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AUSTIN FIDO

BACK IN February, while Donald Trump was distracting us with deranged stunts like arbitrarily renaming the Gulf of Mexico and threatening to annex Greenland, it was reported that archaeologists in Tamil Nadu – India’s southernmost state – had found iron objects dating as far back as 3,345 BCE. Until that announcement, the earliest evidence of Iron Age activity was from excavations in Türkiye (Turkey) that revealed ironworking dating back to around 1,300 BCE. The Tamil Nadu find suggests there might be about 2,000 years of Iron Age we simply didn’t know about.
Did the Iron Age “start” in India? No one is rushing to update any textbooks just yet, but the Tamil Nadu discovery does have the potential to radically change our understanding of the technological capacity of our ancient ancestors. It also suggests there might be a couple of millennia worth of ironwork scattered between Türkiye and Tamil Nadu for archaeologists to uncover in due course.
And yet, extending the Iron Age by 2,000 years is merely the second-biggest archaeology story in Tamil Nadu this year.
Keeladi is a village about eight miles from the temple city of Madurai in Tamil Nadu. Back in 2015, an archaeological excavation started to gradually uncover the remains of an ancient city. Over subsequent years, the dig has found abundant evidence of an advanced civilisation. The settlement includes wells, pipe and channel systems to carry freshwater and wastewater, brick structures, ceramics, beads, and coins. Carnelian from Afghanistan and pottery from Rome points to trade with faraway places.
Any newly discovered ancient site is significant. It’s always nice to have a better sense of what the ancestors were up to. Finding an ancient city in Tamil Nadu is not in itself surprising: Madurai, for example, is a city that dates back to around the third century BCE. Keeladi might simply be a hitherto unknown settlement from the same period.
Or not. Carbon dating of the first wave of artifacts suggested the Keeladi settlement was considerably older than Madurai, dating to around 580 BCE. Subsequent analysis argues that Keeladi could have been settled as early as the eighth century BCE.
Before the Keeladi discoveries, “civilisation” in Tamil Nadu was essentially regarded as beginning around the third century BCE, when we know for sure there was an advanced culture building cities of significance like Madurai. Archaeology has now revealed there were at least a few centuries of advanced civilisation in Tamil Nadu we hadn’t previously known about.
Where’s the controversy?
With apologies to the literally millions of people who know more about this than I do, here’s a simple account of the prevailing view of ancient Indian history. The Indus Valley or Harappan civilisation occupied a large chunk of northern India for about 2,000 years in the Bronze Age. It was followed by the Vedic period, also associated mostly with northern India. From the 1,000 years or so of the Vedic period (1,500 BCE to 500 BCE, more or less), we get cultural practices that (for some) form the basis of what would subsequently become Hinduism and more broadly, Indian national identity.
The civilisation that built Madurai was in many ways derived from the Vedic period, leading to the perception that southern India “inherited” culture from northern India. Keeladi challenges that view.
There is nothing at all Vedic about the settlement at Keeladi, though it has much in common with the older Harappan civilisation. Keeladi represents a new understanding of Indian history: that it isn’t primarily the story of the spread of Vedic culture and ideas, but that at least one other civilisation emerged independently from the Harappan era and developed separately from the Vedics.
This finding draws southern India away from northern India’s shadow. Which perhaps explains why a central Indian government with a particular view of Indian history might be trying to suppress the Keeladi findings. A 900-page report from the site’s founding archaeologist was kicked back to its author by the Archaeological Survey of India earlier this year, with the advice that it didn’t meet the standard for publication. The archaeologist stands by his report and would like to see it subjected to the scrutiny of his peers around the world, not hidden.
Narendra Modi is currently on a whistlestop tour of the Global South, eagerly leading India toward its future on the world stage. But at home, in places like Tamil Nadu, his compatriots are wondering why the Modi government seems to be trying to bury India’s past.
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