In India, modern development puts prehistoric sites at risk

Much of the land holding the country’s buried past is being rapidly transformed for modern development —

agriculture, roads, infrastructure and expanding cities

Every evening after archaeologist Shanti Pappu and her colleagues head home for the night, two watchmen patrol the
team’s excavation site — a plot of dry scrubland near Sendrayanpalayam village, about a two-hour-drive from Chennai in
southern India.

Without such vigilance, the site could easily be disturbed.To the left of the carefully dug trenches, for instance, lies a
bulldozed pit, dredged to remove sand and gravel for a public works project before the researchers started their excavation
in 2019, says Pappu, the founder of Sharma Center for Heritage Education in Chennai. A similar instance of land-gouging,
or a passer-by randomly collecting exposed artifacts — mostly stone tools, crafted by human ancestors tens or hundreds of
thousands of years ago to dig for tubers and slice through meat — would disrupt the careful process of excavation that’s
integral to the team’s research.

“We dig very, very slowly, just five centimeters at a time, ensuring nothing is disturbed around each stone tool,” says
Annamalai, a member of the excavation crew who goes by a single name, speaking through an interpreter. But a bulldozer,
he adds, destroys everything at one go.Undisturbed plots are vital for meaningful prehistoric research. A stone tool or fossil
is only as good as the context in which it is found, whether on the soil surface or deep underground. Disturbed artifacts are
like pages ripped at random from a book — perhaps good for a brilliant quote that’s worth revisiting, but useless to
understand the whole story. And anything that interferes with the location of the artifact can dramatically change how
researchers interpret how human ancestors lived in the region.
Much of the land holding the country’s buried past is, however, being disturbed and rapidly transformed for modern
development — agriculture, roads, infrastructure, and expanding cities. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in particular,
the government has pushed for more roads, industrial corridors and large hydroelectric dams, even proposing changes to

Curious July 2020

existing environmental and archaeological heritage protection legislations to ease the way for businesses.

Protecting prehistoric sites can involve years of litigation over land acquisition, as well as battling encroachments. And
vandalism and theft is rampant across sites and monuments. The ephemeral nature of the sites is a major roadblock to the
slow, deliberate pace of fieldwork for prehistoric research, which often spans decades.
Such research isn’t just an academic exercise, says Katragadda Paddayya, an emeritus professor at Deccan College, Pune.
“We have lot of diversity in languages, cultures, [and] ethnic groups,” Paddayya says.
“Archaeology, history and anthropology,” he adds, “have a big role to enlighten the society about what India is: an area
with tremendous diversity and that there are various archaeological and anthropological processes behind this diversity.”

Sites like Sendrayanpalayam could hold answers to the region’s role in human evolution, Pappu says, just like its more
famous counterpart, Attirampakkam, about 2.5 miles away. Attirampakkam has been a hotbed for archaeologists since
1863, when British geologist Robert Bruce Foote first discovered stone tools in the region. More recently, studies
led by Pappu and Kumar Akhilesh, director of Sharma Center, catapulted the site into international spotlight when they
reported that early humans in Attirampakkam were making and innovating stone tools even earlier than similar tools were
thought to have spread by humans migrating out of Africa.

But such sites for sustained, long-term research are hard to come by. Many of the sites that Paddayya discovered in
Karnataka when he began his field studies in the 1960s are now rice fields, for example, thanks to extensive networks of
irrigation canals. In 2018, an independent researcher highlighted that construction of a government medical college and a
hospital had begun on an important prehistoric site in Maharashtra before the area could be studied in detail. And in central
India, a site called Hathnora, which has yielded the oldest known human ancestor fossil in the country, lies unprotected on
the banks of the Narmada River, threatened by erosion and relentless human bustle.

Even formally-protected archaeological heritage isn’t safe. In 2019, India’s minister of culture and tourism, Prahlad Singh
Patel, told the upper house of parliament that more than 300 monuments and sites listed as protected by the Archaeological
Survey of India (ASI), the government body that manages the country’s archaeological heritage, had been encroached in
some form.

With sites holding the evidence of India’s past rapidly disappearing, researchers worry about whether complex questions
about humankind’s distant past can be answered. “We cannot say we don’t want this development because people’s welfare
and development is equally important,” says Paddayya. But given the scale of that development, “a lot of the sites are
getting destroyed.”

The Indian subcontinent is nestled between several regions with rich histories on human evolution, says Parth Chauhan, an
assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali. There’s Africa and Europe to the
west, and southeast Asia to the east, all home to some of the oldest specimens of Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of modern
humans who roamed the planet for 1.8 million years and was the first known human species to appear out of
Africa. Evidence from India could theoretically link records between these regions. It could also show if the subcontinent
was a route for dispersing early and modern humans.

In the past two decades, using advanced techniques to date sites, researchers studying prehistoric sites have been presenting
a more confident picture of when human ancestors may have lived on the subcontinent. In 2011, Pappu’s team reported that
early humans, possibly Homo erectus, were making bulky stone tools in Attirampakkam as early as 1.5 million years ago
during the early Stone Age or the Lower Paleolithic period. Scientists have dated sites in Karnataka and Punjab to 1.2
million and more than 2 million years ago, respectively, although the latter claim has been heavily contested.

While existing research helps fill in gaps of humankind’s early history in the region, researchers say it isn’t enough. Dates
from individual sites must be taken with reservation, Paddayya says. To understand the origin of India’s ancient Stone Age
cultures, we need dozens of dates and many more areas need to be surveyed in detail, he adds.

(Source: Down to earth)

Curious July 2020