Early History of Orissa

Author(s): Amarchand Mittal
Publisher: Jain Cultural Research Society

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AN EARLY HISTORY OF ORISSA
certainly homotaxial with similar industries in other parts of India or Africa. These may or may not have been so. It is necessary, therefore, to fix accurately the date of the Kuliana industry on the basis of local geological evidences before trying to correlate it with regions yielding the same or comparable types of human artifacts.
De Terra and Peterson1 have described a section of the Narbada valley, which is comparable to the section exposed near Kamarpal in Mayurbhanj.2 In the Narbada section, there was first a coarse cemented conglomerate bed overlain by a red silty clay with lime concretion. The conglomerate yielded some fossils---Hexaprotodon, Namadicus and Bos, and a few rolled, rather crude artifacts resembling handaxes and choppers.3 The upper clay yielded several unrolled flakes and a fresh acheulian biface. De Terra is of opinion that the basal conglomerate is Middle Pleistocene and, on typological grounds, is equable with the terrace deposits of the Punjab.
The section at Kamarpal has not yielded any fossils, nor perhaps, a correlation is justifiable with sections in the Punjab, the Narbada valley or Madras4 on the basis of typological evidence alone. Apart from this, the few flakes and flaked core-resembling artifacts, which have so far been unearthed, can be accounted for by natural causes alone. 5 We have, therefore, to wait for a further discovery of fossils and artifacts from the conglomerate bed or overlying or underlying it, in order that some dependable scale can be 1. Studies in the Ice Age in India and Associated Human Culture,
p. 316. 2. Bose & Sen-op. cit., Sec 21, p. 15. 3. Ibid, Plate xxxii. 4. Ibid, Sec. 16, p. 1 2. 5. Ibid, Sec. 28-29, pp. 17-19.