Listen to this article:

In 1945, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler discovered an ancient port site, Arikamedu, when he sank a trowel 20 kilometres outside present-day Puducherry. I had first heard of Wheeler through Tamil cinema. His reel version appeared in the opening scenes of the Kamal Haasan–starrer Hey Ram, telling Haasan and Shahrukh Khan to pack up the dig since Partition was imminent. After serving in World War II, Wheeler was appointed Director-General of Archaeology in the Government of India, serving from 1944 to 1947. He identified two major problems in historical knowledge in the subcontinent. In North India, there was a gap of 1,000 years or more between the end of the IVC and the beginning of the Persian Empire around 600 bce.

In South India, the problem was even more far-ranging, as it was unclear exactly what occurred before the Greco–Roman interactions of the first century ce. Wheeler aimed to bridge these gaps in the sequence of cultures between Protohistory (3000 bce to 600 bce), the period between prehistory and written history, and the Early History of India (600 bce to 300 bce). Much of archaeology serves to fill such cultural gaps, showing the baton passing as one culture evolved into another, or how migration........

© The Wire