Neolithic and Chalcolithic in the subcontinent

Detail

Farming did not begin everywhere at the same time

• The subcontinent shows regional variation in when farming began. Some regions took up farming thousands of years before others.
• The north-west (Baluchistan, today in Pakistan) started first, around 7000 BCE. The south (Karnataka) started much later, around 2000 BCE.
• Neolithic means "New Stone Age" — the stage when people ground and polished their stone tools, began growing crops and keeping animals, and settled in one place instead of only hunting and moving.
• Chalcolithic means "copper-stone" — people still used stone tools but had also begun making objects out of copper. Stone did not stop; copper was simply added.

Mehrgarh — the oldest Neolithic site

• Mehrgarh lies on the Bolan River, in present-day Pakistan. It is the subcontinent's oldest Neolithic site and earliest agricultural village, c. 7000 BCE.
• The site sits on the Kachi plain, close to the mouth of the Bolan Pass — the route from the Indus plain up to the highlands of Baluchistan — and is about 30 km from the town of Sibi. [2]
• It is not one mound but several low mounds, covering about 250 hectares. Much of the old material lies buried deep under river silt. [2]
• It was excavated 1974–1986, and again 1997–2000, by a French–Pakistani team led by Jean-François Jarrige. [2]
• The buried layers at Mehrgarh are over 11 metres deep and run from the 7th to the 3rd millennium BCE — so one village site records about 4,000 years of change in one place. [2]
• Mehrgarh is on UNESCO's Tentative List of World Heritage Sites. [2]

How the people of Mehrgarh lived

• Houses and storage.
• They built sun-dried brick houses — mud shaped into bricks by hand and dried in the sun, not baked in a kiln.

• They built granaries — rooms to store grain. Storing grain means they grew more than they ate at once, which is the mark of settled farming.

• Burial of the dead. They buried their dead in graves. Grave goods placed with the dead tell us about belief and about who owned what.

• Ornaments. They made ornaments of semi-precious stones — lapis lazuli and carnelian — and shell.
• Lapis lazuli is a deep blue stone; carnelian is a red-orange stone. Neither is found at Mehrgarh, so these came by long-distance exchange.

• Shell had to come from the sea coast, again far away.

• Crops. They cultivated wheat and barley.

• Animals. They raised sheep, goats and Indian cattle — notably the zebu humped bull (the Indian cattle breed with a hump on its shoulders).
• Alongside farming and herding, the early Neolithic people at Mehrgarh still did hunting, fishing and gathering of wild fruits — the old ways did not vanish at once. [2]

Mehrgarh enters the metal age

• The people of Mehrgarh were the first in the subcontinent to make copper objects, taking the region into the metal age.
• Mehrgarh becomes Chalcolithic by c. 4000 BCE.
• This copper-working laid the basis for the Bronze Age Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation around 3500 BCE. (This is the chapter's preferred name for the Harappan civilisation.)
• Sequence to remember: Neolithic village (7000 BCE) → copper use / Chalcolithic (4000 BCE) → Bronze Age civilisation (3500 BCE). One unbroken local line, not a sudden arrival from outside.

Note: A 2025 radiocarbon study of human tooth enamel argues that farming life in the Indus Valley appeared later than earlier estimates. [4] Keep the NCERT dates (Mehrgarh c. 7000 BCE) for the exam; this is a live research debate, not settled ground.

The Southern Neolithic

• Sanganakallu (Karnataka) is a Neolithic site sitting on top of a granite hill, dated to about 2000 BCE.
• Living on a hilltop is a southern pattern — settlements on granite hills and boulder slopes, not on river plains.
• In northern Karnataka, stone-axe-using herders spread across the southern peninsula. The earliest radiocarbon dates there come from ash mounds — huge heaps formed by burning large piles of cow dung inside cattle pens. [3]
• These ash mounds show the first settlers were semi-nomadic with large herds of zebu cattle — they moved with their animals rather than staying fixed all year. [3]
• The earliest known settlements of this kind are Kodekal and Utnur, dated to about 2900 BCE. [3]

The subcontinent by 2500 BCE

• By 2500 BCE, Neolithic agro-pastoral communities occupied most of the subcontinent.

