Basak Bishnupriya (University of Calcutta, India)

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in looking at the emergence of archaeology as a discipline and its role in the construction of the sub-continent’s past in the nineteenth-early twentieth century. Yet, one strand of ‘academic inquiry’ remains largely outside the purview of these works and which this paper wishes to address. Discoveries of ‘chipped/polished stone’ or ‘rude stone monuments’ belonging to remote antiquity, which started appearing in accounts left behind by geologists employed by the Geological Survey of India, civil servants, military officials and individuals variously engaged in different professions in the colony, gave shape to a different inquiry in the past in the second half of the nineteenth-early twentieth century, bringing forth questions of human evolution, race and the progress of civilization The germs of prehistoric archaeology in the sub-continent may be sought in these early writings, where the boundaries between prehistory, ethnology and ethnography were often fuzzy. There has been substantial research on the history of Victorian anthropological thought. Of late there has also grown a voluminous literature on ethnological surveys and ethnographic documentations in the sub-continent. Discoveries of stone tools or stone monuments need to be situated in the backdrop of these developments. In trying to understand the beginnings of prehistoric research I am restricting myself to eastern and north eastern India where one comes across a profusion of such writings, many published as notes in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. These writings are many-layered, in which typological descriptions of the artifacts are interspersed with rich anecdotes, myths and legends of existing indigenous communities.