special notes on historical geography, the caste system (whose beginnings lay in this period) and the question of epic archaeology. A special feature of this monograph is the inclusion of seven substantive extracts from different sources, which should give the reader a taste of what these texts are like.

The art of metal casting was imported into Indonesia, but its peoples mastered the secrets of metallurgy, and applied these, in ways often original and unique, to create their own distinctive civilisation of the Bronze-Iron Age. In this handbook, which is a sequal to my The Stone Age of Indo nesia, I have endeavoured to assemble a comprehensive picture of the Indonesian Bronze-Iron Age from the results of excavations, innumerable stray finds in museums, and various studies scattered among numerous scientific journals and periodicals (often difficult to obtain). The resulting picture can, of course, be a tentative one only, valid until many more scientific excavations have taken place. I have added a bibliography, as complete as it was possible to assemble. The completion of this summary of the Prehistory of Indonesia has been assisted by a grant-in-aid from the Wenner Gren Foundation "The Viking Fund", New York. I am grateful to Mr. Basoeki and Mr. Soebokastowo for the drawings of Figures 1, 11, 12, 13, 22 and 16, 23, 24, 25 respectively. Figures 2-10 and 15 were drawn by the well-known artist, the late Mas Pirngadie, and are here published for the first time, with the generous permission of the Board of Directors of the "Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen", Djakarta. I am deeply grateful to my brother-in-law, Mr. J. H. Reiseger of Kempston, Bedfordshire, for so willingly undertaking the translation of the Dutch text into English.