Piklihal Excavations

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In 1952 when my wife and I first visited the Raichur Doab it must have ranked as one of the most well explored districts in Southern India, containing no less than seventy sites, of which notice was already published. In spite of this and of the fact that large-scale excavations had been carried out at at least two places, very little had been done to gather and analyse the information; so that the culture sequence proposed by Foote in 1887, and refined by him in 1895, still formed the basis for any descriptive account. Only in 1947 did Sir Mortimer Wheeler's excavations at Brahmagiri provide a stratigraphical demonstration of Foote's correctness and herald a new era in Deccan archaeology. I shall consider the history of archaeological research in some detail when I turn, in a later volume, to the Gazetteer of sites in the Doab. Here it suffices to notice that the first discovery of stone artifacts in India appears to have been made at Lingsugur in 1842; that Col. Meadows Taylor resided in the neighbourhood for many years and published for the first time an account of the grave site in the Benakal forest; that Bruce Foote visited the Doäb on a number of occasions in the succeeding decades and has left in his collections and publications much valuable information on the sites he discovered. The discovery of Maski was by Foote. In the period 1925-45 the two main contributors to our infor- mation were the Hyderabad Archacological Department and the Geological Survey of Hyderabad. In the former the work of Khwaja Mohammed Ahmed is particularly noteworthy, culminating in the large-scale excavations at Maski, which still await exhaustive publication: in the latter the work of its remarkable Director, Captain Leonard Muum, whose unflagging enthusiasm led to the dis covery of over forty new sites. The limitations of Munn's work may, however, be soon seen. In his paper on the Prehistoric and Protohistoric finds in the Raichur district he attempted to bring together his evidence: the results do little if anything to carry forward Foote's observations and leave the reader more muddled at the end than at the beginning. One other thing made Raichur district remarkable. The discovery of a minor rock edict of Aśoka at Maski in 1914 by an engineer, Beadon, was followed by that of two more at Koppal some twenty years later. Thus it appeared that the Raichur Doab must have been included with the districts to its south in the southern province of the Mauryan empire, indeed Munn associated the name Suvarnagiri with Maski the ancient settlement on the edge of the Raichur gold fields.