• "Agro-pastoral" = farming and animal herding together, not one or the other.

• Their economy rested on two legs:

• herding — cattle, sheep and goats;

• farming — cereals, millets and pulses. Millets (ragi, jowar, bajra) need little water, which suited the dry peninsular interior.

• In places these Neolithic groups were interacting with contemporary Chalcolithic cultures — neighbours who already used copper. So stone-using and copper-using communities lived side by side and traded, rather than one replacing the other everywhere.

• Named Chalcolithic cultures of this later belt include Ahar–Banas (Rajasthan), which was next to and at the same time as the Indus civilisation and is known for its terracotta seals. [5]
• Inamgaon (Pune, Maharashtra) is a Chalcolithic site with three occupation periods: Period I (1600–1400 BC), Period II (1400–1000 BC), Period III (1000–700 BC). [6]
• At the Jorwe levels of excavation, archaeologists found five structural phases and a terracotta cylinder seal showing a procession — a horse drawing a cart, a deer behind it, and a long-necked animal, perhaps a camel. [7]
• Daimabad (Maharashtra) has yielded well-known copper objects of the Chalcolithic period, held in national photo-archive records. [8]

Prelims Hooks

• Mehrgarh stands on the Bolan River, in present-day Pakistan — the subcontinent's oldest Neolithic site, c. 7000 BCE.
• Mehrgarh sits on the Kachi plain near the mouth of the Bolan Pass, about 30 km from Sibi; the site covers about 250 hectares. [2]
• Mehrgarh was excavated 1974–1986 and 1997–2000 by a French–Pakistani team under Jean-François Jarrige; deposits run over 11 m deep. [2]
• Mehrgarh crops = wheat and barley; animals = sheep, goats and Indian cattle (zebu humped bull).
• Mehrgarh ornaments used lapis lazuli, carnelian and shell; houses were of sun-dried brick, with granaries; the dead were buried in graves.
• Mehrgarh made the subcontinent's first copper objects — Chalcolithic by c. 4000 BCE, leading to the Bronze Age Sindhu–Sarasvatī (Harappan) civilisation around 3500 BCE.
• Sanganakallu (Karnataka) — Neolithic site on a granite hill, dated c. 2000 BCE.
• Southern Neolithic ash mounds were formed by burning cow dung in cattle pens; earliest such settlements — Kodekal and Utnur, c. 2900 BCE. [3]
• By 2500 BCE, agro-pastoral groups across most of the subcontinent grew cereals, millets and pulses and herded cattle, sheep and goats.
• Ahar–Banas (Rajasthan) was contemporary with the Indus civilisation and is marked by terracotta seals. [5]

Mains Points

• Neolithic change was regional, not one single event. Mehrgarh farms by 7000 BCE; Sanganakallu only by 2000 BCE. So "the Neolithic Revolution in India" is better written as many local beginnings at different dates, shaped by rainfall, soil and available wild plants — wheat-barley in the north-west, millets and pulses in the dry peninsular south.
• Mehrgarh proves local continuity into the Harappan civilisation. One site records village farming (7000 BCE) → copper (4000 BCE) → the Bronze Age Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation (3500 BCE) in an 11-metre-deep unbroken sequence. [2] This weakens any claim that urban civilisation in the subcontinent was simply imported ready-made from West Asia.
• Stone and copper overlapped; ages are not neat boxes. By 2500 BCE Neolithic groups were interacting with Chalcolithic neighbours, and Chalcolithic Inamgaon still runs to 700 BC. [6] Use this to argue that the three-age scheme (Stone–Copper–Bronze) is a teaching tool, not a timetable every region followed in order.
• Ash mounds show a herding-first path to settled life. In the southern Neolithic, dated evidence begins with mounds of burnt cattle-pen dung and semi-nomadic zebu herders [3] — that is, animals came before permanent fields here, the reverse of the north-western crop-led story. Good material for a compare-and-contrast GS-I answer on regional models of the Neolithic.