BENGALURU: The charred foodgrains that were discarded and fell on the mud house floors of Neolithic settlements have survived thousands of years to give the unique story of agricultural origins during the Neolithic period between 3000 and 1200 BCE in South Asia.
One of the most enduring archaeological finds from the Neolithic sites at Tekkelekota, Sangankallu, Kurugodu and Brahmagiri in and near Ballari district are not the human remains, but charred pulses and millets that were locally grown in the prehistoric era and helped archaeologists establish that this region was a thriving and independent agricultural centre in India between 3000 BCE and 1900 BCE.
After this period, food crops from outside the region were introduced by pastoral movements from the North.
Speaking to TNIE, renowned archaeologist Prof Ravi Korisettar said they found four types of foodgrains -- two of millets and two of pulses -- which the archaeologists collected from the 40 Neolithic sites between the Eastern and Western Ghats.
“We found some charred grains at these excavation sites. Because they were charred they were unfit for human consumption. Discarded, they were thrown on the soil and remained embedded for thousands of years.
These are carbonised grains and never sprouted. We collected them and studied them using the flotation method and found that they were locally cultivated in the region and were not imported from any other Neolithic settlement in India. This was a major discovery in our understanding of the prehistoric sites in South India,” said the archaeologist.
Millets staple crop of Neolithic era
Flotation is an important archaeobotanical sampling technique used on site to investigate ancient plant and seed remains lost in the normal screening of soils from archaeological sites.
“The staple crops of the Southern Neolithic were millets, dominated by a foxtail millet, in some cases to be identified with the bristly foxtail, although the yellow foxtail may also have been present. It is also possible that sawa millet, another grass that is a natural constituent of the peninsular grasslands, is present. The ubiquity and quantity of millets from recently studied sites strongly suggests their use as staple grains, although it remains ambiguous as to whether these were actually domesticated or extensively gathered in the wild. The high level of purity of the samples, with relatively few other grasses present, argues for cultivation,” explained Korisettar.
“Of the plant remains, pulses were clearly the most prevalent. The most widespread pulse on the Southern Neolithic is horse gram. It occurs in the earliest samples, such as the lowest level at Sangankallu, and it has also been recovered from all regions of the Neolithic sites thus far sampled. The green gram is also widespread through the middle and later periods of the Southern Neolithic,” added the veteran archaeologist.