Keeladi excavation: ASI director defends findings; 'Would be criminal to change them'
In the wake of a request to 'make corrections' and change the period of the
Keeladi
civilisation in his 982-page report, ASI director (
National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities
launched in 2007) Amarnath Ramakrishna came down hard on the Centre and Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), saying it would be 'criminal' to do so. 'No alteration is ever done once a report is handed in; only proofreading takes place. If a photograph is missing and if any illustration needs to be added, that can be done. Nothing more,' said 51-year-old Amarnath, who has devoted 25 years of his life to archaeology, in an interview with
Jaya Menon
. Excerpts:
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Was the Centre's move in replacing you as ASI director (antiquity) with ASI director (exploration & excavation) Hemasagar A Naik justified?
No comment. They assigned me to NMMA, and I am working there.
Is there a deliberate attempt to dilute the antiquity of Keeladi findings?
That is what they seem to be doing. India has a plural culture. We must enlighten people about it. They always talk about the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), the Vedic Civilisation (that followed the decline of the IVC), Chandragupta Maurya (the first emperor of the Mauryan Empire) and Harshavardhana (who ruled the Pushyabhuti dynasty).
Why are you not seeing other parts of the country? There was the Sangam culture here. To date, we have not determined the age of the Sangam period. We simply say 300BCE to 300CE. There is no scientific evidence to confirm this. It is based on literary sources, now taking the form of archaeological material. I hope to have the opportunity to re-investigate the Sangam dates using archaeological material.
ASI has asked retired archaeologist P S Sriraman to submit his report on the third phase of Keeladi excavations. This, when Sriraman said there are no significant findings.
That is his view.
I say it is a potential site. After his statement, following the Madras high court order, the state conducted excavations and found so much. How can a person with no background on the site say there is nothing? I have understood the site, explored it, assessed the Vaigai River and identified Keeladi as a potential site. That is why I was begging the Centre to allow me to also study the burial site at Kondagai, which is just 700m away.
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It would have helped compare the burial and habitation sites.
Hemasagar Naik
asked you to make 'corrections' in your draft report on Keeladi excavations.
I am the excavator, I fixed the period, I gave the stratigraphical results (the study of rock layers), cultural sequence, and cultural material deposits with accelerator mass spectrometry dates. I have corroborated and justified findings in my report. If the narrative is to be changed, they must do a re-excavation. Let's see what dates they get.
Arundati Banerjee, a retired superintending archaeologist who worked for 25 years in the publication section of the ASI, told me that this is the first time an excavator has been asked to make corrections.
What is the counter-evidence they have?
If they are countering it, they must redo the excavation and clarify their findings, like a postmortem. Like Ayodhya (excavations), form a committee — state, central, international, judiciary — and excavate. They have not raised queries about my reply.
You submitted a strong reply to corroborate that your Keeladi findings date from 800BCE to 500BCE.
I agreed to only minor spelling corrections and the nomenclature given in the periodisation.
I considered changing only these – early, matured and late phases. But I refuse to change the dates. Keeladi has been dated as per stratigraphical sequence observed during the excavation and reconstructed based on drawings. My report has all the documentary evidence.
If I change the concept, I become a criminal. If you ask for a change in first-hand information, you are spoiling the moral value. I do not accept that. It is not a hypothesis. The dating was based on the excavations. How can I tamper with it?
Naik refutes the dating of Keeladi and believes it must be dated to a period before 300BCE.
The Keeladi habitation is the first time ASI excavated a site properly.
We have dated the site based on its stratigraphy. We studied a 6m deposit, of which the lowest 1.5m was dated between 800BCE and 500 BCE. There are no indications of brick structures in this layer, only thatched roof huts. We also found neolithic celts and microlithic tools in this layer. But I am not saying this is a neolithic or microlithic period.
I am saying an ancient culture existed here, dating between 800 BCE and 500 BCE.
Then it slowly developed into a full-fledged urban settlement from 500 BCE to the end of the first century CE, when construction of brick buildings, ring wells, and drainage systems began.
Union culture minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said the Keeladi report was neither scientifically sound nor technically corroborated.
Ask him to read the report first.
How did your Keeladi journey begin?
Our objective was to try to identify habitation sites in Tamil Nadu. I initiated the Vaigai River exploration project in 2013-14 when I was ASI superintending archaeologist (excavation branch) in Bengaluru.
Until then, I had never supervised riverine-based archaeological exploration in the south. When I was studying at the Institute of Archaeology, I was involved in an excavation at Rakhigarhi, a Harappan-era site in Haryana.
We discovered a burial site. In 2014, they managed to extract the DNA from skeletons, which provided evidence of the genetic make-up of inhabitants who lived more than 4,600 years ago.
What was unique about the Keeladi findings?
In 2013-14, we explored Keeladi and identified 293 sites on both the left and right banks of the Vaigai, which flows through Theni, Dindigul, Madurai, Sivaganga, and Ramanathapuram.
When we found the megalithic burial sites, we began to question who had created them, and that is how we arrived at Kondagai, 700m from Keeladi. I requested the third-season excavation at Kondagai but was not granted permission.
For the Indus Valley excavation, roughly 13,000sqkm was excavated and more than 10,000 sites discovered. The Indus civilisation is not concentrated only in Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Many excavations were conducted in Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana, and Gujarat, as well as in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That is why we are saying it is a vast civilisation. We can do the same here.
Does the 3D facial reconstruction of two men from the sixth century BCE, based on skulls found at the Kondagai burial site, corroborate your findings?
Those who lived in Keeladi were buried in Kondagai.
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